During early commercialization of the willow coppice system as an agricultural crop in Sweden, funding agencies made the decision to put the far majority of the development costs for harvest machines on the account of commercial machine developers. This resulted in a situation in the early 1990s where many willow stands needed to be harvested before self-thinning would lead to an irreversible mortality among willow stools and long-term production losses, while harvest machines still had to be developed and assembled. This is one of the reasons for the early commercial yields to be disappointingly low (see section 4.7).

Fortunately, a variety of willow harvest machines are on the market now, and recent technical improvements greatly enhance harvesting speed while lowering the costs for willow harvesting. In Sweden, willow is usually harvested during the winter, when the soil is able to carry heavy machinery and when willow chips can be transported to district heating plants for direct use, without long-term storage (Figure 9).

However, mild and wet winters may prohibit the use of heavy harvesters, which means that either lighter equipment has to be developed or that the harvest season has to be extended. Expanding the harvesting season for willow biomass crops would expand the time period over which it can be a part of the fuel supply and increase the number of acres that a single harvesting machine could cover in a single year. This would likely increase the demand for willow and certainly reduce harvesting costs, because capital expenditures for a harvester would be spread across more tons of biomass. Nordh [81] investigated the possibility to extend the harvest season, focusing on the re-growth capacity of willow coppice after harvesting, and found that willow (clone Tora) could be harvested from autumn, prior to the onset of dormancy, until late spring, when bud burst already had commenced. Early and late harvest did not increase plant mortality, but it could result in a slight production decrease in the consecutive season.

Apart from direct chipping (Figure 9), willow biomass can be baled (Figure 10) and fragmented in a later stage, possibly after storage, which will decrease moisture content of the willow biomass.

To harvest willow rods for conventional planting by means of a machine, equipment has been developed which can harvest entire one-year old shoots. Mature stands can also be harvested by means of a whole-shoot harvester (Figure 11) which may carry its load to the headland for further transportation. Special equipment has been developed to make bundles from a pile of whole shoots, thereby improving further transportation logistics. As willow is a low-density fuel, willow should preferably be cultivated in the proximity of the consumer, to decrease transportation distances and costs.