2014 was a good year for many growers but finding enough workers to do plant spacing has become harder than ever in the Nursery and Greenhouse industry. Harvest Automation HV-‐100 robots can eliminate this concern while delivering a return on investment in under a year. Higher wages and benefits are not enough to entice laborers in sufficient numbers to do this task. HR teams have been pushed to the limit to find workers, and reports indicate that once workers get a taste of moving plants for a week, many don’t bother to show up the following Monday. Spacing plants is the most physically demanding task in a Nursery or Greenhouse, and it is arguably the most critical. Workers who can move plants at a rate of hundreds of pots per hour for short periods will quickly slow to a fraction of that as the day wears on.
Repeatedly bending and picking up a plant that weighs up to 25 pounds for 8 hours a day under the hot sun not only tires a person, but can lead to debilitating back injuries, lost work days and expensive workers compensation claims. But the work must get done, otherwise plant quality and customer satisfaction will suffer. The Harvest Automation HV- 100 robots can eliminate these concerns. Customers that have used the HV-‐100 to move plants have not only witnessed the production efficiency but have also experienced a reduction in plant moving related injuries and an associated savings in worker’s compensation insurance premiums, along with the added benefit of a happier, healthier workforce leading to fewer lost work days and fewer instances of workers not showing up for work.
Metrolina Greenhouses in Huntersville, NC purchased robots in 2013 expecting that they would reduce their labor costs. The HV-‐ 100’s lived up to that promise, but they paid additional dividends in the form of fewer lost work days, fewer spacing related injuries and zero workers compensation claims. In effect the robots paid for themselves in under a year and eliminated some big headaches for the Metrolina team. “The robots are a morale booster because the workers dislike the spacing job, and now they don’t have to get stuck on that job for a long period of time,” says Safety Director Kerry Krivanek. “In a prior year we’d experienced three spacing related injuries within the first two weeks, this year we had zero.”
The HV-‐100 plant moving robots allow growers to move plants night and day, as long as there is work to be done. Harvest Automation robots are meant for year-‐ round use, with capabilities for spacing plants in the Spring, consolidating (re-‐spacing) picked over fields from Summer into Fall and collecting plants to can-‐tight at the end of the growing season for Winter protection. For operations large and small the HV-‐100 makes sense for any Nursery or Greenhouse. Getting quality work done when it’s needed most.
For more information about Metrolina Greenhouses please visitwww.metrolinagreenhouses.com/.
Contact Harvest Automation sales to arrange an on-‐site demo or to discuss our flexible financing, leasing and rental programs; please call (978) 528-‐4250 or email sales@harvestai.com.
For more information about Harvest Automation and the HV-‐100, please visit www.harvestai.com.