8 2GM Monday June 13 2022 | the times
News
Ministers will set out plans today to
reduce Britain’s reliance on imported
seasonal crops as part of a strategy to
prioritise food security in the aftermath
of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine.
Under proposals to be published by
Boris Johnson and George Eustice, the
environment secretary, the govern-
ment will prioritise developing a net-
work of industrial greenhouses that can
produce lettuce, tomatoes and cucum-
bers for supermarkets all year.
Ministers will also announce plans to
increase the number of seasonal work-
er visas issued each year to help address
agricultural labour shortages, and con-
duct a review on the long-term work-
force needs of the sector. Farmers
complain that they have struggled to
Once a week for the past five weeks a
farmer in Kent has ploughed
perfectly good onions back into the
ground. He needs at least 124 people
to harvest all the crops that are now
ready for the supermarket shelves but
has only managed to recruit 78.
Without the same numbers of
Romanians, Poles and Lithuanians
who helped keep British farms in
business until Brexit, and the
Ukrainians who made up a
significant portion of seasonal
workers last year, he has had no
choice but to let about £75,000 of his
produce rot. “You plant them in
September, spend the winter taking
care of them, then one day, walk into
the field and think, ‘Yes, that’s a
cracking good crop.’ So to have to
plough them back in, after all
that time and effort,
because you’ve not got
the people to harvest
them is soul-
destroying,” he
said.
The early
harvest of beans
also went
unpicked. “I
don’t even like to
look at the fields
now because it’s
too depressing,” said
the farmer, who asked
not to be named.
“Everybody is suffering.”
For the second year since the
UK formally left the European Union
there are not enough seasonal
workers to pick and process the food
grown in British fields. Paperwork
now prohibits the return of the
experienced eastern European
workforce. The land army of British
workers that was occasionally
predicted to replace them has not
materialised, nor has the technology.
“The mechanisation isn’t there yet. It
can’t do the labour these people can
do. We need these people, we’re so
reliant on them,” the farmer said.The recruitment agencies
scrambling to fill the government’s
seasonal workers visa scheme are
having to recruit from further and
further afield, including Nepal and
central Asian countries such as
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
Kazakhstan. The onion farmer in
Kent is expecting 25 recruits from
Kazakhstan to arrive this weekend.
How many turn up, and how long
they stay, will determine how much
of his yield will make it to the
supermarket.
A government scheme gave
growers the opportunity to invite
30,000 seasonal workers to the UK
but farmers say this is still not
enough. The National Farmers’
Union (NFU) is urging ministers to
process 10,000 more visas urgently.
“We’ve already seen lettuces wasted,
tomatoes not harvested,” said Tom
Bradshaw, its deputy president. “The
[labour] shortage has been the worst
anyone’s ever known. There have
already been quite a lot of crops
wasted, and we’re going to need the
staff here for picking berries [and
other crops] in August, September,
October. Unless we get the visas
imminently, it’s going to be
too late.”
Jack Pearce, a
third-generation
farmer, said he was
struggling to fill
about ten
vacancies a day
to harvest and
process root
vegetables at his
farm in King’s
Lynn, Norfolk.
“We’ve worked
really hard with the
local job centre but it
has been a huge challenge,”
he said.
The stereotype of the agriculture-
averse British jobseeker had proved
true, he added. “We have a lot of
people turning up two hours late or
not at all. Sometimes you do the
induction, they take the company
clothes and then you never see them
again.
“We can just about keep running
but it’s about being productive. The
amount of time and money that
we’re having to put into employing
people is just huge.”
The shortage has forced him toplant fewer crops. “We’ve walked
away from about £3-4 million of
turnover,” he said. “They are sales
that we no longer do because we
can’t physically find the people to fill
that extra capacity in our factory. It’s
hugely frustrating. We have
effectively sold less because we can’t
find people to work extra shifts.”
Nick Marston, chairman of British
Berry Growers, said members were
“apprehensive” as they waited to see
how many workers would turn up.
“It’s very upsetting. There is serious
concern as to whether we will have
enough harvest workers to pick crops
right the way through the summer,”
he said.
“We don’t need to do the politics of
Brexit but obviously the day we
decided to close our borders to that
free flow of labour from Europe was
the day that we made it very
challenging for ourselves to recruitenough workers to do the jobs,
whether it was the care sector,
hospitality or agriculture.”
The British berry industry is worth
about £1.7 billion in retail. In 2019
about £12.4 million of berries went
unpicked. In 2020 that figure rose to
£18.7 million; last year it ballooned to
£36 million. “I would expect that that
figure will increase again quite
substantially this year,” Marston said.
He said it would take some time to
build up a workforce as productive as
the one Britain had had before Brexit.
“The agencies appointed by the
government have had, at very short
notice, to recruit people from new
countries that we’d actually barely
recruited staff from, in the past.
“I’m sure they’ll be good folks but
they will be completely inexperienced
so they will be less productive than
people who’ve done it before,” said
Marston, who added that a returningworker was on average 13 per cent
more productive than a new worker.
This year the government said it
was encouraging all sectors to make
employment more attractive to UK
workers through offering training,
careers options and wage increases.
It added: “We fully acknowledge
that the food and farming industry is
facing labour challenges and we
continue to work with the sector to
mitigate them. We have given the
industry greater certainty by enabling
the seasonal workers scheme until
the end of 2024, allowing overseas
workers to come to the UK for up to
six months to work in the
horticulture sector.”
Back in Kent, the onion farmer was
anxiously awaiting updates from the
new arrivals from Kazakhstan. Of the
25, ten have confirmed so far. Will
they be enough? He could not say.
“These are unprecedented times.”Farm labour shortage
brings a bitter harvest
Millions of pounds of
Britain’s unpicked crops
are being ploughed
back into fields, writes
Lucy Bannerman
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h E Ui Th t t fthJack Pearce, a third-generation farmer in Norfolk, says the loss of workers from eastern Europe, left, has been disastrousMega greenhouses to boost salad supply
recruit enough staff since Brexit, leav-
ing some crops rotting in the ground.
There have also been warnings that the
country is overly reliant on imports for
a number of “key staple products” that
are shipped in from Europe and are
vulnerable to disruption.
The UK is 86 per cent self-sufficient
in beef and fully self-sufficient in milk,
lamb, poultry, carrots and swedes.
However, the country produces only
23 per cent of the cucumbers and 15 per
cent of the tomatoes supplied domesti-
cally, while relying on imports for a
number of other seasonal fruits and
vegetables in winter.
Under the proposals the government
will relax planning laws to approve a
new generation of greenhouses — each
the size of ten football pitches — that
can grow crops such as tomatoes, cu-
cumbers, peppers, lettuce and soft fruitall year. Ministers will also support the
industry with a package of grants and
investment capital as well as making it
easier for developers to hire workers
from abroad with experience of similar
projects in countries such as the Neth-
erlands.
Eustice, who took office in February
2020, said that the move had been in-
formed by a series of events that had
threatened the UK’s supply chain. “I
have sat in the Cobra [Cabinet Office
emergency] room many times since
I’ve had this job,” he said.
“And whether it’s strike action from
French ferries or no-deal Brexit or
indeed Covid, when we look at our
national resilience and food supply the
thing that always comes up as an acute
vulnerability is salads, principally
tomatoes and cucumbers, the vast
majority of which come from the Neth-erlands and Spain. I think the events in
Ukraine have kind of reinforced it. It’s
very important that we don’t take for
granted our national resilience.”
Eustice said that increasing domestic
production of products such as toma-
toes was a priority. “If we’re going to in-
crease our production-to-supply ratio,
that’s the area that we should target
first,” he said. “And it also means you
can get quite a significant increase in
food production without taking up...
large areas of land because you get
large amounts of production from a
relatively small area.”
Eustice said that by strategically sit-
ing the greenhouses near big industrial
plants it should be possible to use
generated heat to supply the farms, re-
ducing their cost and carbon footprint.
Government sources said the strate-
gy moved away from the idea of usingBrexit as an incentive to farmers to use
their land for environmental and cli-
mate change objectives towards a
greater focus on production. This is
likely to be welcomed by farmers who
have warned it would be a mistake for
the government to focus on issues such
as rewilding.
Minette Batters, president of the
National Farmers’ Union, said that this
had led to frustration among the
farming community because of the
“very strong focus on environmental
delivery alone”. She said: “What I would
say, very strongly, is it cannot be about
an either or: it isn’t food production or
the environment, it is food production
and the environment. It was a big mis-
take to focus on one and not the other
because, as I continually reiterate, you
have got to treat them as symbiotic.”
Feeding the nation, letters, page 28Oliver Wright Policy Editor
TERRY HARRIS FOR THE TIMES