Who would have thought robots would be cropping flowers in 2022?
The technological advances have been propelled forward by Brexit and the ever increasing shortage of people available to harvest vegetable and flower crops in England.
Leading the research and development; the team at Lincoln University have proposed due to the cost of the robots there could be a ‘rent a robot’ system to enable the cost to be more affordable to a wider number of farmers.
At Evolve we source flowers from a number of flower farmers within a forty-mile radius of our hub in Pinchbeck, Spalding-South Lincolnshire.
One of our local British flower farmers is featured in this video; Ian from Collison and Sons. Evolve source over 300,000 stems pa from this forward-thinking flower farmer. Ian suggests that the type of flowers which are grown may depend on whether the product can be mechanically cropped as well as the products suitability for growing - we may see a reduced variety of products when this happens.
You can read all about Collison cut flowers here:
https://www.collisoncutflowers.co.uk/our-customers/