Operations · September 17, 2024

The hazelnut season problem: planning pallets around an eight-week harvest

Willamette Valley agriculture does not need pallets evenly across the year. It needs all of them in October. Here is how we plan for that.

Marguerite Okonjo — Yard manager 6 min · 362 words

Long rows of clean, freshly graded pallets stacked high in a bright warehouse — Grade A pool, ready to ship

Request a quote

Ask the author, or ask for a price.

This form reaches the yard team who wrote the article. Mention the piece in your message if you want a follow-up on something specific.

Portland, OR · email only, no phone

First name *

Last name *

Email *A mailbox you actually read — this is how we reply.

Phone *US or Canada, 10 digits — format (503) 274-0900.

Company

Address

City

State / Province

Postal code *US ZIP or Canadian code.

Select service *

Product type *Type freely or pick from the list.

Quantity *Whole number — per month or one-time.

Grade

Message

Required fields are marked *. We validate every entry, so a typo in your email or ZIP will be flagged before the request is sent. Read our privacy note.

Oregon's pallet year is not flat

Our shipment volume has a shape, and that shape is agriculture. Nursery stock peaks in spring. Berries arrive in June and July. Hazelnuts and wine grapes land in a compressed eight-week window from late September. Cider apples follow. Then everything stops and January is eerily quiet.

A pallet yard that plans for average demand fails in October. By the time the harvest arrives, the regional pool is tight, prices have moved, and every grower is calling every supplier simultaneously.

Building inventory in the quiet months

We buy aggressively in January and February, when pallets are cheap and nobody else wants them. Those units get graded, repaired and stacked under cover, reserved under customer names where a supply program exists.

This is capital sitting in a yard doing nothing for six months, which is a genuine cost. We accept it because the alternative is telling a hazelnut dryer in October that we cannot help, and that is the kind of failure a customer remembers for a decade.

What growers should do in July

Tell your supplier your October number in July. Not an exact figure — a range is fine. A grower who says 'probably 1,800 to 2,400 units, starting around the 25th of September' gets reserved stock. A grower who calls on the 24th gets whatever is left.

Reserved does not have to mean paid. Under our supply programs, volume is held against a name with a ±20% flex clause, because harvests are weather, not spreadsheets.

The deck-gap detail that matters in agriculture

Agricultural customers care about something most industries ignore: the gap between deck boards. Nursery stock needs drainage and airflow, so wide gaps are a feature. Bagged soil amendment needs the opposite, because narrow bags sag between boards and split.

We keep separate pools for both and we ask which one you need rather than assuming. It is a two-second question that prevents a season of torn bags.

What the quiet months are for

January and February are when the repair bay catches up, the fabrication shop builds upcycled fixtures, and the crew takes the holidays nobody can take in October.

Seasonality is not a problem to be eliminated. It is the rhythm of an agricultural region, and a yard that works with it serves growers better than one pretending every month is the same.

Terms used on this page

Defined the way a yard uses them, not the way a standards document does.

Block pallet: A pallet supported by nine solid blocks rather than stringers, giving true four-way entry and better racked performance.
Bolster: A squared timber used to block and brace loads inside trailers and containers. We re-saw ours from retired stringers.
Chamfer: The bevelled edge on a bottom deck board that lets a pallet jack roll on without catching.
Companion stringer: A second timber nailed alongside a cracked stringer to span the damage and restore the load path.
Core: Low-grade pallet material bought for board and fibre recovery rather than resale.
Closed loop: A pallet population circulating between known points and returning. Cycle time, not consumption, governs pool size.
Deck board: The boards nailed across stringers or blocks forming the top and bottom surfaces of a pallet.
De-nailer: The machine that separates deck boards from stringers and removes fasteners before fibre recovery.

The full glossary, 36 terms

Process

How a request after reading this actually happens

No sales team, no discovery call, no CRM sequence. We have no telephone, so everything below happens in writing and stays searchable afterwards.

What we need: footprint, grade, count, ZIP, and how the pallet is handled.
Nice to have: a photo, your dock height, whether you run forklifts or jacks.
Not needed: a purchase order, an account, or a phone conversation.

01
You send the form
Every form on this site is the same form and reaches the same yard team. Required fields are validated as you type, so a mistyped ZIP or email is caught before anything is sent.
02
We check today's stock
Used pallet availability moves daily. You get a real count and a real date rather than a list price that was true last quarter.
03
A written quote, within one business day
Price per unit by grade, freight itemised separately, delivery window, and any honest reservations we have about the specification you asked for.
04
Delivery, count, paperwork
Signed count sheet on arrival, weight ticket where relevant, and a diversion certificate for anything we collect for recycling.

14kpallets graded monthlytwo hand-grading lines
1,100heat treated per dayISPM-15, chart recorded
4.1M lbwood diverted last year68% reused whole
0 lblandfilled in 2025weighed and reconciled

Questions

What people ask about working with the yard

What is the minimum order or pickup?

No hard minimum for collection at the yard — come and take four pallets on a Saturday morning if you like. For delivery it is 50 units inside Portland metro and 150 outside it, because the truck has to earn its diesel. Outside our 180-mile fleet radius we quote through partner yards and freight, with the lane itemised.

How fast can this happen?

Standard 48×40 Grade A and B stock: same day for pickup, next day for metro delivery. Block pallets one to three days. Custom builds five to nine business days; engineered runs two to three weeks. Heat treatment is same day for booked batches and 48 hours standard. Written quotes always come back within one business day.

Why is there no phone number anywhere?

Because verbal quotes get remembered differently by different people. Since 2018 every price, date and commitment we make exists in an email you can search and forward. Most customers dislike it for about a month and then prefer it. Everything else happens in person at 3821 NW St Helens Rd, Portland, OR 97210.

Can I inspect before committing?

Please do. Visit the yard by email arrangement — closed-toe boots required, hi-vis provided — or ask for photographs of the actual pool your order would come from. We would rather lose an order than have a customer discover a surprise on their dock.

What documentation comes with it?

A written quote, a signed count sheet by grade, a weight ticket where material is weighed, heat-treatment certificates for treated batches (archived seven years), and a monthly diversion certificate for anything we collect for recycling — measured pounds kept out of landfill, which is the figure your ESG report actually needs.

What will you refuse to do?

Take methyl-bromide fumigated, chemically contaminated or fire-damaged wood. Buy marked rental-pool pallets, which belong to their operator. Promise same-day delivery outside the metro. Or quote a grade we do not think will survive your handling — we will specify downward and explain why.

Everything else on this site

Decision table

Five ways to get a pallet, compared honestly

Including the two we do not sell. Cost index is against a new wooden pallet of the same footprint.

Indicative figures for a 48×40 footprint in the Pacific Northwest, 2026. Rental pool economics vary by contract and are deliberately shown as a range.
Option	Cost index	Trips	Repairable	Carbon per use	Best for	Watch out for
Grade A recycled	45–55	9–14 then repair	Yes	3.1 kg	Almost everything	Colour varies; tare varies by a few pounds
Grade B recycled	30–40	7–11 then repair	Yes	3.1 kg	One-way, floor stacking, closed loops	Lower racked rating (1,500 lb)
Remanufactured	25–35	5–8	Yes	4.8 kg	One-way on a budget	Visibly mixed boards; 1,200 lb racked
New wooden	100	15–20 then repair	Yes	14.2 kg	Tight tolerances, audits, odd sizes	Pays for appearance you may not need
Plastic	500–1,000	30–100	No	High embodied, low per-use	Wash-down, deep freeze, pharma	Cracks end its life; not repairable
Rental pool	Per-trip fee	Managed	By operator	Operator's figure	Exchange networks, retail mandates	Pallets are not yours; losses are chargeable

We sell the first four and supply plastic where a wash-down line genuinely needs it. We do not operate a rental pool, and we will not buy marked pool pallets from you — they belong to their operator. Full comparisons

Diagnostics

Read the damage, fix the cause

Damage patterns are not random. Each one points at a specific handling behaviour, and fixing the behaviour is worth more than fixing the pallets.

What you see	What it almost always means	What to change	Cost to fix
Split lead boards at one end	Forks driven in too fast and too high	Operator training; dock lighting. Usually one shift is responsible	Free
Torn stringer notches	Pallet jacks entering notched stringers at an angle	Specify block pallets with true four-way entry	Spec change
Bottom boards ripped off cleanly	Pallets dragged rather than lifted, or frozen to a cold-store floor	Floor condition, forklift capacity at peak	Low
Crushed corner blocks	Stacks higher than the rating, or uneven loads on one corner	Stack-height policy; centre the load	Free
Out of square, nothing broken	Racking loading pallets diagonally — beams at different heights	Rack survey. This one is worth chasing	Medium
Mould in the middle of a stack	Wet pallets stacked tight with no airflow	Store off the ground, cover the top, leave side gaps	Low
Protruding nails tearing cases	Ungraded stock, or units repaired without re-checking	Buy graded; reject on the ticket	Free
Deck boards cupping	Moisture cycling between a freezer and a humid dock	Kiln-dried pool; helical fasteners	Spec change

Keep thirty of your own broken pallets aside for a month and photograph the damage. Patterns appear quickly. We do this analysis free with any repair quote, because a customer whose damage rate halves buys from us for a decade.

Next step

Put this into practice

Every article on this site came out of a customer conversation. Start yours — one form, one business day, written answer.