Robinson Nursery – I am Oregon Agriculture

Me, my brother and our dad.

We are Oregon agriculture.

My name is Chris Robinson and my parents, Rick and Roxanne Robinson, started Robinson Nursery in 1984. They spent those early years working several different jobs trying to make the nursery self-sustainable. In 1996 my father left his managerial job at a large nursery to pursue Robinson Nursery full time.

A field outside of our greenhouses.

They started small, as the company grew they began to acquire more land and expand the nursery into new markets. In 2008, my brother and I joined the team after graduating from Linfield College. We had a lot to live up to but we readily took the challenge. My brother, Josh, runs the sales side of the company while I run the production side. Our family truly loves working together to create a great product. We have also been blessed with a team of amazing individuals that live up to our challenge of growing our customers’ expectations.

Our self-branded GrowReady Liners™.

Today, we farm over 650 acres of prime irrigated soil in the Willamette Valley. We grow two different product lines — bare-root, field-grown trees, and our self-branded GrowReady Liners™. We propagate all of our products in-house. We believe this brings a consistently better more dependable product year after year. Eight years ago, we jumped out of our comfort zone of growing field-grown, bare-root trees and began growing containerized trees. There seemed to be a need in the industry for a higher quality container product that had a better root system. Traditional containers can create long-term problems for plants, because they allow the roots to circle in the container. This can lead to decreased performance.

Field-grown trees at our nursery.

We began using special containers that prune the roots with air as they grow. These containers create a superior root system, allowing our customers to transplant our trees with ease. We decided that we needed to come up with a new way to package these trees, we couldn’t ship them in their containers because that was too expensive. We found a machine built by a company in Holland that could wrap a root ball of a tree with a biodegradable mesh. With this, the GrowReady liner™ was born. We now ship all of our air-root-pruned container trees with this biodegradable mesh. It helps save on the cost of shipping by eliminating the weight of the container. Our customers can then take these plants right off the truck and plant them in their fields or larger containers without the hassle of messing with containers. This is a win-win for everyone, including the environment. We have truly been blessed by God to be able to farm such beautiful land with a team of amazing employees, customers and vendors. We are excited for what the future holds for our farm and Oregon agriculture.