Harvest and haulage issues affecting Scottish growers

Scottish broccoli and cauliflower growers are facing costly headline problems around labour, haulage and packaging shortages – along with the year-on-year battle against the weather according to Andrew Faichney, Managing Director of East of Scotland Growers (ESG) in a guest blog for NFU Scotland. ESG are a farmer owned cooperative based in Cupar, Fife. Its main crops are broccoli and cauliflower along with a wider range of vegetable crops produced over a 180-mile radius. Andrew writes: July was a difficult and costly month for us due to lack of product, a direct result of April frosts and May’s rain, which in turn artificially lessened the labour and haulage issues due to low volume of crops to harvest. The inevitable flush of crop occurred this month and we have had some pretty devastating losses; on the 1st of August, we were cutting crops that were due to be harvested on the 11th of July, and by the 15th of August, we were harvesting crops due a week later. We had 6 weeks’ ...