I truly admire this man. I'm wanting to do a smaller scale similar effort on 150-ish acres of land I own. It previously was ravaged by forest fire (long before I bought it) and there are very few trees left. I've been trying to water the new saplings that are growing, but I haven't set up the infrastructure to be able to scale that yet. I really wish there was more help from local government on restoring forests. We have in the U.S. a program for setting aside land as a preserve and getting a tax break. I've tried to do that to help fund re-foresting the land, but no one seems to be able to point me to how to actually move forward with that process (you need a local conversation org to sponsor you, but the ones I talked were too big to have time for me). I feel like if we just provided more information and process then folks like me could re-forest a lot of land.
Find out what the native pioneer species are and start with those. They're typically fast growing things like bramble, birch, ... Once they get off they'll prevent soil erosion, top soil dehydration and dampen wind whilst adding organic matter to the top soil. After 5 - 10 years you can start introducing slower growing native trees.
