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.

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23 hours ago

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1 day ago

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Funny how they always release these proposals in August when most farms are working overtime.

Let’s use our brains for a moment and think about this. Let’s say I’ve got a farm in bc, where i grow a crop that I then turn into jam. I have a small window each year where my produce is ready. I turn it into jam. Now my jam becomes a big hit and people want it year round. The only way for me to produce outside of my fruit bearing window is to bring in fruit from other places. I’m supposed to let my investment sit idle for most of the year? You can extrapolate this to many things we grow in bc and have short windows where it is ready. Our goal shouldn’t be to make it harder for people to succeed. Maybe 5% is too low, but 50% means it’s going to sit idle.

5%? Yeah, that’s a big “no” from me… the whole point of allowing processing on farmland is to make farms more economically viable by increasing the market for their product.

Where is the link for input?

I find that 5% vs 50 % equation very unsettling. In this situation it is not 5% from the farm it is 5% from bc. The rest can come from anywhere else. This is fine for industry standards but does not help agriculture in bc. So if we are going to give up limited agricultural land for this endeavour it had should help farming in bc. Farmers are expected to use 50% of their own on farm product on alr. Farmers would continue to be expected to use 50% while processors need not grow anything nor support bc farms. This doesn’t pass the sniff test to me

I am by far, no expert, but why would you even propose to build a plant on good farmland, isn’t that for growing a plant? You can build a plant on any ground. Reminds me of all the greenhouses built on prime soil, to me it reduces capacity and takes away from local farmers so big business can come in and take over.

Here is the link: news.gov.bc.ca/files/FoodProcessingALR_DiscussionPaperAug18_2026.pdf Taking input until September 18th. In my opinion, lowering the sources to just 5% does nothing to build food sovereignty which is what we desperately need.

This is such bs

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2 days ago

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Can someone explain why they irrigate during the day in the blistering heat. Would it be better to water early morning and at sunset?

Time to start new methods of agriculture, ive watched our ecosystem take a beating in my lifetime, iym not against any productivity of our economic development within our structures, really its not rocket science. Its just going to cost alot to change to a better, more viable solution. Banks and your intellectuals, wanna run this country with money, then quit, wasting it on ignorance. The solutions are all easy, just how much money, do we waste, and how much are we going to spend, on actually fixing the issues.

200 fish over all the feed that grows in this valley wow that some expensive fish

Get your water off fly hills two big lakes off there Spa and author

The methods we have now are because settlers always saw what was excess resources in their eyes - the riches of the ‘New World’ have been used and abused and as the limits have been reached are in disbelief and still trying to push for more….when the problem is US and how settlers have always been about extraction and not living with and much less understanding the landscapes in their integration because the next crop is the horizon and there is no compassion for the land its flora and fauna because it needs to be remade in the settler image and naive ideal

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What is old is new again in Chilliwack.

7 days ago

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