LOLA

The Landscape Ontario Labour Assessment project (LOLA) is funded by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs as part of their Agri-Food Prevention and Control Innovation program. The project has two phases. The goal for the first phase of this project was to identify technologies and management resources that could mitigate labour challenges with the co-benefit of reducing risk of COVID-19 exposure. The research team identified several objectives that could be of value to farms:

  1. A searchable online resource of available technologies and labour management tools (the LOLA Sourcebook).
  2. An employee’s survey identifying COVID-19 risk areas and opportunities for employers to address employee concerns in both English and Spanish (the LOLA Worker’s Survey).
  3. An assessment tool where nurseries can benchmark their current production and labour efficiencies, identify their labour-intensive activities, and investigate resources that may lead to improvements in productivity (the LOLA Nursery Assessment). Aggregation of this data by the LOLA team will allow for an industry-wide benchmarking, against which individual farms can compare their own data.
  4. A webinar series to highlight different methodologies for addressing labour as well as leading edge technologies (https://www.youtube.com/c/landscapeontario/videos).
  5. A review of available ornamental horticulture training resources for seasonal employees.

The information gathered through the use of resources and the LOLA Nursery Assessment will be used to develop the second phase of the LOLA project – where we will strive to further your labour efficiency and productivity improvement journey.

The LOLA research team includes Dr. Jeanine West (PhytoServ) as project lead, along with her stellar counterparts: Dr. Ann Huber (Soil Resource Group), Jennifer Llewellyn (OMAFRA), and Christoph Kessel (OMAFRA (retired), Certified Crop Advisor).

For technical support with LOLA, see our Help page.