'Horticultural visa' needed to solve Top End labour issues
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A special horticulture visa is needed to help solve Northern Territory farmers' labour issues, according to a Top End melon grower.
Access to, and the quality of, labour is an ongoing issue for northern melon and mango farmers.
Last year the negative impact of the backpacker tax debate saw large volumes of fruit being left to rot due to a lack of workers willing to pick it.
Middle Point melon grower Dave Cormac said every year there were fewer people available during the peak harvest season.
"We have a problem in this country where it seems like nobody wants to work on a farm," Mr Cormac said.
"Backpackers were doing OK, but it is not good enough for the whole industry to be relying on people who may come or may not come.
"We want people who can come back year on year, who are qualified for the job and they know the job."
Seasonal Worker Program not suited to small farms
After struggling to find enough backpackers to pick his melons in the past few years, and the lack of skilled tractor drivers and workers with farm experience, Mr Cormac was unsure how he would fill his labour quota.
Some Top End horticulturalists have turned to the Seasonal Worker Program (SWP) to solve the unreliability of sourcing new backpacker labour each harvest season.
But Mr Cormac said for smaller farmers such as himself, the outlay of costs involved in registering, being approved, and the conditions involved in supporting the SWP workers while they were in Australia were prohibitive.
Additionally, he said the strict dates farmers had to nominate for the arrival and departure of workers on the SWP did not take into account the unpredictability of a melon or mango season.
Mr Cormac said allowing workers to enter Australia on a short-tern horticultural visa could fix his labour issues.
"If you nominated [a country] you could have people approved in advance, and an approved farmer like ourselves, so if the day comes you need more staff, it is only a matter of days rather than weeks you can get the additional staff you need," he said.
Experienced workers hard to find
Mr Cormac said finding people with horticultural or machinery experience was very difficult.
"I am still in the situation where [the labour hire contractor] can't get me leading hands that know the job," he said.
"We have irrigation to run, we have the spraying program, fertigation. It is not easy.
"One of our key workers got sick last year and it all fell apart.
"I had to work up to 18 hours a day to get the job done, and when you have 100 tonnes of fruit in the shed and no one is putting any diligence into getting it stacked and weighed, it is a major problem to the grower."
Topics: rural, agribusiness, katherine-0850, humpty-doo-0836
