Who will pick the berries?

Scotland’s fruit industry has been one of the great farming success stories. Polytunnel technology has turned a six week season into a six or nine month picking season. But if Brexit results in restrictions on the movement of labour, many farm owners and workers are asking: “Who will pick the berries?”

The 100 acre Wester Hardmuir farm near Nairn grows strawberries, raspberries and a range of other fruit and vegetables in forty-four polytunnels. It has a half a dozen full-time employees – some Scottish, some from Eastern Europe. Each picking season, from May to September, they bring in around twenty students from Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia to pick the crop of ten million berries, which is sold through a farm shop and through a wholesaler.

Castleton Farm near Laurencekirk grows fruit on an industrial scale. Castleton has built a small village to house the six hundred workers who come from across Eastern Europe to pick berries for up to nine months of the year.

With Scotland’s soft fruit industry seeing a 10-20 per cent shortage of seasonal workers coming from the EU this year, NFU Scotland’s horticulture committee chairman and soft fruit farmer James Porter said that fewer workers were being attracted from EU member states due to the UK’s poorer exchange rates and growing affluence in other parts of the Continent. Stating that the situation was likely to get worse ”year on year”. “For a major soft fruit area like Angus, the importance of seasonal workers cannot be underestimated,” he said. “There are only 1,400 long-term unemployed in Angus, yet Angus Soft Fruits – the group that I supply with soft fruit – needs a seasonal workforce of 4,000 to pick crops.” Adding that there would hardly be a punnet of Scottish strawberries or a head of broccoli on supermarket shelves which hadn’t been picked by non-UK workers, he said there had to be a mechanism to allow access to workers in place by next year – and to ensure workers would still be able to come to Scotland post-Brexit, in spring 2019. Seasonal workers – who were generally fit, young and healthy and made little calls on the health services – contributed about £160 million in national insurance payments.

Losing access to European workers would have a “disastrous and cataclysmic” impact on the industry. A report produced for the industry showed that with up to 95 per cent of pickers coming from European countries – mainly Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania – any move to deprive the industry of its workforce would force berry prices to rise by more than 50 per cent and threaten many fruit farms with closure.

One of Scotland’s leading growers, Lochy Porter, stated that there was no doubt that if the UK government put barriers in the way of the 12,000 migrant labour force working in the industry it would do considerable harm to farms across the region and explained “Scotland has a thriving berry industry, growing some of the best berries in the world. Without migrant support, the Scottish berry industry would collapse and consumers would no longer find Scottish berries on their supermarket shelves.”.