Current Labor Challenges and Opportunities in Nursery Crops Production

The US nursery industry faces a labor deficit. Despite current high levels of employment generally in the United States (80%) for prime age workers (age 25–54), nurseries responded they were prevented from hiring new workers due to high wages and unqualified workers. Declining US birth rates may not alleviate the problem in the next decades. Use of the H2-A visa program has increased tremendously for the green industry in the past decade to help stop-gap the crisis, but that strategy is not without its limitations to provide housing, training, and pay higher worker wages compared with local seasonal help. Automation adoption by nursery operations may help retain current workers and attract new employees. Percent of all tasks automated has increased ∼15% over a 15-year period ending in 2021, but no one task was automated more than 57% among survey respondents in a 2021 national labor survey compared with 52% in the mid-2000s. Nursery crops are a niche market for automation, robotics, or engineering companies to invest research and development capital, especially when operating environments are neither uniform nor protected from weather extremes. Federal funding for automation in specialty crops has been a focus of increased funding by both the US Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation, which provides a path for innovators to produce automation and technology that might help nursery crops fill the need to attract workers while also retaining current employees.