ENGLAND, United Kingdom (Reuters) — For 70 years, Tim Chambers’ family has harvested fruit in south-east England, but after Britain’s vote last year to leave the European Union he expanded into Poland and is ready to sell some of his land if a shortage of migrant workers worsens.
His firm, W. B. Chambers & Son, has relied heavily on seasonal staff from eastern Europe for the past two decades as it focused on growing raspberries and blackberries that require laborious harvesting by hand.
Typically, at the height of the summer season, 1,200 migrant workers from other EU states pick the delicate berries from more than 520 kilometers (320 miles) of rows of bushes planted across rolling land in Kent, a county known as the Garden of England.
This year, Chambers found it harder to recruit workers at the start of the season in June. Many workers hesitated about coming to Britain after the fall in the value of the pound since the vote for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum.
Chambers invested this year in raspberry production with a partner in Poland to avoid possible barriers to exporting fruit to the EU from Britain when Brexit happens in 2019.
If the shortage in migrant labour gets worse and pushes up his costs, he is prepared to shift more of his business to Poland and might even sell some of his family’s land in England, he said.
Farm manager Salih Hodzhov migrated from Bulgaria.
He said that many migrants have worries about their future since the Brexit vote.
The government has said it will use a transition period to ensure employers are not left without workers after Brexit, but so far there is no clear sign of how it plans to do that.
Nick Ottewell, farming director for Laurence J Betts, a Kent-based salad grower, said the uncertainties clouding migrant labour and Britain’s EU divorce talks could cause major headaches for British agriculture.
“The political instability going on is just pushing back any real action being taken,” he told Reuters. “Farmers are going to potentially be staring over the cliff face in 2019.”
