Q&A with Hussam Haroun

Photos courtesy of Vineland Research
& Innovation Centre

Greenhouse Management: We’re now two years into the COVID-19 era of agriculture. Have you experienced firsthand an increase in grower interest around automation technologies in the last couple years?

Hussam Haroun: Automation is still an emerging technology in the greenhouse sector. But to answer your question more directly, yes, we have witnessed an increase in grower appetite and attention to automation solutions. Back in February and March of last year, Vineland started producing what we call technology maps, which are industry technology roadmaps that really focus on specific crop organizations.

GM: Those automation “roadmaps,” as you’ve described them, how can those help advance automation technology adoption, thus making the technology more affordable and easier to obtain for growers?

HH: Because of COVID, what the Ontario government did is, they asked us, can we survey, can we do a roadmap, and help those growers assess the various technologies (sensors, cameras, data loggers, etc.) better? They can expedite or improve automation or, basically, help us realize automation opportunities earlier than some of the more advanced cases that require more time to be developed. So, what we've done at Vineland, what you'll see is we've actually laid out a really excellent way forward that kind of looks out over a period of 10 years, and what that effort found is that there might have to be additional investment required. And then we went back and looked at the data again and tried to figure out, what can growers deploy today with the least amount of investment, and what can they deploy today also with a bit higher investment? What can they deploy that will help their businesses grow long-term? That’s a focus at Vineland today.

GM: We’ve chronicled growers investing in transplanting and sticking robots, irrigation automation, climate automation, and plant movers and conveyors over the years, but what do you think is the next major process that automation moves into that will make growers go, ”Wow, I need that in my greenhouse?”

HH: We’ve seen a lot of interest at the grower level in automating harvesting — can you develop an autonomous harvesting solution? Because that’s such a labor-intensive activity for the grow crews. But over the last two years, we’ve really be inundated with even more interest in how we as growers can learn to be more efficient, and more successful at growing plants, from all this data that we’re collecting with cameras and sensors and climate control systems. And maybe we’re not quite all the way there yet as an industry, right? But the whole idea is to prepare for that push. Now we think the push for more intelligent systems or efficient artificial intelligence to make these systems smarter, to make the greenhouse smarter, is sort of now becoming a major push in parallel to the effort to advance the adoption of automation. You start making various areas around the greenhouse smarter, implementing interconnected systems solutions, and then as automation develops, it becomes more possible.

Follow the latest research advancements at Vineland here: bit.ly/VinelandAutomation