article id 108,
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                        Research article
                    
        
                                    
                                    
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                            Today’s crane-mounted planting heads plant seedlings with biologically  similar or better results than operational manual planting. However, the  total cost of mechanized tree planting in southern Sweden must decrease  at least 25% to compete economically with manual planting. Although  seedlings packed in machine-specific packaging increase the productivity  of planting machines by reducing seedling reloading time, they also  increase logistics and investment costs. In this study, we analyzed the  total cost of outplanting seedlings with an excavator-mounted Bracke  Planter and seedlings packed according to four different concepts:  cultivation trays, cardboard boxes, band-mounted seedlings in cardboard  boxes and linked pots in container modules. The total cost per planted  seedling was calculated for each packaging system as the sum of all  costs from nursery to the recovery of empty packaging. The results  showed that today’s system of transporting seedlings in cultivation  trays is the most cost-efficient of the four alternatives.  Machine-specific seedling packaging was 16–23% costlier per planted  seedling than cultivation trays when trucking distances were 100 km.  Sensitivity analyses indicated that machine-specific seedling packaging  increased in cost-efficiency relative to cultivation trays primarily  when more planting machines were contracted, but also as planting  machine fixed costs and productivity increased. Moreover, the relative  cost-efficiency of band-mounted seedlings, but not seedlings in  container modules, increased with increasing trucking distance. Thus, we  show that investments in machine-specific seedling packaging for  today’s planting machines are justified only when the fixed costs,  productivity and number of contracted planting machines increase  substantially.
                        
                
                                            - 
                            Ersson,
                            Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Forest Resource Management, SE-90183 Umeå, Sweden
                                                        E-mail:
                                                            back.tomas.ersson@slu.se
                                                                                          
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                            Bergsten,
                            Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Forest Resource Management, SE-90183 Umeå, Sweden
                                                        E-mail:
                                                            ub@nn.se
                                                                                
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                            Lindroos,
                            Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Forest Resource Management, SE-90183 Umeå, Sweden
                                                        E-mail:
                                                            ol@nn.se