Lack of workers means lettuces ploughed back into the ground
A farmer has been forced to destroy more than 300,000 heads of fresh lettuce because he cannot find enough workers to harvest it.
Alan Fong, a Waikato vegetable grower, said ploughing produce back into the ground was sad, especially because, last month, vegetable prices were up 17% on the year before.
In October, the average price of 1kg of lettuce was $6.43, Stats NZ said, up from $5.39 a year earlier and $3.64 the year before that.
Fong typically employed 100 labourers full time. He used to employ RSE workers, but he was not able to get them any more. Working holiday visa workers, recently allowed back into the country, had relieved a lot of pressure on the farm, he said.
Foreign backpackers were reliable, hard-working and put money back into the economy, he said.
But he had been forced to become a landlord to rent four houses for the backpackers, because a lot of the accommodation that was available before the pandemic had closed down, he said.
Providing accommodation was a big risk, but he had no other option.
Accommodation cost him between $700 and $1500 a week, which he then charged the tenants. He employed someone full time to take care of the backpackers’ needs, he said.
Fong grew numerous vegetable crops that had to be harvested by hand, hand-cut and packed by hand. He said the Government talked about relying on technology, but it simply did not exist.
He said the increased expense to pay labour, the labour shortage, and the expense of diesel needed to harvest the crop would cost so much that he would pay more for these expenses than he would receive from selling it.
‘‘I can’t keep spending $10 on something and only get $2 back. How long will my business last?’’ he said.
Fong had a block of snowpeas he was about to harvest, but feared he might lose some to spoilage as he was 10 labourers short, and would likely not be able to harvest the entire crop in time.
Chair of the Rural Support Trust, Neil Bateup, said the trust was seeing more mental health calls related to increased pressure on farms.
Scarcity of labour was to blame for a lot of it, he said. Bateup said a farm or market garden could not stop operating when there were not enough hands to do the work.
He said most farmers the trust helped were burnt out because they could not take a break.
If labour was missing from a team, it put pressure on everyone else who needed to work longer hours or had less time off, he said.
Farm owners or sharemilkers were worst affected because they carried all the responsibility for a business, Bateup said.
He said immigration policies had made the problem worse and overseas workers who had been successfully employed on farms for years couldn’t make it back to New Zealand. There were no Kiwis to fill the roles, he said.
The lack of immigrant workers also affected supporting industries such as trucking, meat works, and rural contractors.