Addressing labour challenges and highlighting emerging technologies

The SmartHort campaign is designed to find solutions for the lack of affordable, quality labour for UK horticulture, by helping growers improve their labour management practices and identifying new technologies.

By introducing management techniques such as Lean, Champion and Continuous Improvement, you can make a difference to your business, regardless of its shape or size. They can apply throughout your production system - from picking to packing - and play an important role in helping to recruit, retain and motivate staff.

Our Skills Programme includes courses and workshops designed to help you develop and retain your current staff, and improve recruitment.

According to our 2017 survey, over 84 per cent of horticultural growers plan to invest in automation or robotics to help off-set labour challenges.

One of SmartHort’s main missions is identifying and assessing the value of smart technologies, both in the UK and overseas. These technologies could directly off-set labour by automating repetitive tasks, or bring big data to the production system to help improve productivity or reduce yield loss.