The easy part

Everybody photographs the planting. Almost nobody photographs the year afterwards.

On 15 August we planted at village Mangalia, near our Indore works, and on the surveyed land at Anaj Mandi, with the support of Gram Panchayat Mangliya. It took one morning, a lot of people got very muddy, and that is the part you are looking at in this photograph.

Here is the part that nobody puts on a page, which is a shame, because it is the half that decides whether any of it counted for anything.

Every planting is recorded. We write down the site name and its GPS coordinates, the date, the species and how many of each went in, which nursery they came from, who did the planting, and — the field that matters more than all the others put together — the name of one specific person who is responsible for looking after them afterwards. Not a department. A person. We also take a reference photograph from a marked position, so that the same tree can be photographed again from the same spot later on.

At three months, somebody goes back and counts what survived, and writes down what appears to have killed the rest. At twelve months we count again, break the survival figure down by species and by site, and re-photograph the reference trees. Then we do it again at twenty-four months, and then every year after that.

The twelve-month figure is the first one we will publish. It will be lower than the number of saplings that went into the ground on this particular morning, because some of them will not make it. That is normal, and anybody who has run a plantation programme knows it is normal.

The gap between those two numbers is the only part of this worth reading, and it is the part we have committed to showing you.

greenlegacy@iffgroup.com

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