Save Scotland’s fruit crops! Thousands needed for harvest – Stephen Jardine

Thounds of people are needed to bring in the fruit harvest which starts in just a month’s time with calls for a Peace Corps-style campaign, writes Stephen Jardine.

Scotland's soft fruit harvest is just week's away

A week seems like a lifetime at the moment. Thanks to coronavirus, everything changes so fast. Tweets don’t age well but then neither do newspaper columns. This time last year I wrote about the problems facing Scotland’s farmers and warned crops could rot in the fields unless we can find the workers to pick them.

The prediction was correct but the problem was not the one I thought. Twelve months ago the issue was Brexit and the challenge it represented in terms of attracting EU agricultural labour. That looks like a minor hiccup when compared to the virus pandemic now choking the world.

With Europe in lockdown for the foreseeable future, farmers are already worrying about how crops will be harvested this year. With the usual supply of workers from Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Romania stuck at home, there are already warnings some soft fruit and vegetable crops may wither before they can be picked. At a time of food shortages in supermarkets, that is simply unacceptable. When Brexit threatened the supply of EU farm labour, many asked why British workers couldn’t do the job. The excuse was complex and varied.

Coronavirus has changed all that. With millions of workers on furlough and not working, there is now no shortage of available labour in this country with plenty of time on their hands and a desperation to get outdoors again.

Last week the NFU called on the Government to be flexible to allow furloughed workers to earn additional income by working the fields over the summer. In England a ‘Dig For Victory’ campaign has been launched to recruit sufficient labour. Here in Scotland soft fruit growers in Perthshire, Fife and Angus have started a recruitment drive to attract 3,000 Scots to pick berries this year, to make up an 80 per cent shortfall in the numbers required. In addition, author David Black has lobbied the Scottish Government to launch a Peace Corps-style campaign to encourage Scots to help the nation by bringing in the soft fruit harvest which begins in just a month’s time.

It will be interesting to see who answers the call. Older generations well remember summer’s spent working in the fields for extra pocket money. That seems a distant memory to most but as the lockdown rolls on the chance to be outside earning extra cash and snaffling the odd strawberry might prove attractive to workers in the hospitality and tourism sectors looking at a long road back to recovery.

It’s perhaps not a long-term solution to the issue of agricultural labour in this country but with everything from the Edinburgh Military Tattoo to Glastonbury being cancelled, the summer of 2020 is going to look very different. In fact for those people used to the average festival experience of paying hundreds of pounds to sit in a field and go to the toilet in a bucket, the relative luxury of the well-organised world of fruit picking in Scotland is likely to be a revelation.

Even if some kind of social distancing measures are still in place, the open fields offer plenty of space for people to work safely. In these days when fresh air feels like a commodity, the raspberry fields of Perthshire might not seem that bad a bet after all.