‘The anxiety is off the scale’: UK farm sector worried by labour shortages |

On a fruit farm in Herefordshire, unpicked blueberries are rotting on the bushes. The fruit is ripe and ready for harvesting, but there are not enough workers to pick it.

This is the reality of the shortage in seasonal agricultural workers at Withers Farm near Ledbury, where Nick Leeds tends a mix of crops across 300 acres with his father and brother.

“We go through all the winter. It takes a long time pruning, spraying, all the husbandry work, and then you can’t pick them – they just sit there and rot essentially,” Leeds said.

He is missing about a quarter of his seasonal workforce of 350 pickers, and predicts that as much of half of their blueberry crop will got to waste this year, resulting in a £100,000 loss for the business.

Most of the farm’s seasonal workers usually come from the EU, particularly Romania and Bulgaria.

Although Leeds has been able to recruit some pickers who can gain permits to come to the UK through the government’s seasonal workers pilot scheme, he blames Brexit for this year’s staff shortages. “We used to have a good rate of returnees, from Romania and Bulgaria. But there are other opportunities out there now. We are hearing some of them are in France or are going to other places,” Leeds said.

“We keep going back to our returnees, but they don’t want to come at the moment. We have been to our agency, but they can’t get any more people in from Ukraine. We are looking at ways of reducing the need for labour,” Leeds said.

Reports of unpicked fruit and vegetables are coming from up and down the country, according to Tom Bradshaw, vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). “Earlier in July, we know Barfoots [a farming company] on the south coast near Chichester had courgettes they couldn’t harvest because they didn’t have enough labour. There is a pepper grower down there who could only pick their peppers every 11 days instead of every three because of labour shortages,” he said.

It’s not just crops that are affected, but animals too, Bradshaw added. “We’ve got big issues with pigs backing up on farm because slaughterhouses are only operating four days a week because they haven’t got enough butchers to process the pork. We’ve got dairy farmers that are really struggling to recruit the workforce they need, in Wales and in Bath,” Bradshaw said.

Labour shortages are not just making themselves felt in the food supply chain, but elsewhere in the consumer economy, from the lack of availability of new cars, to toy retailers urging parents to buy Christmas presents now to avoid disappointment because of stock shortages.

Retailers and logistics firms have been warning for some time of a shortage of about 100,000 lorry drivers, critical for moving goods around the country, as a result of Covid and Brexit.

Meanwhile, Britain’s meat processing industry, which is two-thirds staffed by non-UK workers, is currently missing about 14,000 people out of a total of 95,000 employed in the sector.

If the situation does not improve during the labour-intensive period in the run-up to Christmas, when more workers are hired, the industry could end up being short of 25,000 workers, according to…