By Tracy Ilene MillerOver the past 40 years, automation

has become an increasingly regular part of how nurseries operate.

Tom Fessler, general manager of Woodburn Nursery & Azaleas in Woodburn, Oregon, remembers as a kid watching his father’s avid approach to automation. Bob Fessler, who founded the nursery in 1967, installed roll-ing benches and watering booms for propagation.

Some of those original benches are still in use at the nursery today; however, it’s likely they will be retired soon, since the nursery is moving toward on-ground flood floor operations, which provide bet-ter access for forklifts and tractors.

One of the bigger improvements

recently made at Woodburn was the installation of a buffer conveyor belt for the potting line. This new piece of equipment gathers up pots and puts them in rows, so they can be picked up

with a forklift. “I had seen them around when we

were on a trip to Europe with my pro-duction manager, and we said we had to do this. We started with one forklift, and now we have five,” Tom Fessler said.

But are these and other improvements adequately described as automation?

“In none of our practice is the human touch completely gone,” said

Scott Cully, general manager of Fall Creek Farm & Nursery in Lowell, Oregon. “Our definition of automation is assisting the human hand.”

Allan Elliott, operations manager of Carlton Plants in Dayton, Oregon, offered another per-spective: “In a broader sense, it is mechaniza-tion and streamlining of activities. It’s not

just automating, it’s fine-tuning.”Elliott said mechanization is an

ongoing process. Nursery managers are always on the lookout for opportunities to automate processes.

Looking for low-hanging fruitWhen considering how to integrate

automation into an operation, the first place to look is the so-called “low-

Nursery managers explain how and why they mechanized their operations

The ins and outs of automation

Workers offer guidance as a two-row cultivator from GK Machine works its way through a growing field at Carlton Plants in Dayton, Oregon.

Photo Courtesy of Carlton Plants

AUGUST 2014 ▲ DIGGER FARWEST EDITION 43

▲ automation

hanging fruit” — those places where upgrades or changes will yield the big-gest gain for the least input.

Although it is not the case for each nursery, the potting line is very often the first focus, Matt Gold said. Gold is president of Gold Hill Nursery in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Midas Nursery Solutions. His family started Midas in 2009 to assist nurseries looking to incor-porate automation into their operations.

In 2005, Gold began to accelerate efforts to automate Gold Hill Nursery. “We looked at the operation from a high-elevation view, and decided to see where the opportunities lay,” he said.

Gold looked at all processes, from trimming and spacing, to propagation and shipping — essentially breaking down each phase of production. Along the way, he identified numerous oppor-tunities to improve product quality and to reduce labor costs. Increasing safety and the ability to meet deadlines were other key considerations. Getting the job done faster and safer, while ensuring products would be available to custom-ers no matter the weather — a big con-sideration in Oregon — was the ultimate goal of automation. But where to start?

Gold found the potting line to be that low-hanging fruit and thus, decided that process would be the first to get a major overhaul.

“We automated with a drill and fill, which dumps the soil in the pot and has a place to put the plant,” Gold said. “We had a pot dispenser at the time, but it didn’t work. We fixed the pot dispenser. We were doing individual pots, then went to plugs, and that took two people off the potting line to other things. We had a person putting fin-ished plants on a tray and then onto trailers. Instead, now, they get self-load-ed and staged on blocks.”

Gold also asphalted the roads so forklifts could get out faster, and installed a soil-mixing system. The effect of these changes? Before, there were 12 people on the crew putting in 14,000 plants in an eight-hour day. Now, it’s three people putting in 18,000 plants.

This kind of improvement means staff can be redirected to more technical and detailed work. At Carlton Plants, “we’ve taken a lot of things that were tedious handwork and turned them into some-thing that is mechanized,” Elliott said.

For instance, they changed to grad-ing seedlings on a belt. They automated tying machines, and they modified a Hesston grass swather to take the trim-mings from chopping off the tops of rootstock and chip it right there on the ground. The machine can do a 1,000-foot row in 10 minutes.

“We look at each item to make it fast-er, safer and more consistent,” Elliott said.

Doing due diligenceFall Creek Nursery started to

approach automation systematically years ago by identifying the order of improvements — irrigation first, fertiga-

tion second, shearing last. “Part of our mission is to optimize

our customers’ success by continually putting out a better product,” Scott Cully, Fall Creek’s general manager, said. “For me, the more uniform our product, the more uniform it will go into our customers’ field or nursery, and it improves their success.

“When you manually do anything, each person that does that task in a production line will have slightly differ-ent techniques,” Cully said. “Person A might plant slightly deeper than B, and C doesn’t center it. Through automation, the quality of that task will be uniform.”

The company is now actively pur-suing automation of transplanting, a decision that was not made hastily. For years the company deliberated, evaluat-ing and planning the change. Part of the deliberation was locating a vendor

Newly potted plants move down a conveyor belt at Gold Hill Nursery near Hillsboro, Oregon. These plants will be automatically consolidated on a larger belt so that a specialized forklift can pick them up and transport them to the beds. Photo Courtesy of Gold hill nursery

44 AUGUST 2014 ▲ DIGGER FARWEST EDITION

who offered the kind of support and mechanics they wanted.

“There is quite a bit of machinery out on the marketplace, and we need the support of the vendor,” Cully said. “What might vary is a nursery’s willing-ness to accept poor service.”

Apart from the service offered by the vendor, the right piece of equip-ment should be based on its user-friendliness, adaptability, utility and even its physical dimensions.

“One thing people overlook, even when you buy something as simple as a tractor, is specifying and ordering it tai-lored to what you want to accomplish,” Elliott said. “I’ve seen people go out and buy something, get it back to the property and it doesn’t suit.”

Elliott and others emphasized the importance of analyzing and scrutiniz-ing everything. Take your time, and talk to a lot of people here and abroad.

“Europe is very progressive because their labor cost is double ours, and most of their energy, their fuels, cost twice ours,” Fessler said. Because of these economic conditions, European companies tend to be on the cutting edge of innovation.

“One of the things that we learned going around the country, and we got advice from everybody, people said to do this incrementally,” Cully said. “Add one piece of equipment, learn the bugs, and then add another piece. People said repeatedly, ‘If you expect immediate satis-faction, you are going to be disappointed.’”

Nor should you expect automa-tion to solve all your problems. Having looked at the entire operation to deter-mine what could be automated, Gold also found places where automation was not the solution; for instance, in propagation, where there were extra cuttings that became waste. Here, Gold found an opportunity to reduce waste by changing the process itself — not by upgrading the equipment.

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▲ automation

from owners, operators and managers. “The potting line [crew] can dream

about a better potting line, but if the people at the top aren’t supportive, it’s hard to make that change,” Gold said.

It’s important to involve everyone in the company and to use their ideas, Elliott said. The owners, managers and the operators must provide the details that matter to them.

“At times, we tackle a specific chal-lenge with a focus group: the produc-tion manager involved, the floor person dealing with that problem specifically, and a shop person,” Elliott said. These people help analyze the situation and determine how to make it work.

“We take their ideas and turn them into the finished system or process.”

Automating also depends on a company’s comfort level with change and how aggressive it wants to be.

“If you have a vision about your opportunities and how you foresee them, automation lends itself to a logical process: first, the lowest hang-ing fruit — the ones with the quick-est return on investment — and then maturing to the next level,” Gold said. “It can become addictive. You get to the nitty-gritty, to the next opportunity, and ask, what can I do to make the next process work better? It becomes kind of fun.”

Realizing return on investmentFor Fall Creek, the return on

investment (ROI) for new transplant-ing equipment was improvement in quality and uniformity, and the reduc-tion in waste of #2 grade plants, as well as lower labor costs and increased productivity. At Gold Hill, production increased by 4,000 plugs per day.

But there are some parts of ROI that are hard to measure immediately with hard numbers. Sometimes you have to make an educated assumption about improvement.

“It is very difficult to measure impact on the brand itself,” Cully said. “But if you have a tremendous num-ber of happy customers, you want to believe word will spread, and your sales will be impacted. If you focus on that, all the other things fall into play.”

“ROI is a tough one,” Fessler said. “I can figure what labor automation saves, but to me, it is also a gut feeling sometimes. You make a decision not on the dollars and cents, but improving the job that people are doing.”

Tracy Ilene Miller is a writer/editor who lives in Eugene, Oregon. She can be reached at tracyilenemiller@gmail.com.

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