An East Anglian vegetable producer has invested £2.5m in automated machinery which will replace 20 seasonal workers in a bid to solve growing recruitment difficulties.
Frederick Hiam has upgraded its factory in Brandon with a new trimming line which will process around 15-20pc of the UK's parsnips when it begins production later this month.
It will boost the factory's output and efficiency, radically improving its trimming accuracy, reducing wastage and retail rejections while saving 20pc on energy and 30pc on water.
But the key motivation is labour saving - the equipment will save an estimated £500,000 a year on manual labour costs and replace seasonal agency workers who are becoming increasingly scarce and costly to recruit.
Managing director Jamie Lockhart said the problems came to a head in December 2021 when the firm struggled to find enough people to fill production shifts during the busy pre-Christmas rush.
"I thought: If we can't get this over the line, we are either going to have to invest or stop what we are doing," he said.
The company worked alongside Snetterton-based manufacturer Wyma UK to develop the new equipment.
Mr Lockhart said it was important for businesses to embrace collaboration and "take the plunge" to stay at the forefront of agri-tech advances, rather than waiting for wider industry innovation or lengthy government funding processes.
"With all of these agri-tech developments, it has to be a collaborative approach," he said.
"You need the developer with the vision and the ideas, but you need growers to come in and encourage and back these developments at an early stage of the process, because if you don't, they never get off the ground.
"I can understand why businesses don't want to take the risk, but if we don't expose ourselves to some of it we cannot expect the solutions to come any time soon.
"For us it was the only route forward. One of the advantages is we negotiated a period of exclusivity, so we have this line for 12 months now before anyone else can start having conversations with Wyma."
Mr Lockhart also highlighted the value of strategic partnerships with other growers.
Frederick Hiam has an agreement to trim root vegetables grown by fellow producer Burgess Farms in Isleham, near Ely, which will double the factory's output of washed and trimmed parsnips to about 14,000 tonnes per year.
Mr Lockhart said the factory's traditional pool of eastern European labour had already started to dwindle before Brexit ended free movement from the EU, as strengthening economies in countries like Poland lowered the need for people to seek work abroad.
"There were definitely issues before Brexit," he said. "But since Brexit and the change in [immigration] policy we are finding that for us the seasonal call for workers in the poultry sector, for example, coincides with our busiest time, so there are a lot of businesses calling on an ever-decreasing pot of people.
"The other big challenge we have is the cost of labour. We have just seen a 10pc increase in minimum wage, and I would not argue that it is not warranted and deserved in terms of the cost of living, but for us that 10pc increase was worth about £500,000."
While the automation will remove 20 roles previously filled by seasonal agency staff, Mr Lockhart said full-time employees will be trained to fulfil other roles, including becoming machine technicians rather than machinery operators.
The new machinery takes washed and de-stoned parsnips from the initial input phase, automatically sorts the crown diameters into 20mm bands, and sends each into a flume which feeds one of six trimmers to cut the vegetable to specified length - processing two parsnips per second, totalling 1.2 tonnes per hour.
Frederick Hiam is seeking funding for a further phase of development to install optical sorters for quality control and grading, which will further reduce manpower demands.
And its commitment to emerging technologies has also brought trials of an unmanned Robotti farm machine which has been autonomously sowing and hoeing in the field.
The firm has secured a 40pc grant from Defra's Farming Transformation Fund to buy the Danish-built £220,000 machine, which will start working commercially next spring.
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