Fears over lack of pickers leads Ross Mitchell to dig deep for his 321 acres of soft fruit at Castleton Farm in Aberdeenshire

A Scottish fruit grower has invested more than £1 million in fruit-sorting technology in order to reduce his reliance on labour.

Ross Mitchell, whose family has run Castleton Farm in Aberdeenshire since 1992, took the decision to invest due to his growing concern about the availability of labour, which he identified as an issue before the EU membership referendum in 2016.

“Every year we need to recruit 900 temporary staff members to get through the season, mainly pickers but also in the packing house, and year on year it has been harder to get staff in to do the job,” he said.

“Brexit hasn’t caused this issue, although the devaluation of the pound has made it less attractive to come here.

“The industry needs to change, to become less reliant on such a large labour pool, because there just aren’t enough people able to do the work.”

With that in mind, Ross decided to look into alternative technologies which could allow his business to expand their blueberry production without needing to increase their staff numbers at the farm.

“We currently farm 321 acres of soft fruit, including raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and cherries, but it’s the blueberries that we are expanding,” he said.

“Not even 20% of Uk-consumed blueberries are grown here and the market is growing at 10% a year, so it makes sense to increase our acreage in that area.”

He has invested in a large scale optical grader and sorter, one of just three currently working in the UK, which can sort blueberries and cherries into a range of grades through taking more than 40 pictures of each individual fruit in a second. While Mr Mitchell still requires staff to pick the fruit by hand they are now at least 30% faster as they no longer have to grade the fruit while in the field.

Instead the machine, which can assess two tonnes of fruit every hour, filters the specimens into different specifications through judging size, softness, colour, and internal and external scarring.

“We still need around 500 staff harvesting in the fields at any one time,” he said.

“But with our expanding acres we would have needed 50 extra this year, so we have made a definite saving in staff costs. It’s been a really worthwhile investment, and I think we will see more of these in the UK over time as the price decreases.”

Looking ahead, Mr Mitchell hopes the seasonal workers scheme pilot will be successful as he sees that as the best way forward for the industry in the short term.

“It will be controlled migration rather than immigration, so it should be a winwin for the industry and the workers involved,” he said. “I just hope that the Brexit deal is agreed so we have the transition time we need to test the scheme and then expand it out so we can bring in the labour we need.”

While access to labour is still the priority for Castleton Farm in the short term, in the longer term the Mitchells believe new technology and automation will drive the industry forward, but that they can’t expect all the change to come from elsewhere.

“We will need to change to adapt to the new technology which is coming in 15 or 20 years,” Mr Mitchell said.

“There is an amazing amount of interesting research going on into automated harvesting and picking, but we might need to adapt our growing systems to fit in with the technology, rather than vice versa.”

Castleton Farm, owned by Ross and Anna Mitchell, top, has 321 acres of soft fruit, including raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and cherries. The decision to invest in a largescale optical grader and sorter came after concern about finding enough seasonal pickers.