Flowerwood Nursery: Pioneering production

For more than 70 years, Flowerwood Nursery has stayed ahead of the curve. The nursery was one of the first to embrace the use of robotics to improve efficiency and ease labor issues. It was one of the test sites for Harvest Automation’s wheeled HV-100, or “Harvey.” The knee-high robots space and group pots as needed, which is one of a nursery’s highest concentrations of labor use.

Flowerwood also increased efficiency by streamlining its truck loading process.

Before, workers would canvass the facility pulling plants for a particular truckload, and the plants would be staged on the ground. Workers had to squat down or bend over to tag and bar-code the plants and inspect them for quality.

“What this entailed was you’d look and you’d be short a plant or two, so the pickers for the load would have to go back in the field,” says CEO Ellis Ollinger. Flowerwood fixed this by setting up a “dock supermarket.” The nursery was divided into five sections. Each section has a manager that takes a rack into the section and bulk pulls what will be needed for the next day’s shipments. Everything on the rack is inspected for quality before it is brought to the dock supermarket.

Once the shelves are stocked, the pickers shop the supermarket for the items on their list. The market is organized like a library’s card catalog, which helps the pickers prepare shipments.

“We can hire somebody at 8 a.m. that can start picking racks at 10 a.m. that same morning,” Ollinger says.

For more: www.flowerwood.com