Daffodil farm struggles to find housing for pickers
AFARM in Cornwall wants to install 40 caravans to house daffodil pickers as the county’s housing crisis continues to worsen, and with farms already struggling to recruit seasonal workers due to a combination of Brexit, foreign worker policies and a lack of housing.
A pre-application has been submitted to Cornwall Council by Varfell Farms Ltd of Long Rock, near Penzance, which details how the company recently purchased an existing significant daffodil producer, increasing the farm’s land by around 820 acres.
As a result, Varfell Farms needs to increase production by a further 100 million stems – which is an increase of 33% on the existing workforce – and it will need to provide residential accommodation to these seasonal workers.
The farm says some types of accommodation it previously used are no longer available. The need comes as a combination of Brexit and the pandemic reduced the number of workers willing or able to travel to the UK.
In September last year, 274 million stems were said to be left to rot in the ground – around a fifth of the total daffodil crop – as a result of worker shortages, according to West Cornwall MP Derek Thomas.
Cornish growers had been reporting problems recruiting enough staff ahead of the harvest which started in the new year. Some have told industry leaders that they would consider pulling out of supplying daffodils on a long-term basis if they continue to suffer from a major labour shortage.
The National Farmers’ Union joined calls last year to expand the Government’s post-Brexit Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, which was capped this year at 30,000 migrant workers. Producers say local people no longer want temporary work in the fields, even though good pickers can earn £20 an hour, more than double the minimum wage.
Earlier this year, Alex Newey, the owner of Varfell Farms, told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend that the firm had to let daffodils rot in the fields as a result of worker shortages. “We can’t harvest them, we don’t have enough pickers to pick them. We’re losing hundreds of thousands of pounds,” he said.
Hopes that Cornish workers could step into the shoes of those who not arriving from the European Union have been dashed. “We have significant recruitment drives for local workers to come and harvest crops,” added Mr Newey. “It’s idealistic to think that because of Covid and the higher than usual unemployment rates that those people would come in and do that work.
“I would say that a daffodil harvester is to be highly respected because the work is very hard. You’re out in the cold weather, it’s in Cornwall, it blows pretty hard down there. It’s wet and you’re bending over picking daffodils for three months. Frankly, the people that we’ve had to come and do this work, the locals, may last a day or two days, but they certainly don’t last two or three months.”
The application made for a change of use of land to allow siting of the caravans included the statement: “Housing the seasonal workers required to pick and pack the daffodils has long been a challenge for the operators of the business, with only a small percentage of the workers accommodated at Varfell Farm in 31 caravans. Until 2020, the vast majority of these workers were housed offsite in various forms of accommodation scattered throughout the area. However, in recent years even this accommodation has proved increasingly difficult to secure.”