Rob Lando
Over the past few years, an increasing number of greenhouse operations of all sizes have turned to the Department of Labor’s H-2A program as a means of sourcing a reliable number of seasonal workers. While this reliability no doubt offers a huge sigh of relief, the rising price tag presents its own set of challenges.
Whether you use the H-2A program or rely on local recruitment, the cost of paying your employees in a competitive labor market is only going to rise. So, you might think investing in automation is your best solution. That may be true, but it also takes careful planning and focus, according to Rob Lando, CEO of Oberlin, OH-based AgriNomix, North America’s largest supplier of automation to nursery and greenhouse growers. More importantly, it starts with thinking differently about how you deploy your labor, and even how you operate as a business owner.
During the 2021 GROW Executive Summit, Lando said greenhouse owners can no longer afford to walk past the inefficiencies they may see.
“When you were paying $10 an hour, a couple of extra people on a production line or intermittent downtime was only aggravating,” Lando said. “Now, it’s a threat to the enterprise and forces you to focus on every stage of the workflow process to ensure efficiency.”
With labor costs being (by far) a grower’s largest controllable input cost, it’s important to consider labor minimization and efficiency at every step in facility design, even if it means wider aisles or looking at autonomous vehicles.
“We should be taking into consideration all product touches — not just production in the greenhouse,” Lando said. “Shipping methods are paramount, and opportunities to apply automated grading to plants to ensure benchrun shipping will be widespread in the decades to come.”
We should also care a lot more about plant density and profitable yield per square foot within the growing area, Lando said. Your main aisles may grow in size for internal transportation, but within the houses and growing beds, aisles will get smaller to grow more per square foot.
Some growers will take this opportunity and make great investments that will benefit them for generations to come. Those who don’t, will find the low-cost producers setting the market price and those who are substantially behind won’t be profitable enough.”
With middle management being one of our industry’s biggest challenges, monitoring productivity and process work will probably become more important.
“With the disappearance of the owner from the potting barn, system failure monitoring and production variances will need to be reported up the chain so that issue can be addressed before it’s too late,” Lando said. “Or, simply put, you need to be spending more time in the barn.” These variances in production should be tracked down to the worker and processes for measuring production should be recorded.
“Once you can measure, you can incentivize, or at least increase awareness,” Lando said. “The seasonal nature of our industry makes it very difficult to achieve iterative improvement. So much in the way of best practices can be lost from season to season. Building standard operating procedures can help.”
So how should growers look at return on investment (ROI)? Ask Lando, and he says the discussion should start by looking overseas.
Europeans look at much longer ROI windows, as much as eight years in some cases, which makes sense,” Lando said. “If you really believe that your operation will be in business 10 to 15 years from now, and if you have access to capital and are careful about your investment decisions, why wouldn’t you consider all solid investments in the long term? The key is to do the due diligence, make truly informed decisions and then put an appropriate amount of time and energy into making sure the investment is successful.”
