Hi,
does anyone have any statistics or forecasts numbers about the demand for more food production or organic produce // and how this ties to workforce demands to meet this growth?
Any stats or anecdotes would be helpful, thanks!
i have some links that I will post, just need to research my sources
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Would also be interested in this topic!
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I found this:
“A shortage of qualified labor is the primary concern in the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) industry to sustain rapid growth in greenhouse and indoor farm production that has occurred nationally. This problem is consistent across all the CEA job titles, from hourly manual labor to management positions.” Accelerating workforce development for the controlled environment agriculture industry - CORNELL UNIVERSITY
A brief Google Scholar search on “greenhouse labor shortage” revealed mostly automation promoting papers citing a labor shortage in this sector as a premise in their abstract. Just like the project application you found it is an unquoted premise. Have not found any actul research or dta on this.
“Agricultural operations are constantly becoming technology-driven mainly due to labor shortages, increase in labor cost, and trends in new and advanced technology applications.”
I think labor cost is the main driver for this, not really labor shortage. I mean c’mon, most of the work in greenhouses is low skill or repetitive so the required skills can be learned quickly.
This paper is citing the ratio of elderly (>65) farmers in Japan with a reference to [1]
[1] Yano Research Institute Ltd., “Current status and future prospects of
smart agriculture in 2016”, 2016 (in Japanese).
Which is in Japanese unfortunately.
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Same argumentation in
Tan, L., R. Haley, R. Wortman, Y. Ampatzidis, und M. Whiting. 2013. „An integrated cloud-based platform for labor monitoring and data analysis in precision agriculture“. S. 349–56 in 2013 IEEE 14th International Conference on Information Reuse Integration (IRI).
"Harvest labor has became a prevailing cost in cherry and other Specialty Crops industry. "
“The harvest labor has been frequently cited by growers as the prevailing cost in sweet cherry operations.”
But then there are no sources for this claim.
I know that these are cherries, something not (yet?) grown in Aquaponics, but I think we have a pattern here: High labor costs are postulated as a pro-automation rationale.
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