At Mucci Farms, headquartered in the Windsor area on the shores of Lake Erie, growing vegetables is a remarkably high-tech operation. In the greenhouse, which is larger than 200 football fields, crews of pickers harvest while robots sort and package red, yellow and orange bell peppers that are ripened using irrigation and temperature systems controlled by artificial intelligence. The growing industry has for many years experienced a shortage of low-skilled farm labour, but with more Canadian food producers transitioning to high-tech methods, the sector is also seeing a critical shortage of skilled labour.
“There’s this outdated perception of farming as something old-fashioned,” said Bert Mucci, chief executive officer of Mucci Farms and son of one of the two Italian brothers who started the company in the 1960s when they moved to Kingsville, Ont., southeast of Windsor. “When we were kids, everything was done manually by hand,” Mr.
Mucci said. “These days, so much of what we do can be controlled by an app on my phone.” With its plentiful sunshine, rich soil and warmer temperatures, Southwestern Ontario’s Essex County, situated around Windsor, is the location of North America’s most concentrated greenhouse sector: Around 130 growers pump out more than 500,000 tonnes of produce annually.
Farmers can boost yields with the precision agriculture of greenhouses, which produce around 8.5 times more vegetables per area of land compared to field production. And Canada.
