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Great Lakes Expo turns techy

The Great Lakes specialty crop industry is working to attract innovations from the West Coast and abroad to reduce the need for labor.

Greg Bird with the Michigan Vegetable Council tells Brownfield technology needs to be tailored to the region’s growing conditions to replace hand labor and be adopted by farms.

“Our soils are a little different, our row beds are a little different, so get here and figure out how those items will work here on our muck soils,” he says. “Our muck soils—you don’t have those out West and they’re different than the Florida so we need that equipment here because the adverse effect wage rate that we use for a good chunk of our workforce is just not sustainable.”

Bird says Michigan is a major supplier of fresh produce across the Midwest but is losing acreage as growers cut back on labor costs.

“There’s the need for the number of acres that we have, we kind of are a huge exporter out of the Midwest region, but if we don’t grow what we have now, then we have to bring in more from out of this region and that’s just a bad situation,” he explains.

But, he says choosing between million-dollar equipment and using the H-2A guest worker program can be cost-prohibitive without government intervention.

Brownfield interviewed Bird as part of this week’s Great Lakes Fruit, Vegetable & Farm Market Expo in Grand Rapids.