ASHS 2025 Conference

LEAP is an acronym for investigating the complex nursery specialty crops production system to identify both the individual and interactive effects of Labor, Efficiency, Automation, and Production on current and future nursery industry sustainability. This system is currently experiencing a crisis of labor availability. Our goal is to develop new automation and through better understanding of diffusion of innovation stimulate adoption of existing technologies to study their effects on the remaining system components, including consumer preference at the retail level and the effect of labor retention and re-allocation as a buffer against ongoing labor scarcity. This dynamic approach is necessary, given the complex nature of the nursery specialty crops system that encompasses culturally diverse owner-producer-employee relationships in terms of labor, with high needs for many physically demanding tasks, biological systems, machines, technology, energy, and natural inputs, i.e., water and other resource, all overlaid by preferences and demands of widely different consumer groups. To prevent that labor availability crisis from becoming catastrophic, LEAP and its AB recruited experts at the federal and state level in both plant and social sciences, economics, mechanical engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence to create five powerful, culturally and disciplinarily diverse teams with expertise in Production and Robotics Engineering (PE), Socioeconomics (SE), Behavioral Adoption (BA), Consumer Preference (CP), and Extension and Science Communication (EX). These teams will work collaboratively with the advisory board, stakeholders, producers, county and regional Extension staff, and allied industries to accelerate the diffusion and impact of automation adoption through nurseries and their workers to illustrate technology’s inherent effect on output, labor efficiency and productivity, revenue, rural economics, and nursery sustainability.