University of Tennessee Extension and UT AgResearch scientists have been awarded part of a nearly $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study ways to use automation and robotics to address the labor shortage in the nursery crops industry.
Growing plants in a nursery is highly dependent on manual labor, making this industry particularly prone to worker shortages. An increasingly scarce workforce is limiting production, economic development and prosperity in the rural communities where nurseries are predominantly located.