Travis Keatley, senior vice president of Timberlands, plants the symbolic “billionth” seeding at Mima. Travis Keatley, senior vice president of Timberlands, plants the symbolic “billionth” seeding at Mima.
In 1967, Weyerhaeuser purchased a 67-acre property just outside Olympia, Washington, which has become our Mima nursery. This March, Travis Keatley, senior vice president of Timberlands, had the honor of planting the nursery’s 1,000,000,000th seedling.
“One billion is a huge milestone,” says Sue Woodall, Western Regeneration seed and sales manager. “It really emphasizes the longevity of our operation and how much we’ve grown since 1967.”
Photos from the nursery’s earliest days show harvesters wearing long dresses and perched on wooden planting rigs. Contrast that with today’s technology: the gleaming red automated transplanters made by Ferrari Costruzioni Meccaniche.
“Many things have changed here at Mima, but one constant is the teamwork it takes to hit our production goals,” says Jim Brackman, nursery site leader. “We’re really proud of how well we work together to produce top-quality seedlings for Western Regeneration.”
A SEEDLING’S JOURNEY TO THE FOREST
Mima is one of four nurseries in Washington and Oregon that produce Douglas-fir seedlings destined for our tree farms throughout Western Timberlands.
Seeds that start their lives at our Rochester seed bank are then planted in greenhouses there, just a stone’s throw from Mima. After 12 to 14 weeks, when seedlings have grown enough to transplant, they’re transferred to Mima. It takes two shifts and eight to 10 weeks to get all the young seedlings into the fields, where they’ll develop strong root systems for another year.
Over the winter, they get their first exposure to cold temperatures, which makes them more resilient. In spring, they get lots of rain and some fertilizer, and then they experience the natural summer drought before being lifted and packed into coolers to be shipped to our tree farms at the end of the year.
The Mima team celebrates their one billionth seedling with Travis. “I started at our Rochester nursery in 2008,” Jim says. “When our site manager of 40 years decided to retire in 2015, I was lucky to be promoted to his job. I’ve worked at both Rochester and Mima and seen lots of positive changes at both nurseries in that time, and a whole lot of feedback and collaboration that have resulted in major improvements.”
EVOLVING PRACTICES LEAD TO BETTER RESULTS
“Decades ago, the nursery used a much slower, less natural process that prioritized quantity over quality,” James says. “As part of our new Seedling Technology program, our great folks in Strategy & Technology have worked with site growers to refine and perfect our growing methods to mimic the natural growth cycle. We actually produce fewer seedlings per year now, but those seedlings are far more likely to survive once they’re planted in our forests.”
“Fewer” is relative, of course, when you’re talking about millions of seedlings. Twenty-four million per year are grown at Mima. Twelve million of those are shipped to internal and external customers; the other 12 million stay at Mima to grow another season.
Advancements such as our new Seedling Technology program have played a large role in Mima’s journey over the last decade. Notable innovations include machines that can test bud samples for cold hardiness and the Ferrari automated transplanters, which have reduced the size of transplanting crews from 75 to 25.
“Some of our technology experiments have been transformational,” Jim says. “Of course, others have proven that sometimes you really need human beings to judge things like planting quality.”
For example, the team trialed using a camera-based automated seedling counter on the transplanting machines. It was too slow and inaccurate, so they went back to human quality control crews that can also verify the planting quality below ground.
“On the other hand,” Jim says, “We can now fly drones over our fields and run the images through a program that gives us a birds-eye view of seedling health, which allows our growers to get a heads-up on poor performance due to disease or weather-related damage. And we’re working toward using drone data to count seedlings, too. It’ll be interesting to see how technology evolves even further over the next decade or so.”
MEETING A MOMENTOUS MILESTONE
Some of these technological enhancements were on display during the teams’ one-billionth seedling celebration during Travis’s visit with his Timberlands lead team in March, which included a slideshow timeline of Mima’s history created by Megan Marleau, Western Regeneration leader.
“We all had a laugh over an old article about the nursery that said, ‘The nurserymen knew they were responsible for providing the best seedlings that would survive, and that the field foresters were not a damn bit bashful about letting them know when they were not getting top quality,’” Megan says. “But the technology changes were most striking. It’s amazing to see the progression from what were essentially bicycles to these huge modern robots in the fields.”
A more formal celebration is still to come. Every summer for the past six years, our Western Regeneration nurseries have held a Customer Appreciation Day to celebrate internal and external customers. Last year, it was hosted by our Aurora nursery in Oregon, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. This year, Mima will host the event in honor of its one-billion-seedling milestone, and the team also plans to commission a commemorative sign for the roadside.
“Our number one goal is meeting the needs of our customers, and it’s pretty amazing to think we’ve been able to do that one billion times,” Sue says. “To reach that number, we didn’t just need every single person working at Mima — we also needed all the wonderful collaboration with our Strategy & Technology team and our other nurseries in Western Regeneration.”
