The effect of technology on the role of

HRM in the horticulture sector

BMGT221
Paige Hammond, 1134524
Technological advancement affects the ways that jobs are done in all industry sectors, but
increasing advancements are greatly affecting the horticulture sector and the amount of
people that a company needs to employ. The industry is based around the growing of plants
and selling them to consumers and is generally based around needing a reasonable number
of employees to maintain the plants. This essay will be outlining the possibility of future
technological advancements in the industry and how they affect the future roles and
functions of human resource management for the sector.

Technological advancements in the horticulture sector means that in some parts of

the supply chain there will be less need for humans as a resource to do the activity, an
example of this would be automatic seeding machines. Currently, most horticultural
production systems use people to seed plants, which takes a large amount of time but also
enables the person to ensure that the right amount of seed is going into each tray and that
the right plant is being planted at the right quantities or in the right varieties. Advancements
of technology in this particular sector means that there may be less need to people in the
seeding and labelling area of production as these are jobs that a machine could do.
However, a machine may not be able to transplant plants as it is a job that has to be done
carefully to ensure that the roots of the plant stay intact. In an industry like horticulture,
technological advancements can only do so much, due to plants being very sensitive to
changes in their environment and most commonly the easiest way to manage this is with
people as they are more able to take the variables that come with plants and adapt the
situation to best suit the plant. Advancement of technology means that the sector could
have less staff doing jobs such as seeding and transplanting, which may make the supply
chain more efficient, however there will still be a need for human employees to do quality
checking and to ensure that the machinery is working as planned and seeding/transplanting
the correct amount of plants into each pot. It has been shown that the use of technology
does work very well in some areas of horticulture, such as using LED lights to ensure that
plants get a consistent amount of light each day, which then allows for an increased crop
due to the plant having ideal growing conditions [ CITATION Fil18 \l 5129 ].

The advancement of technology will mean that although there is a need for less
employees, the employees that work with the technology will need to be trained on how to
use and maintain the technology. Although there will be less people doing manual labour,
there may be a need for the management of the organisation to hire employees or train
current employees to use the technology, this would involve monitoring the technology
throughout the day to ensure that nothing is going wrong in day to day running of the
technology and if there are issues that need to be fixed (such as the machine not filling pots
with the right amount of soil). Advancing technology could both increase the production as
well as decrease the production. If we are considering advanced technology for transplanting
cuttings of plants, it has proven to be quite effective in the Netherlands [ CITATION AHD19 \l
5129 ], but there is the potential for error when it comes to selecting the correct cuttings to
be transplanted, as in the Netherlands, the machine picks up the plants and then transplants
them into the matter, whereas when this process is done by a human, the human can check
each cutting for issues such as disease or being the wrong variety before they transplant the
cutting. That is a disadvantage of technology, as machinery can not check for undesired
characteristics of a plant, and the company would then need to employ someone to grade
the cuttings before they go for transplanting.

Technology is an advantage to the horticulture sector in that it allows for the

business to be running 24 hours a day with staff only onsite for 12 of those 24 hours due to
the technology allowing there to be water sensors and light emitters that turn on
automatically or can be turned on remotely. However, even with technology and the
advancements that it is making very quickly, the horticulture sector will always need human
resource management because there will always be a need for human resources. A large
amount of activities in the sector simply cannot be done purely by technology, although
technology will help greatly it is simply not an industry that can be done without large
amounts of human resources. Because of this the future functions and roles of human
resource management in the horticultural sector will stay very similar, but companies may
need to reassure their employees that although technology is advancing, there will always
be a need for humans to do the majority of the work and technology will simply be there to
assist. An example of this is handheld computers that are used on some nurseries, these
allow staff members to all have access to all the information about a floor of plants, without
having to go back to the office and check the system before they adjust the fertiliser or
watering amounts. This also means that any staff member, whether they are on the floor or
in the office, is able to see what is happening with the plants in each area of the nursery.

Advancements in Technology is never going to remove the need for human resources
and human resource management in the horticulture sector, as the activities involved in
producing horticultural products are too variable and have too many instabilities to be fully
managed by technology. Technology will help the industry but the way human resources are
managed will need to be adapted to work with the advancing technology.

References
AHDB. (2019, November 25). Automation and Robotics in Dutch Horticultural Nurseries. Retrieved
from Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board:
https://ahdb.org.uk/news/automation-and-robotics-in-6-dutch-horticultural-nurseries

Fillipos Bantis, S. S. (2018). Current status and recent achievements in the field of horticulture with
the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Scientia Horticulturae, 235, 437-451.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2018.02.058