Milchbauern sagen, dass Arbeitnehmerknappheit die britische Ernährungssicherheit bedroht

Pay more.

Unless you’re farming the Highlands, there’s never less than 1m people within 100 miles. Hell, more like 10m in most places.

I think you’ll find someone.

Need to go back to the old ways and offer worker housing on the farms for free or v low rent and offer apprenticeships to school leavers. The article says people don’t have the skills but that’s reliant on the farms being willing to provide training too. Arla clearly need to expand their apprenticeship scheme.

Dairy farmers don’t say „not paying good wages to workers and giving them better working conditions“ is contributing to worker shortage, but it really is.

It is the half of capitalism we choose not to talk about. That for capitalism to work, it needs for workers to be able to demand what they feel their labour is worth. If you can’t get workers on low pay and bad conditions, you need to improve those things until the workers are willing to do it.

Brexiters told us very clearly that they would fill these jobs once we left the EU. Why aren’t they stepping up? Did they lie?

Oh dear, could the farmers be regretting their Brexit vote, surely the benefits are endless

Well if this isn’t the consequences of your own decisions coming home to roost.

Get Farage and his mates working the farms.

Have they tried paying higher wages?

If you can’t find someone to do a job that usually works pretty well.

We as a country are addicted to cheap labour. This is a key symptom of it.

Instead of paying proper wages and having decent conditions, farmers will import cheap foreign labour and charge them for room, board and internet as well.

Supermarkets will use their size to force these Farmers to sell produce as cheap as they, meaning the profit margins are tiny. And this will keep our food prices low.

Rather than pay wages, and have working conditions, British workers will tolerate everyone wants to import, what is basically, one rung above slave labour so that prices are kept low.

Breaking this addiction will be painful. But it is needed if we want real wage growth.

The big fruit farms near me can’t get Pickers anymore. They used to be on a circuit with the same team of pickers every year, but that’s dried up.

Last year they tried to hire local gym users. They did a „Get paid to exercise, come pick fruit!“. They had a very good turnout, but no-one lasted more than two hours and they didn’t take it seriously, they were chatting and putting obviously rotten fruit in the „good“ pile.

The townies on here are thrilled about this, as expected.

Its okay this will be fixed with appetite suppresants and ozempic

We don’t really have a free market.

1. Government wants cheap, reasonable quality food, so put pressure in various places in the food chain to make this happen, subsidies, regulations etc.
2. Supermarkets have a strangle hold on the supply chain, there’s only really 4 major players so they get to dictate prices and rules, and because of point 1, they’ve driven prices for farmers into the ground.
3. Automation is the name of the game, but that requires investment and that requires governments to stop moving goal posts and that’s one thing governments love to do above all else.

If I were a farmer in this market, I’d sell the farm for development and go live off the proceeds (if it’s enough and I’m not drowning in debt) Because for every year there’s a profit, there’s another 3 where you only break even or make a loss.

Maybe we could do something where someone who comes here as an immigrant has a choice to do jobs like this, get paid, and have it look good on their ‚record‘ while they go through the immigration process?

Purely by choice though. We don’t do slavery.

The wages aren’t gouda’nuff, pay people a bit more cheddar and they’ll brie all over it.

We have perfectly able and willing young people to work shit jobs for shit money and they will like it.. oh actually

People saying… Pay Higher wages.

They can’t. They are competing with EU imports. If they raise prices to pay higher wages their market share goes down.

Unfortunately the answers are either…

Let that happen.

Tariff EU milk (and completely blow up the trade deal).

Increase farm worker visas.

Pay more in subsidies. I assume trade deals also have an impact but so does cost and political appetite.

Jesus there are so many people talking absolute rubbish…

Pre-Brexit and Covid most Farms, whether it be Fruit, Dairy or, Vegetable would use agencies to recruit seasonal workers.

These agencies would hire people who did this for a living overseas and bring them to the UK.

The agency workers would be paid minimum wage and most farmers would have caravans, porter cabins etc in a corner of one their fields for the workers to stay in.

The workers would spend x number of months in the UK, working long days 6, sometimes 7 days a week.

Even thou they were minimum wage because of the long hours they worked and their spending was minimal they could earn a lot money so it was well worth their time.

Then the one two punch of Brexit and Covid made coming to the UK no longer worth it.

They can earn more money going to Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Netherlands etc.. andnot be hated by the public or media like in the UK.

Sounds like an advertising problem.

Maybe they should start with the basics and list hours and wages in their job descriptions.

https://careers.arla.com/job/Aylesbury-Production-Operator-Aylesbury-Dairy/1229775901/

The general public must think farmers never stop moaning about something 😅
But it has been one thing after another this year.