Quercus Project · Huertify
Holm oak, cork oak and Pyrenean oak resprout after fire: they have been doing it for millennia. The trouble starts when that mechanism breaks down — fires every few years, blazes so severe they leave neither seed nor seed tree, soil turned to ash. There the forest no longer returns on its own, and replanting fails too: in dry Mediterranean areas more than half of what is planted can die. The Quercus Project is about exactly those places.
Because the usual “let's plant trees” pitch gets the diagnosis wrong, and getting it wrong there wastes money and time.
Iberian Quercus are resprouters. Cork oak resprouts from buds protected beneath the bark — even on the trunk and branches — and holm oak from dormant buds at the root and root collar. That is no accident: it is an adaptation to woodland that has always burned.1 In a fire of ordinary intensity, with surviving adult trees nearby, these trees come back without anyone planting them. A study in Sierra Nevada found 801 holm oaks regenerating in the first year after fire in a burnt pine plantation.2
If there is resprouting and there are seed trees nearby, planting means spending public money getting in the way of a forest that is already coming back. Any serious restoration project starts by checking whether it is needed at all. This project only makes sense where the answer is yes.
And when is the answer yes? When the regeneration machinery has genuinely broken down. Recurrent or very high-severity fires can exhaust resprouting capacity and wipe out both the seed bank and the seed trees at once: the result is sites with very low natural regeneration potential.3 Add to that the loss of soil — severe fire strips away the litter layer that protected it from erosion3 — and rising aridity that threatens holm oak regeneration from seed.4
There, and only there, planting is called for. And there the quality of the stock decides whether the money achieves anything.
This is not a future scenario. It is the map of the last ten years in north-west Spain.
That is the pattern that breaks regeneration: not one fire, but the same hillside burning over and over before the resprouts ever reach seed-bearing age. In 2025 the Xunta de Galicia put the area burned in Galicia at 118,966 ha, with Ourense accounting for around 86 % of it.8 The summer of 2026 has again left major fires in Ávila, León and Segovia, and in the Sierra Oeste of Madrid.9
And when planting does happen, it is often done badly: a project-scale study in a Mediterranean dryland measured 53 % short-term mortality, with post-planting drought and herbivory as the main causes. Depending on species and site, survival ranges from 5 % to 53 %.10
A note on method: EFFIS satellite figures and official national or regional statistics do not match, because they do not measure the same way. They are cited separately, each with its source, and never added together.
Not a new idea of what a nursery is, but a control system that already exists, applied to raising stock that survives its first summer.
The technical finding the project rests on is well known and well documented: Quercus seedlings establish better under the shade and shelter of another plant — what ecologists call facilitation, or the “nurse plant” effect. Shading is one of the main mechanisms behind that improvement, and the effect is greater in dry years. But afterwards, the same seedling needs light in order to develop.11
In other words: the requirement is not fixed, it changes over time. A nurse shrub provides shade, but it does not withdraw it when that becomes useful. In a controlled system shade is just another parameter — like irrigation, climate or nutrition — and it can be moved along the calendar.
Shading is programmed batch by batch and withdrawn gradually up to full light, instead of depending on a shrub happening to be in the right spot. The stock leaves the nursery hardened off.
Nutrition targeted by species and by phase. It includes nursery mycorrhization, using the protocols already published for holm oak and cork oak — without promising field results, see below.12
The software that already runs the growing hubs tracks each batch: cameras and thermal cameras, growth monitoring and provenance traceability. That is what makes measurement possible afterwards.
Two further decisions. Local provenance: we do not raise “holm oak” in the abstract, but the holm oak of that district, to return it to that district. And two-year-old stock for cork oak on dry, sandy soils, which is what the literature recommends over one-year stock.13
| Species | Scientific name | Resprouts after fire | When planting is needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holm oak | Quercus ilex | Yes, from dormant buds at the root and root collar. | When fire returns before the resprouts bear acorns, or when aridity prevents regeneration from seed. |
| Cork oak | Quercus suber | Yes, and exceptionally so: from buds protected beneath the cork, even on trunk and branches. | Where no adult trees remain to resprout, or where cork oak decline has emptied the stand. |
| Pyrenean oak | Quercus pyrenaica | Yes, strongly, including from the roots. | In the north-west, where fire recurrence over the last decade has been highest and soil has been lost in the most severe blazes. |
| Portuguese oak | Quercus faginea | Yes. | In the transition between holm oak and deciduous oak woodland, on degraded soil with no seed trees nearby. |
The method is not limited to the genus Quercus: it is the best-documented case, which is why it gives the project its name. It extends to whichever native species is appropriate in each area.
For the first time, restoration is not a good intention: it is a legal obligation with deadlines.
The Nature Restoration Regulation has applied since 18 August 2024. It requires measures covering at least 20 % of land and sea by 2030, and all ecosystems in need of restoration by 2050.14
Member States must contribute to the Union target of planting at least 3 billion additional trees by 2030, and submit national restoration plans with milestones for 2030, 2040 and 2050.14
Restoration work after major fires has its own legal basis in Spain — article 50 bis, introduced by Royal Decree-Law 15/2022 — and treatments, erosion-control works and replanting are subsidised with regional and PEPAC/EAFRD funds.15
With an uncomfortable consequence: if a wave of planting is going to be financed with public money, the real risk is planting a great deal, badly, and burying half of it again. The value of this project is precisely that: that whatever is planted where it is needed should live.
This project is not designed to maximise return. Better said now than later, and with numbers.
Tray-grown forest stock retails at roughly €0.80 to €2 a unit, and less in volume tenders.16 And the main buyer supplies itself: Spain's regional governments run their own public nursery networks — Andalusia is investing close to €8M through 2029 to produce some 4.3 million plants; Extremadura runs five nurseries with around 130 exclusively native species.17
A controlled-environment nursery, with climate control, programmable shading, tracking software and a two-year cycle, cannot compete on euros per plant against that. Any plan promising otherwise is either lying or has not looked at the market.
What can sustain it is something else: not selling plants, but selling their survival — and being funded as what it is, a project in the public interest.
Post-fire and depopulation-challenge restoration funding, and European programmes such as LIFE. It is the natural route: the beneficiary is the woodland, and who pays for woodland is the public purse.
PrimaryCompanies offsetting their footprint already pay to reforest in Spain, and today they buy trees planted. The gap is selling them trees alive after three years, verified. That requires traceability: exactly what the software provides.18
DifferentiatorProjects entered in Spain's MITECO registry, with the 30-year minimum permanence the rules demand. Slow, and it requires long agreements over land that is not ours.19
Long termIf this works, the outcome is not a large company: it is a published protocol that any nursery, public or private, can apply. That is consistent with how Huertify was founded — and with what its founding letter says — even if it is bad for the valuation.
The per-unit numbers — cost of rearing, price per plant, survival at three years — have not been measured. They will be published with their method once the pilot trial runs. There is no financial projection on this page because there would be nothing to build one from yet.
Each phase unlocks the next with data, not promises. And phase 02 includes what is almost never done: a control.
Identify plots where natural regeneration really has broken down — high recurrence, no seed trees, severely damaged soil — and rule out those that recover unaided. Raise the first batch of one species and one provenance.
DiagnosisPlant the controlled batch alongside one from a conventional nursery: same seed origin, same plot, same day. Measure survival at the first and third summer and publish the method. If the controlled batch does not win, we say so.
Real dataWith the protocol validated, publish it and replicate by district and species. Growth means adding small nurseries close to their destination, not one large plant.
OpenIndicative split of the work in the first phase, focused on building the pilot nursery and measuring the trial. Amount: to be defined
A split of the work, not a closed budget. Specific financial figures are provided in the dossier.
Honest about the stage: a new project, with no field trial yet. What is already built and reused:
How to take part
We are looking for three things: land where regeneration really has broken down, funding — public or impact — for the pilot nursery and the trial, and people who know their trade: forestry engineering, restoration ecology. If you are here for market returns, please read the previous section first.
Disclaimer. This page is for information only and does not constitute an offer, invitation or recommendation to invest, nor financial advice. Any investment round open to the public would be carried out, where applicable, through a crowdfunding platform authorised by the CNMV, in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2020/1503. The objectives set out here are estimates subject to uncertainty, and the per-unit data have not yet been measured. Investing in early-stage companies carries the risk of total loss of capital and of illiquidity.
Figures on this page are cited with their source and their date. Where sources disagree — satellite versus official statistics — we say so, and we do not mix them. The project's own data do not exist yet: they will be published once measured.