It is a rare occurrence that a new tree species is discovered on our green and blue planet. Such was the case in 1999 when a new conifer was discovered by botanists in the mountains of northern Vietnam. This tree was originally placed in a new genus all its own, Xanthocyparis, and was given the species name vietnamensis. DNA studies in 2010 reclassified it in the genus Cupressus, sub-genus Xanthocyparis. Sadly, the tree is critically endangered in its native habitat due to the fact that its aromatic wood is prized by local people to build shrines and coffins. There are perhaps fewer than 1,000 trees left in Vietnam, and only a handful of mature specimens capable of reproducing from seed. More recently in 2014, a small population of C. vietnamensis was found in the Guangxi Province of China, giving hope that it can reproduce in the wild. Efforts are being made to protect remaining trees in Vietnam. I like the idea that bringing this tree into cultivation will help save it from extinction.

is a beautiful tree in the landscape and has great potential in ornamental horticulture. When I first saw one in a garden setting at the Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden near Seattle, Washington, I thought it was a species of Cunninghamia because the juvenile foliage resembles the China fir at first glance. The transitional and adult foliage is much more cypress-like, and this foliage plurality is an attribute that makes the tree visually interesting. The common name of C. vietnamensis is Golden Vietnamese Cypress, and the golden color becomes more pronounced as the tree matures and its adult leaves receive more direct sun. The most reliable references I have talked to consider C. vietnamensis to be hardy to USDA Zone 8, though a couple indicated that the zone has the potential to go lower, perhaps Zone 7. The introduction of the plant into select North American gardens came in 2006 when an expedition to northern Vietnam sponsored by the Elisabeth C. Miller Foundation returned with cuttings.

Why grow Cupressus vietnamensis?

• It has eye-catching blue-green juvenile and adult foliage forms growing concurrently.
• It’s very rare in both the wild and in cultivation, adding to its perceived value.
• It’s relatively easy to grow in commercial horticulture.
• Growing this tree helps protect it from extinction.

If you looked only at the big picture, you’d have to say we live in deeply troubled times. It seems we’ve never been more polarized. Political discourse feels more like a war zone than a thoughtful national conversation. But what happens when you zoom in closer?

That’s the question I ask myself as I reflect on the past year spent exploring dozens of small and mid-sized communities across America. I’ve talked with hundreds, maybe thousands, of mayors, chamber of commerce members, new entrepreneurs, business owners and citizens of all ages. I’ve sat down to great meals in downtown restaurants, listened to fabulous bands and attended some of the world’s coolest festivals. And what I’ve found is that the America one sees “up close and personal” bears little resemblance to the America one sees on the national news.

I’m not saying we don’t have real problems. We do. But we have more bright spots than dark — more courtesy than incivility — and often that good news flies under the radar. I’ve always been a believer in shining a light on the positive until it overcomes the negative. Gratitude is more powerful than griping. And what I’m grateful for today, at the turn of the year, is America’s communities.

Real life doesn’t happen nationally. It happens locally. And at the community level, I see people partnering with their neighbors to solve problems, working hard and playing hard, listening and compromising and — quite often — making sacrifices for the good of others. Locally is where we’re at our very best. It’s where we can use our influence and our gifts to make our communities strong and to make life better for everyone.

I view communities through a lens of revitalization because that’s the work I do. As things have gotten more dysfunctional at the national level, the by-product is that people on the local level have kicked in. And what I see is that citizens aren’t counting on government to “save” them. They’re doing the hard work of revitalization themselves. They’re owning it. They’re investing in their cities and towns. And they’re starting new conversations: How can we make our community the best it can be? How can we reinvent ourselves, start and grow local businesses, and transform into a great place to work, live and play?

This mindset has kicked in everywhere: big cities, small towns, communities of every shape and size. And no wonder. The chaos and uncertainty of the past few decades have made us crave personal connections with our friends and family. We want our children and grandchildren nearby (with good jobs to keep them there). We want lively downtowns with great restaurants, funky stores, cool living spaces and plenty of fun things to do. And we’re making it happen.

In Thomas L. Friedman’s book “Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations,” he talks about how rapid accelerations in technology, globalization and Mother Nature are disrupting our lives and leaving people feeling destabilized. He says these forces are like a hurricane, one in which the winds of change are swirling so fast that families can’t find a way to anchor themselves.

Friedman makes the case that the only answer is building healthy communities, ones that are flexible enough to navigate this hurricane and provide stability for the citizens within them. He quotes the words from a ballad by Brandi Carlile, “You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you’re standing in the eye.” Our communities are that eye. They provide a firm place to stand and find stability while all this change is swirling around us.

My hope is that 2020 will be the Year of the Community. We can make it so. We can hold our families close. We can reach out to neighbors to connect with them, to help them, to engage them in the work of making things better. We can shop local. We can partner with government the right way. We can smooth the way for entrepreneurs. We can galvanize our small business communities to drive positive change. And we can act as ambassadors for our communities so that others want to invest, live, work and play here too.

Won’t you join me? Celebrating all the good in our communities, and working together to make them stronger, will make for a 2020 that’s even better than all the years that have come before.

Trucking is a historically cyclical industry, one currently on the downturn. Trucking companies cut 4,200 jobs in September, representing the third straight month of declining payrolls, according to figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A wider industry recession led to 640 carrier businesses going bankrupt in the first half of 2019, representing more than triple the amount of bankruptcies from the same period last year, according to transportation data from Broughton Capital LLC. Sector observers studying the shipping market slowdown point to faltering freight demand following a far more fertile 2018.

What this fluid situation means for the horticulture industry’s 2020 spring shipping season is still unclear, note industry experts. While trucking has struggled in recent years with a shortage of qualified drivers, transportation-savvy nurseries can still thrive during the so-called “100 days of hell” that can make or break their bottom line.

“Nurseries don’t have transportation professionals working on staff, but they’ll do what they need to do to get their loads delivered,” says David Roush, president of KSM Transport Advisors (KSMTA), a financial advisory services firm serving the trucking and logistics segments of the transportation market. “They can reduce costs and improve their service by adopting methods that have been around since deregulation in the trucking industry.”

Questions, questions

Most growers don’t have a vehicle fleet at their disposal, creating challenges when it’s time to ship plants in spring. Considering the ongoing freight recession, nurseries this winter should review their entire transportation function, from how many trucks they annually hire out to new technology platforms that may improve routing efficiency, says Roush.

“Are they using the least cost routing technology system, or are they relying on tribal knowledge of someone who’s done their routing in the past?” he says. “How are they paying for drivers? How efficient are they at recapturing their racks?”

KSMTA recently helped reconfigure an annual grower’s full transportation division. The company hired a specialist to manage shipping and integrated new routing software into its larger transportation management system.

“Now they’re a professional transportation company, not just a shipping company,” says Roush.

Nurseries must continue to adjust amid storms within the larger carrier industry, experts say. The $800 billion freight sector slowed down this year after a hot 2018, which saw robust profits sunk into record big-rig orders and increased driver pay. Trucking companies are now dealing with softening demand and a tougher pricing environment, particularly in the spot market, where prices for last-minute transportation are more unpredictable than the contract rate truckers negotiate with customers. Spot-market prices in July fell nearly 19%, according to online freight marketplace DAT Solutions LLC.

“Horticulture has larger exposure to fluctuations in the spot market than for-hire carriers because of their need to procure a large amount of capacity in a shorter time period,” Roush says.

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A unique set of challenges

Tristan Daedalus, director of advocacy and policy communications at AmericanHort, says his organization supports the green industry supply chain in areas including transportation. Among other duties, AmericanHort provides members insight on newly enacted trucking regulations impacting nursery and agricultural products.

Growers face unique hurdles in moving goods, particularly as they’re competing in an open-market shipping space with entities transporting non-perishable products year-round, notes Daedalus. Nurseries vying for truck space with Best Buy, for example, are challenged in wooing truckers unwilling to take on their difficult-to-transfer loads.

“At a nursery, trucks are mostly loaded from the ground, as most facilities don’t have bays,” says Daedalus. “Items are perishable, so that’s limiting, and they’re dirtier, too, because they have to be open-air. Leaves and flowers fall onto the bed of the truck, so the driver’s going to have to clean it. Best Buy has easy goods to load on and off, and their stores have docks. Drivers will say they can get four loads done in a day, but only two loads from a nursery. They’ll have to charge double to make up the difference.”

Although AmericanHort hasn’t directly dealt with the trucking recession, it is fielding concerns from affiliates about rising shipping costs and other issues related to the downturn. Complicating matters for greenhouse and nursery businesses is the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate set forth by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).

Per the two-year-old directive, motor carriers placed ELDs in their trucks over outmoded automatic on-board recording devices, ideally improving efficiency and supplanting paper logs drivers used to record data. Though the new technology is designed to hold drivers and their companies accountable to crucial hours-of-service regulations, the mandate, combined with higher freight volumes to constrain truck capacity, has resulted in rate hikes for the acutely seasonal green product business.

AmericanHort hosted seminars to guide the industry through new regulations, offering further information on governmental exemptions for plants and other agricultural commodities. According to FMCSA, hours-of-service regulations don’t apply to agricultural goods operating within a 150 air-mile radius. If, for instance, a nursery’s plants are to be delivered within that radius, drivers can mark their shipment as “exempt” from hours-of-service strictures.

“How the federal government defines agriculture in that exemption doesn’t include horticulture, but it doesn’t exclude it, either,” says Daedalus. “The exemption would help our nurseries, because when you’re filling those logs with the government, that’s a cost to the driver. An exemption could lower costs and make drivers more willing to ship our products.”

A way ahead

Smaller growers without trucks at their disposal — and that’s most of them industry-wide — can sign less-than-truckload (LTL) contracts for small loads or quantities of freight. Daedalus knows a few direct-to-consumer nursery owners who simply contract out to UPS to haul a few dozen boxes of goods to local buyers.

Roush of KSMTA says most truckers prefer pre-loaded trailers to the more complicated process of lugging racks of plants. Although there’s some debate around the severity of the driver shortage, there’s little contention about the high average age of the existing workforce.

As stated by American Trucking Associations (ATA) in a July 2019 report, the average driver age in the for-hire truckload industry is 46. Other trucking sectors — like LTL or private carriers — have an even higher average age. Additionally, the industry has historically struggled with diversity — just 6.6% of truckers in 2018 were women.

Bob Costello, chief economist at ATA, says driver scarcity is more prevalent in the truckload freight space, where demand for shipping services remains relatively steady.

“We aren’t attracting new drivers fast enough to keep up with increases in demand,” says Costello. “This dynamic led to significant pay increases in 2018 and early 2019 — pay increases that have held fast so far, but that trend has stalled in the latter parts of this year."

Roush points to high driver turnover as well as the cost of hiring new candidates — about $11,000 in advertising, training and loss of productivity until a new driver hits the road. Even in the midst of a recession, properly credentialed drivers comfortable with the trucker lifestyle can find work, and that’s where nurseries must take advantage.

“Growers just need to have a strategy on how they will procure their capacity and make sure they have enough capacity to get through the busy season,” Roush says.

Doug Guth is a freelance writer based in Cleveland.

The idea of using GPS to find our way from A to B is still not very old. Most of us have had some interesting experiences with those early models, such as when my machine proudly declared that I was at my destination when I was actually sitting in the middle of six lanes of north Atlanta traffic. Fortunately, modern GPS is more accurate and can access real-time information about road restrictions, roadwork, accidents and other hazards. For most of us, these issues are inconvenient but to a trucking business, detours cost money and disgruntled customers.

Transporting live nursery material involves not just the best route for drivers, but the best times for plants to arrive when the retail operations can accept them. For decades, this task was done with pen and paper, which involved many hours of planning.

For Weatherford Farms in Stafford, Texas, co-owner Bridget Weatherford says the delivery schedules were previously set manually, and during busy holiday times, things got hectic — fully laden trucks had as many as 20 stops to make in the Houston area. Those days of manual planning came to an end when the grower switched to Paragon Software Systems, a routing and scheduling software program.

“Before we went to Paragon’s system, drivers complained about arriving at a site only to find another driver already there,” Weatherford says.

This is what truck route optimization is all about. It is a computer program that takes the real-time data for where and when delays are likely along a driver’s entire route, as well as the best truck route for each vehicle to take for deliveries. With this data input to the computer, the program delivers the route in minutes, not days. Some people talk about the route optimization programs as being the first major improvement to the trucking industry in many years.

Florida-based Costa Farms has several locations around the country where they grow tropical plants for the consumer market. The grower uses software from CACI Truckstops, helping them find routes for their trucks, which in the high season can number more than 200 trucks on the road at a time. Ryan MacFarland, Costa Farms’ vice president of supply chain management, says the optimization program found routes for all the trucks for three days in under 90 minutes.

Truck route optimization is typically a modular system that is installed on the site computer and designs routes that include all delivery points along with an assigned delivery time. The scheduling manager plugs in all the variable times and locations and gets a route that includes all those points, in minutes not hours. These routes can be printed for the driver or delivered via an app on their phone.

Adam Rowe, technology writer for Tech.co comments that KeepTruckin, another fleet management software company, “offers both hardware units and the software to go with them, including a manager dashboard and driver mobile app. KeepTruckin uses an open API for their software, ensuring that any third-party routing service can be integrated with the KeepTruckin dashboard.”

Willy Maurer, Costa Farms’ director of logistics, added that both software and updated driver information regarding problems is updated on the office computer and the driver’s module is updated before the next trip.

The nursery industry relies on having a great relationship with customers, which is tested at times when deliveries arrive at an unscheduled time and when staff cannot reasonably accept them. An irate customer relays their issues to the driver, which in turn makes that driver’s job satisfaction plummet. Truck route optimization allows wholesale operations to plug in multiple destinations along with preferred time for acceptance which, when met, is great for customer relations and increases the job satisfaction of the driver. This last point is important in an industry where turnover of drivers is high. According to the National Private Truck Council, driver retention is an important issue, so having routes that create happy customers and drivers that return home at a reasonable time is a benefit to everyone. Fewer miles travelled also makes your business more environmentally friendly.

Additionally, Pierre Netty at CACI Truckstops says that although most trucks are full of plants for each run, with traditional routing this can be as low as 60%, which wastes space. Often with the optimization, not only will the trucks arrive at the locations on time, but they can also make more stops which means the trucks can carry more plants per trip. Truckstops estimate that with proper routing, the fill rate rises from 65% to 95%.

Good software is carefully built to include industry best practices to ensure that drivers take sufficient breaks from the road and by January 2020, the ELD government mandate (Electronic Logging Device) will make sure that they do.

“An ELD is a device that automatically records certain data elements at a set interval. These elements include date, location, time, engine hours and vehicle miles, as well as identification information for the driver, vehicle, authenticated user and motor carrier,” Rowe explains.

All optimization programs should already be linking directly to the ELD.

With a cyclical business like the green industry, many companies opt to hire the trucks and lease them by the day. The route that these trucks take and how long the lease lasts is a major investment each year. Having the trucks cover the distance efficiently and with fewer miles has a big impact on the bottom line of the business. Fortunately, most of the modern fleet trucks already have compatible systems so that your optimization program of choice will interface correctly.

Regarding the future of truck optimization programs, look for your ordering programs to be integrated with the truck optimization programs, says William Salter, managing director at Paragon Software Systems. This enables the trucks to be filled in the correct sequence for delivery without exceeding the weight limits. So, no more last-minute adjustments that delay the start of the trucks’ route.

For more: Paragon Software Systems, www.paragonrouting.com; CACI Truckstops, www.truckstopsrouting.com