Florida is a national leader for producing plants such as tropical, foliage and house plants.
The Sunshine State's nursery, greenhouse, landscape and garden industry generates more than $30 billion in output sales and provides more than 266,000 jobs statewide, according to a 2022 study by the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association and Farm Credit of Central Florida.
But the industry is going through a labor shortage due to multiple factors, including immigration policies, recent hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, scientists are hoping to replace outdated and tedious systems to make production smoother and keep nursery growers in business longer.
Robots instead of people may soon be potting, fertilizing and watering plants, along with spraying weed and insect killers, thanks to a federal grant that aims to tackle the industry's labor challenges.
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Researchers with the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences are studying whether nursery owners, who grow ornamental plants, trees and shrubs, could boost profits if certain tasks are automated.
The researchers are using $1 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to gather economic data and create a decision-making tool.
The goal, said UF associate professor Chris Marble, is to help nurseries become more sustainable amid labor shortages by easing tedious tasks such as inventory.
"People are still going out there and counting plants in a lot of cases," said Marble, "and that's extremely time-consuming. So, if we were to be able to develop an automated form of inventory management, growers can count how many plants they have at what size and what species and everything. That will be very beneficial."
Florida's agriculture industry has used automation to help with things such as watering crops and spraying pesticides, but nurseries have been slower to adopt technology.
Marble said it’s more complicated for nursery growers since they could be responsible for many varieties of plants, flowers and trees instead of a single crop.
"There's automation in blueberries, citrus, a bunch of different key crops that we grow in Florida," Marble said. "In nursery production, it's very different, and it can be a lot more challenging because one grower might have 500 different plants that they're producing.”
He added that not every owner may be open to new strategies.
“We also have social scientists on there, too, so getting people's thoughts and why they haven't implemented different forms of automation … that's a big part of it as well,” Marble said.
The research is important for Florida’s nursery industry, he said.
“To have this type of information, to make informed decisions … I think that's the biggest thing, probably because … there's a big knowledge gap in terms of all the different things that are available, how to make improvements and basically be able to do that economic type of analysis so that they have better decisions,” said Marble.
The study is part of a five-year project led by North Carolina State University. Nurseries in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon are participating.
