NatureFresh is holding back the expansion of their operations in Delta, Ohio. During a recent Northwest Ohio Ag-Business Breakfast Forum, founder and CEO Peter Quiring expressed his concerns about finding the right qualified workers to pick their tomatoes. While business has been good for NatureFresh ever since they set foot on Ohio soil, the company now paused their 45 acre expansion plans.
NatureFresh currently operates on a total of 45 brand new acres in Ohio, which have been built in three phases of 15 acre each. Over the next few years it is the plan to expand the company with another 9 phases to a total of 180 acres by 2022. The construction of phase 4, 5 and 6 have now been postponed.
“Labor’s the caveat,” Quiring said in an interview with the Toledo Blade. “It’s not happening unless we figure out the labor situation. It can’t happen. My bank wouldn't even let me do it, not that I would.”
In the article by Tyrel Linkhorn on the Toledo Blade, Quiring expressed his concerns about the U.S. foreign worker program, as well as the quality of the available workers in the area.
He explained that people want to be a head grower or CEO of a greenhouse company, but nobody wants to get his hands dirty and pick the tomatoes. And the people that do apply for this work, often fail to meet the criteria.
“We’ve interviewed around 600 people in the last two years. Of that 600 people, about 30 to 40 percent didn’t pass a drug test. And we don’t care about marijuana, by the way. This is heavy drugs we’re talking about,” he said. “It’s a sad fact", Quiring told the Toledo Blade. NatureFresh hired close to 300 from that pool. Some never showed up, about 40 were dismissed, and another 90 quit — many within their first few days.
Perhaps automation, robotic harvesters or the recently announced tomato deleafing robot can help NatureFresh in the future. “I go to a lot of trade shows,” Quiring said. “The Number 1 topic of conversation for the last five to 10 years has been labor. Now it’s the only topic of conversation. There is nothing else to talk about anymore.”
