At Bailey Nurseries in Dayton, Oregon, properly grading bare-root plants in a timely manner is critical.
Between seedlings, shrubs and trees, Bailey’s hand grades more than 3.5 million bareroot items in its West Coast operations, all of which have to be dug and processed in a timely manner. Sit on material too long and plants can dry out and risk contracting diseases and molds.
According to Production Manager Esteban Herrera, having experienced graders is key to Bailey’s success.
“I can’t discount how important it is to have the same graders that are setting the standard for your company,” he said. “We have some graders who have been here 30 years. They have a keen eye for what we expect of our trees.”
Grading bare-root trees is both a subjective and an objective process, according to sources. When it comes to measuring caliper size, branching and height, the process is fairly cut and dried, said Vladimir Lomen, finance manager at Sester Farms in Gresham, Oregon. “Generally speaking, there are no leaves on the tree, and there’s no soil on the roots, so that sucker is buck naked and everybody can get on the same page,” he said.
In other cases, subjectivity comes more into play.
“There is some subjectivity in terms of how much scarring is acceptable, how much bend in the trunk is acceptable, and so on,” Lomen said.
Sester Farms analyzes a tree’s root or branching structure in quadrants. “If it is supposed to have branches, we look at whether there are branches on each side or if it is lopsided,” Lomen said. “And the same thing for the root structure. We look at its uniformity.
“Often, it is a fine line. You don’t want to throw away a product that is quality, but you don’t want to ship a customer something that should have been thrown away. Then you’ve got longer-term problems.”
Lomen added that it is rare for a tree to be perfect. “A tree is a living thing. It’s not like a widget. There are going to be some characteristics that aren’t perfect but that are acceptable, and only a trained production person would know what that is.”
In some cases, customers will take a #2 tree, said Joshua LaPoint, owner of Standard Nursery in Lafayette, Oregon. But, he said, in his experience, moving those trees is not a good business model.
“In my experience, for the most part it’s pretty much a liability for the nursery, because if you go ahead and spend the labor to store it in hopes that someone will buy it, you’re already in the negative,” LaPoint said. “And if they don’t buy it, then you’re really in the negative. And if they do buy it, maybe you cover your costs or you get a little bit back from it. It’s really not a model to plan on.”
Spring estimates
Grading essentially starts in the spring, when growers take a birds-eye view of their bare-root production and use historical averages to estimate production.
“And then in the fall, when certain things are done growing and they’re not going to caliper up, what we do is a 50-count,” Herrera said. “And we do some estimates based on that, where you take sample sizes of different areas of a crop to make sure that you’re in line with your spring estimates so that they reflect one another loosely. Nothing is perfect. You can be close, but you really can’t tell until you strip them down and they’re naked and you kind of see what is what.”
Herrera added that at times it can be deceptive to grade in a field in part because the proximity of plants to one another can distort the perceptions of tree sizes and a grader can get the impression a tree is more full-bodied than it is.
“Once you get them inside, they can look a lot different,” he said, “and that is where it gets hard, because in my opinion, grading can be very subjective. You have to meet the [American Standard for Nursery Stock] standards, but you also have a standard that you’ve created within the company that is an accurate representation of what you produce year in and year out. There are often crops where you have trees that have multiple branches, but if they don’t appear to be balanced or if they have large gaps between each set, you start to venture into light-branch territory, regardless of the tree having far more than the minimum needed.
“You have to always remember that not every genus is going to have the same appearance,” Herrera said. “I would never expect a Ginkgo tree to have the same standard as a two-year red maple. They are different animals. You can throw away a lot of trees if you are not acknowledging the differences of natural growth between different genera. So, allowances need to be made to befit the crop you are grading. It’s not the case with every genus, but it’s important to note that they can be uniquely different.”
Once a tree is inside the warehouse, graders evaluate it in its entirety, Herrera said. “Each tree is picked up and given the full 360 to make sure it looks good top-to-bottom. During the growing season, you were just evaluating the top, but once they come into the building, you are checking out what they had underneath (the roots), as well. All of those factors have to be weighed before we say, ‘This is what we want to represent our company.’
“Our customers have become accustomed to what we would call branch-full and throughout on certain varieties,” Herrera said. “Even though you could take a lot of these plants and say that’s branched, because it has the minimum ANLA standards, but it might not meet our internal standard.”
Historical averages
Older nurseries — those with historical records dating back, in some cases, decades — typically have better odds of aligning their spring estimates with their actual production, said LaPoint.
“They’ve got all the records, they’ve got the skill,” he said. “When they do their estimates, they pretty much know where it’s going to be later in the year. If you are a new nursery, just starting up, the barrier to entry is enormous, because you really don’t know from your estimates what your production numbers are going to be.”
Still, even for established nurseries, zeroing in on estimates can be difficult.
“You just don’t know how the growing season is going to go during the summer,” Herrera said. “You don’t know if it’s going to get real hot and shut things down or what is going to happen.”
“You build in your traditional shrinkage factor, because things die,” Lomen said. “And then as you get closer to shipping and harvest and grading is completed, you either call some neighbors, and you buy to fill in the sizes that you thought you had back when you made your projection, or you adjust orders and contact customers.
“You want to be the customer service vendor of choice,” Lomen said. “When you’re getting ready to ship, you will find the product to make sure that your customer gets what they need for their production, because they are depending on you.”
Customers typically will allow for substituting up or down one caliper size, LaPoint said, but have limited tolerance for substituting up or down two sizes. “At that point, you are really asking them to change their program,” LaPoint said. “Now it is a different pot they have to put it into.”
Grading and tagging
Some nurseries have started grading and tagging trees in fields a month or so prior to harvest to try and eliminate some of the guesswork and speed the grading process.
“It does seem to speed up the process, but it requires labor on the front end,” LaPoint said. “The upside is they don’t need that historical forecast. The only thing they have to account for at that point is the cull factor, which you can usually guess at.”
In the method, trees are tagged by grade and bundled accordingly during the harvest process.
“So, what happens is as the machine pops them out, the guys who are harvesting and working behind the machine, those are your graders,” LaPoint said. “So, if they see a J root, they just chuck it away behind them and they keep moving. The trees are already separated and isolated, so when they come out in a pallet on the grading room floor, they’re kind of all bundled together. So, you can actually see the height and the caliper right there and you can just bang out a whole row pretty quickly.”
LaPoint noted that he has worked in bare-root, container and field-grown nurseries. Bare-root, he said, presents perhaps the biggest challenge, and he ranks grading as among the most critical parts of the production processes.
“With bare-root, it’s all process, process, process,” LaPoint said. “And your employees need to have extensive experience. It’s a challenge. One of the most challenging to manage and be successful.”
From the April 2026 issue of Digger magazine | Download PDF of article