Cherry growers focus on labour

Securing labour for the 2026 season will be critical to avoiding a repeat of last season’s lost opportunities, cherry growers say.

Some 65 members of the cherry industry, including growers, packers and brokers, gathered for a townhall meeting the BC Cherry Association hosted January 26 to discuss the 2025 season, which delivered a record crop – a sizeable portion of which went unpicked due largely to labour shortages.

“If I had a 50-acre cherry orchard, my son and I could farm it together, except during harvest season when we would need 50 pickers for four weeks,” notes BC Fruit Growers Association (BCFGA) president Peter Simonsen.

In the past, pickers often came from Quebec, but that source has slowed down a lot, Simonsen says.

He wants to see the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) adjusted to be more flexible to growers’ needs.

“Right now, the program is very bureaucratic, and we are working to make it less so,” he says. “We need to be able to share workers so they can maximize their time and pay here and support a number of farms.”

Simonsen says the BCFGA is also lobbying the federal government to develop a work permit that would allow international students to work on Canada’s farms.

“We have asked for a program whereby travellers can get a work permit to legally work in agriculture while they are visiting Canada,” he says.

Worker housing is another key issue, Simonsen says.

“Support for worker housing really varies,” Simonsen says. “Kelowna seems to have things sorted out, but it is more difficult to get a housing permit in Lake Country. Governments have to realize that labour is a key component of food security as well as supporting the rural economy.”

With a secure labour supply to harvest and process the crop, more BC fruit could move to market – helping boost grower returns. Many saw their lowest returns ever last year, thanks to high input costs and reduced picking.

Several cherry packing lines were running 24 hours a day when they could find the labour, but the former BC Tree Fruits Co-op packing line at Oliver was not online in time for the cherry season, meaning there was no excess capacity available for the record crop.

“Getting the BC Tree Fruits Oliver cherry line up and running for next season will really help,” says Simonsen. “The marketers told me that once they got the cherries into the box, things were pretty good.”

Algoma Orchards Corp., which now operates the co-op’s former packing line, met with growers at the end of January to discuss its plans for the 2026 season.