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COVID-19. This will be a year that many wish to be done and never revisited.
For horticulture crops, including tree fruits and grapes, the disruption of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) arrivals in March and the reduced numbers for the remainder of the year was only compounded by the lack of backpacker labourers, both from Canada and abroad. It is notable that the federal and provincial governments recognized early the need for food security and got the SAWP program back operating and eventually achieved 79.3% of the total workers in 2020 compared to 2019. In BC, that figure drops to 67.4%, but could be due to lower numbers in the sectors hit with reduced crops due to frost damage to buds (cherries) and difficulties in planting crops due to weather and early season labour availability (vegetable crops).
Agriculture labour availability and making workplace adjustments for COVID-19 were the largest factors impacting the horticulture sector. Of course, this compounded financial trouble for already weakened balance sheets following years of poor returns (for apples) and following a year of difficult summer weather (cherries). Industry associations are actively lobbying for increased support from government, as has been the case for several years, but made more urgent by the pandemic impacts.
In other sectors, the impact of the pandemic was a sudden, severe jolt. The impact was especially acute in the hospitality and tourism industries, as regular tourism shut down. Movie theatres, cruises, hotels were closed and operations that rely on a flow of tourists were left without customers, such as BC wineries, micro breweries, and agri-tourism ventures. But even here, adjustments have started.
Some of the business adjustments made during the pandemic will be permanent, while other changes will not permanently displace the old ways but a new mix of ways of doing business will emerge, and in many cases, businesses will simply revert to the old way of doing business.
So, where will the trends be accelerated or new trends emerge?
Will there be less business travel, now that we are getting used to meeting on video conference calls? Many people agree that in-person meetings will remain important, but the economics of traveling less and participating in video calls is appealing when budgets tighten. Not traveling also frees up a lot of time, though many business travellers work while on the airplane.
Local customers and tourists have assumed greater importance. People cannot get away to their hot weather destinations in the winter, so they are switching to the warmer areas of Canada. It is now difficult to get a vacation stay in Osoyoos and Victoria; vacancy rates are approaching zero, compared to the usual ‘low season’ open rooms.
People are focusing on outdoor activities more. Bicycle sales have boomed. Travel trailers are in tight supply - not to go to Arizona, but to visit local provincial parks. Provincial Park reservations were booked online, but filled up in minutes. In fact, there was so much interest from local tourists that the reservation system crashed.
Many farm offices are fairly isolated to start with, but the partial or full shut down of agriculture organization offices and the move to ‘virtual’ home offices happened quickly. Will we ever wholly go back to the five day a week office routine? Employers needed to move to a new way of trusting that their employees would do the work at home. What we generally found was that employees were working too much and burning out! The work-life balance of working at home depends on having some time where personal time is not taken up or disrupted by work. Employers and employees are still learning, but seeing that there are benefits in some time to work-from-home. In a sense, farmers already have this benefit. The farm office is usually located in the home, usually, and the farm operations are generally adjacent to the home.
Finally, change is accelerating due to the pandemic. One area where changes will be lasting is in our short-term adjustments to labour constraints. A shortage of labour will lead growers to automate faster.
One example is the self-levelling picking platform that Asif Mohammad is testing in his orchard, assisted by an AgriInnovation grant. Asif feels that he is saving 20% of the labour to do the same work, and further, that he can continue to work in rainy weather as the platform gently handles the slippery fruit and workers seem to stay drier on the platform.
Another example is the greater use of information technology to reduce unnecessary work. Why spray if the timing is not right or if weather is delaying maturity of insects and delaying stages of their growth? The DAS system of SIR therefore becomes more important as farms become more restricted in the availability of labour. Weather predictions become more important and the weather station network in the Okanagan takes on newfound value.
The pandemic also shows the value of data, such as knowing where the COVID-19 outbreaks are located, tracing of possible infections, and knowing the variables that may cause faster transmission (cool, damp meat-packing plant environments, for example), and protecting vulnerable populations are all areas that we knew about, but where we are now having to implement good practices.
Everyone is learning that science and technology are going to beat the pandemic, not immediately, but through diligent, disciplined and dedicated work. We have also learned to focus on the positives that we can achieve, and not dwell on or become mired in a very difficult economic situation. The truth is, we have learned to adapt.
It will be a long time before we return to normalcy, and our future will definitely be different than our past. We will look back on the pandemic and be surprised at how much we, as an industry and society, were able to accelerate the pace of change as a matter of survival. We will all be stronger as a result.
Glen Lucas, General Manager, BC Fruit Growers’ Association