A BORDERS fruit farm has been saved this season by a huge increase in ‘pick-your-own’ customers.

Alistair Busby, of Border Berries, near Kelso, says the fruit farm industry struggled to find seasonal workers this summer, due to lockdown and low wages, but his business has coped well thanks to members of the public “picking for their own entertainment”.

He said: “This year, only about 10 per cent of our sales will be fruit that’s been farmed; 90 per cent of our sales has been pick your own; we’re normally 25 per cent [farmed] to 75 per cent ['pick your own'].”

Mr Busby says his business benefited from being outdoors, while other fruit farms were unable to hire workers to pick the produce grown in polytunnels.

He said: “The real problem for the industry – because it’s picking in polytunnels, which starts in the beginning of May – was that in May and June it was very hard for people to come.

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“But because we’re a little ‘pick your own’ farm, that’s just outside, we don’t start till the beginning of July and by that stage they could catch flights over.”

Border Berries hired four Czech students to work on the farm, using a government quarantine exemption that allowed workers to fly to the UK as long as they quarantined themselves on the farms employing them for 14 days.

Other farms, Mr Busby said, were forced to charter planes to bring Eastern European workers to the UK.

“At the start of the industry season it was almost impossible to get Eastern European workers,” he said.

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Photo: Alistair Busby says Border Berries has enjoyed a 'very good season'

“So they did a big recruitment drive for British workers but the productivity of British workers is less than [that] of the people they normally get.

“As soon as they could, they got foreign workers, by accommodating workers and chartering an aircraft to get people across, and the regulations being loosened slightly to allow them to come over.”

Mr Busby blamed the low wages traditionally paid in the sector for difficulties in finding British workers.

He said: “There’s a long-term thing about getting pickers, as the industry pays a minimum wage and charges people for accommodation, for a job that UK individuals on the whole are not prepared to do.

“If you pay, workers will come. If you pay the least you possibly can, you struggle to get pickers.”

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Mr Busby believes coronavirus has actually benefited Border Berries, as members of the public were eager to escape from lockdown.

“We opened the same week people were allowed to travel more than five miles from home, and we’re outside and so people were desperate to do something,” he said. “It’s been a very good season for us.”

He added: “If there’s entertainment, people will not put a price on their time.

“If they’re being paid to do it, they look at what they’ve earned after three hours of really quite hard work and then, in general, a lot of people wouldn’t do it again.

“But if they’re doing it with kids, granny, extended family, they will spend hours picking stuff, because it’s fun.”