ISHS Acta Horticulturae 155: VIII Symposium on Horticultural Economics
TRANSPORT AT NURSERIES |
| Author: | G.J. van Boetzelser |
| Abstract:
At the nurseries the transport of trees is a very important work. A large part of the time for the delivery of trees is used for transport. A part of the work can be simplified with the use of the pallets. In the Boskoop area, the centre of nurseries, a lot of pallets are used. Most of the pallets which are used, have the dimension of 120 × 100 or 120 × 80 cm. Mostly these are boxpallets. the use of pallets, however, is not without problems. Much of our products are too long to pack in these bospallets, so you often see combined loads: a part of the trees is bospallets and a part as bulk cargo. In some branches of out nurseries, only a few pallets are in use now. This is the group of nurseries that grow forest trees and most of the nurseries that grow fruit trees. We, that is a group of our Horticulture Advisory Service, who are specialized in nursery problems, did some research into this matter to see what was possible to improve the situation. We visited a lot of nurseries to look at the methods that are used and to inquire how the nursery men think about the transport-problem. By the methods which are used at the moment we see that the loading time is very long. To load a truck and trailer, it takes about a whole day with 4 men to do the job. We have made the suggestion to use pallets. The nursery men saw all kinds of difficulties. they had to invest in a handling system and they were afraid that the product would start heat up. However, we did some experiments; we made a number of pallets and did some heat measurements. We indeed found some heating up, but not enough to give problems. It also is true that when we load a truck in bulk, we can load more then when we load with pallets. The difference is about 20 – 30%. When they do not have full loads, there are no problems of course. So we suggest: start with the use of pallets in your own nursery and for | |
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