We’re sitting on something like 400,000 shortleaf pine seeds right now—seed that will be used to restore the Southern Cumberland’s great lost forest system. It’s pretty safe to say that’s the largest collection of shortleaf seeds in Alabama in the better part of a century. By next spring, we anticipate we’ll have close to 2 million. That’s about 20 times the number of seed we promised when we started this program.

There are many reasons for our success. But one of the biggest is the fact that Robert Gandy picked us up off the sidewalk, dusted us off, and showed us how the big boys collect and process pine seed.

Robert is a legendary seed collector for the forest industry. He’s done it in Central America, he’s done it all over the South. But not even Robert had ever done shortleaf pine seeds before. So I think Robert saw shortleaf as the final Everest of seed collection, the last and most daunting mountain that must be climbed.

We schemed for months about when to collect—because there’s only a few weeks when cones are ripe enough and before they throw their seeds to the four winds. He attended our collection sites almost daily, assessing the quality of our seed. He custom built machinery that would coax the seed out of the cones, then air dry them, then remove the “wings” that help seeds fly away, then separate the live seed from the dead seed.

And when it was over, he sent the processed seed to colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service who declared it to be 99 percent pure live seed. It doesn’t get any better than that.

What’s even more important is that Robert is helping us create an industry in Paint Rock focused on the restoration of native biodiversity. Robert’s custom-made processors can be used for many types of seed, and we’re already in discussions with lots of folks about how to begin to develop a seed processing and propagation facility that brings new opportunities to the valley, even as it fuels restoration of the Cumberland’s largest lost ecosystem.

Volunteers like this make us what we are. There’s no way we would have succeeded without his help. I can’t calculate the debt of gratitude we’re going to owe Robert when all this is done. But so far, all we have to do is sit around and listen to his dry jokes while he spins out pound after pound of shortleaf seed.