Examining the impact of greenhouse growth 

As Canada’s greenhouse sector expands rapidly, it’s become increasingly reliant on migrant labour to keep crops growing. This development has raised  questions about the conditions of migrant workers, as well as new agricultural technologies and their impact on labour and the environment. It’s a field ripe for research, as PhD student Olivia Doggett has discovered. 

Doggett, who earned a Master of Information degree and worked in the financial sector before returning to the Faculty of Information in 2020 to earn a PhD, already had an interest in human computer interaction and areas undergoing sociotechnical transitions. She had also worked as a community outreach coordinator with migrant organizations like Techfugees and the Canadian Council for Refugees. 

In reading investigative news reports about migrant workers in Leamington, Ontario, which is home to the largest greenhouse concentration in North America, Doggett realized that this new greenhouse phenomenon brought together many of her diverse research interests including migration, labour and sustainability. Her current research delves into the intersection of technology, labour exploitation, and the vital but undervalued migrant workforce in Canada’s expanding greenhouse sector. 

The first prong of Doggett’s research looks at the impact of technology on workers, particularly what Doggett calls the “surveillance and tracking technologies” prevalent in Leamington. Workers are often required to wear watches or use phones to log their work performance. After harvesting a row of tomatoes, for example, they must tap to input the volume of produce picked. This data then feeds into a larger labour management system, where performance is compared among workers.  

Doggett worked in collaboration with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to carry out a study, from 2021 to 2023, about these practices. “What we learned is that these technologies were typically used punitively and were intensifying the existing pace of work in ways that were harder both mentally and physically,” she said.  

Doggett points out that while many people are familiar with the labour-tracking technologies being used in Amazon warehouses, they don’t tend to associate them with agricultural technologies. “This seems like an intentional division that allows labour to continue to be devalued within farming,” she said. Farm workers are purposefully excluded from the design of these technologies because “ultimately they’re not wanted to be there,” she said. “They’re a stop-gap solution assuming that robots will eventually be able to do it all.” 

The second prong of Doggett’s work is “a multi-sited ethnography,” which is a research methodology that involves studying a community, phenomenon or object across multiple locations or settings. She followed workers from Canadian greenhouses back to their family and community-owned farms in Oaxaca and Veracruz in Mexico. Through this journey, she explored the rich knowledge and skills of migrant farm workers, many of whom are experienced farmers in their home countries.  She observed their traditional practices, including agroecological and permaculture practices and the building of agricultural infrastructure including for irrigation.  

While Doggett focuses on migration and labour, she emphasized how the environment often exists in competition with technology, as it presents a major reason why full automation in agriculture is not yet possible. Modern high-tech greenhouses, especially hydroponic ones that grow plants in water, have been adopted more and more as a food solution amidst climate change and drought. However, these facilities, despite requiring less water in theory, consume substantial electricity and have a complex environmental footprint of their own. 

Seeing the labourers at home on their own turf, Doggett was stuck by their resilience and savvy as well as the double standard they face. While they are required to have specific agricultural experience, once they arrive in Canada they’re designated as unskilled workers. Doggett sees this as another way to “intentionally devalue farmwork.  It’s very limiting given that many of these people have diverse capacities to help the Canadian agricultural economy yet they are forced to into manual repetitive roles and made permanently temporary.” 

Doggett says the workers’ traditional farming methods offer “an interesting alternative vision of what innovation is because rather than having something that’s shiny and new, people are literally working with what they have and what they can borrow to just make ends meet.” 

The third prong of Doggett’s research is an explicit intervention bringing together her Canadian and Mexican research: soil health workshops designed to provide migrant workers with agricultural knowledge and training. These experimental workshops, often held on workers’ days off and not typically offered in Canadian greenhouses, allow them to connect their embodied knowledge with what is officially known as “plant science.” The workers use basic tools like pH measurements and electrical conductivity sensors to learn about nutrient absorption and soil nourishment, knowledge that is directly applicable to their farms back home. 

This initiative aims to empower workers facing displacement due to automation as well as to support their aspirations for farming in their home countries. Doggett describes it as a knowledge gathering process to determine what workers want to learn and how they see themselves using this knowledge over the long term. 

Doggett’s work is particularly timely given the unflattering spotlight shone on Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program by a United Nations expert in 2023.  Special Rapporteur Tomoya Obokata described the situation as “breeding grounds for contemporary forms of slavery” in a report issued after a visit to Canada. 

As she moves towards completing her PhD, Doggett is spreading the word about scholarship in this sector. Last spring she visited Mexico City to speak at a symposium on the future of high-tech greenhouses in Mexico and Canada, an event she co-organized with scholars at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. They brought together leading academic researchers and industry representatives to discuss issues related to migration, workforce dynamics, sustainability, and the economic structures of greenhouses.  

In describing the event on LinkedIn, she wrote: “I’m especially looking forward to exploring how we can best support Mexican temporary horticultural workers in Canada through a just transition.” 

Olivia Doggett’s contributions to this field have been recognized through several accolades. She received the Connaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellowship (2023) and was named a Climate Positive Energy (CPE) Graduate Scholar. The SDGs@UofT Mobility program has funded her international knowledge exchange work in Mexico.