From left: Skye Cuevas-Arevalo, Ben Verhoeven and Tristan Wampole at Kraemer’s Nursery. Photo by Josue Ramirez
It’s early in the morning when I pull into Kraemer’s Nursery in Mt. Angel.
It’s peaceful, not unlike the abbey just a few miles up the road, but as I get closer to the center of the nursery, things begin to wake up.
First, a forklift. Then a crew loading a trailer. An irrigator making her rounds. Then the welcoming smile of Skye Cuevas-Arevalo, logistics coordinator, and my tour guide for the morning.
Skye has been with Kraemer’s since 2022 and has quickly risen through the ranks. What strikes you is not just her cheery demeanor, but also the warmth and respect she shows to her coworkers.
Skye is excited to tell me about some of the improvements the team has made, starting with the use of their moving forks. Imagine a fork with 14 tines. Each tine is precisely spaced to carry a row of gallon pots.
Prior to this invention, all the moving was done by hand and a team of 11 people. Fifteen days of bending over with pots all day long, moving 100,000 or more boxwoods. The improvement “started as a way to make potting more ergonomic,” Skye explains. “But we ended up seeing productivity gains in the transportation of the pots.”
Now the work of 11 can be accomplished by four people, with fewer touches and most importantly, less bending over.
As we walk the nursery, Skye introduces me to Tristan Wampole, an account manager at Kraemer’s. He shows me a grid of 1” x 1” wood screwed together. At the time the moving forks were first implemented, he noticed that it was challenging to keep the pots spaced on the trailer. He raced off to the maintenance shed on his lunch break, emerging with this grid of wood. The lift driver could deposit a load of potted plants onto the grid, maintaining exact spacing for the next driver to unload.
Tristan recalls that afternoon when the team immediately asked, “Can you make 40 more?” Fast forward a few years, and they have replaced Tristan’s early wooden batch with metal grids, but a few of the originals still exist — enduring reminders of creativity over capital.
“Employees tend to have some of the best creative minds,” Skye says. She reiterates that these tools were “built to help the employees. From that we found other uses for them.” Now they have banks of color-coded forks and matching grids to accommodate many different size pots. Tristan explains the colors “make it so somebody brand new can do it right the first time.”
As I bid farewell to my hosts, the most important lessons I take from my visit are that if you make someone’s job physically easier, productivity will follow. Skye and Tristan’s enthusiasm is a good reminder that when you let people harness their creativity, there is no end in sight. Skye smiles and says, “We’re not done yet!” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
From the September 2025 issue of Digger magazine | Download PDF of article
At the president’s request, this column is also available in Spanish. Read it.