Research & Breeding

Collecting Pinecones & Pollen

When you see a pinecone on the ground, it’s finally reached maturity after a year-and-a-half of growing. Inside each cone, there are 150 or more seeds ready to grow more trees. With so many cones on every tree, you could quickly grow a whole new forest with the cones from just one tree!

Did you watch our controlled pollination video? The video below picks up with the same pinecones a year-and-a-half later, when the pinecones are fully grown and it’s time to pick them. They go through a drying process, then the seeds are collected for future planting.

In the video below, you’ll see how pinecones are collected by the truckload. How do foresters know when pinecones are ready to pick?

Collecting Pollen

How do foresters collect so much pollen?

How do foresters collect so much pollen? In the same way they pick pinecones: they use a hydraulic lift to reach into the treetops and cut down the male cones, called catkins, when they’re full of pollen. Then they’re dried and run through a “shaker” machine that frees the pollen to be collected into jars.

Your turn: Why do researchers go to the trouble of collecting pollen to fertilize pinecones vs. allowing the wind to carry pollen to their pinecones?

Collecting Pinecones

Forest Disease Prevention

By now you've seen just how much work is involved in breeding and collecting seeds from specific tree families. Why is it so important? In addition to developing the fastest-growing, straightest tree families, breeders work to find the tree families that resist disease the best. Here are two devastating diseases that breeding helps us prevent:

  • Fusiform rust - A fungus that causes rust “galls” or cankers on the trunk and branches of a tree. This damages the quality of the wood the tree produces and also can cause deformed or broken trunks.

  • Pitch canker - Also a fungus, pitch canker can form cankers that bleed resin on trees, discolored needles or even death.

Collecting Pinecones & Pollen

Collecting Pinecones & Pollen

Article: How Pinecones from Rayonier's Best Trees Become Forests

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Learn more about Research and Breeding and what comes next in the Forestry Lifecycle:

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