Automate your inventory

Maintaining an accurate and up to date inventory is critical for nursery operations, production planning, sales management and logistics. Unlike the climate-controlled environment in a warehouse, the outdoor environment found in a nursery makes the inventory process even more challenging. Manual inventory counting in outdoor nursery environments is labor-intensive, time consuming and often prone to inaccuracies.

Supported through two rounds of funding from the Horticulture Research Institute (HRI), a collaborative team from academia and industry has been investigating the use of RFID technologies to improve inventory management in nursery production systems. The vision is to identify RFID tags that will work in outdoor environments and evaluate the ability to read tags using either a handheld reader or reader attached to a drone. A handheld reader would be useful for small growers, large growers that need a quick scan of a small block, or in circumstances where a drone cannot be flown (e.g. inside a short hoop house). A drone-based reader would likely be the most efficient way to count large blocks of plants and possibly reduce labor costs. The team has considered using a drone for this purpose since 2012 but it took years for the reader and antenna technology to become compact and light enough to make the vision a reality.

What RFID can do

RFID systems offer several advantages over traditional barcodes and QR codes because a perfectly clean tag (heavy dirt and mud can impede reading), close proximity or line-of-sight scanning are not required. There are significant issues (e.g. water and metal) that can impact RFID signals, some of which are common in an outdoor nursery but not in a warehouse. The microchip in RFID tags contains space for several types of memory (reserved; tag identifier; electronic product code; user). An RFID tag can be used in many ways by a nursery. For example, the tag itself may carry only your product code that would be linked to a larger production database (potting date; finish date; application dates for fertilizer and chemicals; pruning dates; etc.). Some nurseries may wish to simply use RFID to provide localized information about a block of plants which could help with tracking of activities (e.g. spraying, fertilizing) within the block. In addition to inventory tracking, RFID systems may also support improved traceability, operational efficiency and real-time production monitoring within nursery operations.

Our vision for an RFID tag begins when a crop is potted. One option is to use an in-line adhesive tag applicator to place the RFID tag on the container at potting or to use pots with the RFID antenna and microchip already embedded in the wall of the container. As the containers exit the potting line a small antenna verifies the plant count. Once located in a production bed, as plants are removed for sales or shrink, inventory can be immediately updated using a handheld reader in the field. As plants are being loaded on a truck for shipping, a portal equipped with an antenna array at the loading point can effortlessly inventory plants. The same RFID tag used during production can continue to be used by the retailer for their purposes. Upon receipt of the product the retailer can simply encode the tag or use the existing tag ID to link to an item in their database.

Let’s quickly give an overview of our research.

First a clarification in terminology: We are using passive UHF RFID inlays. The inlays consist of a microchip on which information is encoded connected to an unpowered antenna. The RFID reader (whether drone-mounted or handheld) has a powered antenna and various ways of storing and/or transferring data read from the RFID tags. The RFID tag’s antenna becomes powered by the signal from the RFID reader antenna and transmits the data to the reader. It is important to keep in mind that two different antenna types make up our system: the passive RFID inlay antenna and the powered RFID reader antenna.

Early RFID evaluation trials (2022)

The first step was for the academic collaborators to partner with two leading companies in the manufacture of RFID tags. Avery Dennison, a global leader in RFID, originally selected four antenna/microchip RFID inlays for the project. The RFID inlays were then transformed into tags by William Frick & Company. Experiments started in February 2022 and continuing with bi-monthly tag counts through December, were conducted at R.A. Dudley Nurseries in Thomson, Georgia. Although the initial results were less favorable than expected, the trials provided valuable insights into tag performance under outdoor nursery conditions. That turned out to be an incredibly important year for the refinement of tags and the reader on the drone. Results from the drone-based reader system indicated that reader power output power had a greater influence on tag detection performance than reader or inlay antenna configuration alone.

2025-2026 experiments

Based on the valuable lessons learned from earlier experiments, the team decided to evaluate three types of inlay antenna used in five types of tags (loop lock, pot stake, rim stake, adhesive label just under the rim, adhesive label mid-way down the outside of a container wall). A total of 11,200 RFID tags were deployed across four different plant types using 200 replications per treatment combination. These experiments are also being conducted at R.A. Dudley Nurseries. For this experiment the RFID inlays were supplied by Avery Dennison and then converted to horticulture tags by SATO America. RFID tag counts started in December 2025 and will continue bi-monthly through October 2026. Tags are read using two different Zebra handheld readers (RFD8500; RFD40) and a custom-designed reader attached to a small drone. During this phase of the project, Dr. Maja developed a compact and lightweight drone-mounted RFID payload system (0.6 lbs), which resulted in improved tag detection performance during aerial scanning operations.

Although the study is still ongoing, preliminary results indicate strong potential for RFID technologies to improve nursery inventory automation and operational efficiency. Consistent with earlier findings reported by Dr. Fernandez in 2015 at J. Frank Schmidt & Co., container substrate interference significantly reduces signal performance when RFID tags were positioned midway along the container wall. Stay tuned for more updates on the use of RFID tags to help automate the inventory process at nurseries.

Dr. James Robbins, Ornamental Hort Solutions; Dr. Joe Mari Maja, Senior Researcher and Director for the Center of Applied Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Agriculture, South Carolina State Univ.; Dr. Tom Fernandez, Dept. of Horticulture, Michigan State Univ.; Gary Stegall, Technical Sales Specialist, Avery Dennison; Dr. Van Patiluna, Research Assistant, South Carolina State Univ.

The academic team would like to express our sincere thanks to R.A. Dudley Nurseries (Bennett Dudley), Avery Dennison (Renee Rhodes, Shane Hutton, DJ Lee), SATO America (Brad Shipman, Amanda Schaffer, Chris Brooks, Chris Jones), William Frick and Co. (Brent Howell), Michigan State University (Henry Gonzalez, graduate student), Profile Growing Solutions (Dr. Jim Owen), Virginia Tech (Dr. Matt Chappell) and Clemson University (Jannette Quino) for key assistance in this research. Sincere thanks also to HRI for critical funding.