The Fobro 1500 Forest Nursery Tree Lifter

I manage a 40 acre transplant nursery in Northwest Washington. Our facility has a capacity of 2 million trees per year and we do both fall transplanting of plugs for plug -1's and spring transplanting of bareroot of 2-0 for 2-1's. The soils are for the most part very well drained, fine sandy loam. Ours is what I call a one horse nursery. Capacity is such that each operation is handled by a single crew of 10 to 14 people with a single supervisor providing overhead. We have only one of each piece of equipment necessary to run the nursery. For this reason, we had to be very careful in choosing a lifter to dig our crop. We do not plan to have backup equipment available. First of all we needed a machine that would fit our scale of operation. It had to be efficient and productive enough to allow us to complete the lifting job within the December to mid-March season with a crew small enough to meet our manpower constraints. On the other hand, our annual production placed a strict limit of funds available for equipment and our lifter had to be purchased for under $8,000.

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Details

Author(s): Peter Heide

Publication: National Nursery Proceedings - 1982

Event: Western Nurserymen's Conference
1982 - Medford, OR