According to new research by the National Farmers Union (NFU), the number of seasonal workers coming to work on British farms has plummeted by 17 per cent, leaving farms ‘critically short’ of people to harvest fruit and vegetables.
The decline in people coming to the UK is being blamed on Brexit, with the vote to leave the EU being seen as “xenophobic” and “racist” by workers from overseas, according to separate research by a major agricultural recruitment firm.
UK producers require around 80,000 seasonal workers to pick the fruit and vegetable harvest, and the vast majority come from Eastern Europe. In fact, only 14 of the 13,400 workers recruited between January and May this year were British, according to the NFU.
When a similar survey was conducted by the NFU at the same time last year, the shortfall was only 4 per cent. Meanwhile, this year’s survey found that the proportion of overseas workers choosing to return to the UK has fallen from two-thirds to one-third since January, meaning that valuable experience is being lost.
The immediate implication of a lack of experienced pickers will be that there are crops left in the fields and potentially a shortage of fruit and vegetables for sale, which could even have an impact on the strawberries traditionally served at Wimbledon.
Meanwhile, for those who have already picked their crops, finding sufficient workers was very difficult, with almost 80 per cent of growers saying that recruitment this year had been the hardest for years.
The NFU is therefore calling on the Government for reassurance that farmers will be able to source a reliable and competent workforce both now and in the future, as without this, the trend is likely to continue and will “hit hard”.
