YOUR INDUSTRY
LABOUR SHORTAGE: BERRIES SET TO ROT Words by Rose Mannering
Dianne Charlton with berries left on the vine
Small block holders and gate sales operators in Hawke’s Bay have been put under severe pressure, Tollemache Road berry grower Dianne Charlton believes.
“I don’t begrudge this, I encouraged them to go, because they were short too,” she says.
She and her husband Matthew have been growing boysenberries and then raspberries for 38 years just south of Hastings at their business The Berry Farm. She believes an inability to get workers this season due to labour shortages is placing the whole berry industry in jeopardy.
The labour shortage has also meant some employees felt as if they could get away with more, knowing their jobs were secure because producers were desperate.
First it was Perry’s Berrys strawberry producers in Auckland, then others have quietly followed, just closing their gates. “I believe the long-term future of the farm shop is threatened,” she says. Being just on the outskirts of Hastings has meant the Charltons have had few problems in the past attracting locals, students and backpackers to help with the berry harvest. “We were okay up until Christmas, harvesting our boysenberries,” she says. But as students have gone back to schools and universities, the labour market tightened. This was compounded by the start of the apple harvest in February with even her long-term “retired ladies” moving into roles in apple packhouses because they could get longer hours.
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NZGROWER : MAY 2021
Picking berries is not well suited to women with children at school; the berries are best picked early in the morning before the sun heats them and they begin to soften.
Dianne disagrees that poor pay is contributing to people not staying long enough to get the crop picked. “If people are not used to working outside, they struggle to maintain this work, day in day out, she says. That, combined with the early starts, had often resulted in workers not even making it to pay-day before quitting. Other workers were concerned if they earned too much they would lose their Working For Families Ministry of Social Development benefits. In the peak of the raspberry season the Charltons were by-passing crop and only picking once every seven days, instead of the normal rotation of three days for their autumn raspberry crop, leaving berries to rot on the vine. “We needed eight pickers in the peak of the season, but we were lucky if we got three,” she says.
