Just because fruit isn’t being picked, it doesn’t mean growers sit still! There’s plenty of important off-season tasks to be done; infrastructure maintenance, pest and disease control, and weed management, to name a few.

We tend to think of harvest by number of bins, kilos, or pallets but how do growers manage off-season work that is also by piece, like winter pruning, or vine or tree training for example?

Off-season tasks often require fewer workers than harvest, but they’re usually needed over several months, and winter work often requires skill and precision. This can be an overlooked opportunity to better monitor and manage workers with a resultant reduction in labour cost.

Growers increasingly use digital tools or apps to track who worked on which rows or blocks, measure how much area each person covered and record quality checks. In ABCgrower any worker activity can be captured by time or by piece. For example, recording the number of trees a worker has pruned. A supervisor has real-time visibility to quantity done per hour for each of their crew members or earned hourly rate when paying piece rate. Crews can be better managed, as it happens. ABCgrower allows information captured by piece to be paid by piece or converted to hourly wages.

While work rates are highly important it can’t come at the cost of quality; it’s a constant balancing act between quality and labour cost. ABCgrower comes inclusive of a module that allows organisations to assign workers to rows (or bays or areas). This has the advantages of capturing work done by piece (tree, vine, plant, etc.) with the additional benefit of having visibility to who did what, where and when. For example, a QC can inspect work done and know which workers did what in case of remedial action required, or potentially for bonus payments to be made.

The Quality module in ABCgrower is highly flexible, allowing organisations to do quality assessments on winter work to measure and help manage the quality of work done, and identify tree or plant issues.

Winter work presents other challenges, not least of which is weather dependency. ABCgrower is designed to capture what is happening, when it happens, without the extra admin of having to edit pre-entered information as schedules shuffle constantly.

Off-season work is crucial but requires skilled labor, careful supervision, and a balance between quality and quantity within the bounds of compliance. It’s quieter than harvest, but definitely not “quiet” and digital tools can be used to enhance efficiency year-round.

The introduction of a minimum wage floor for horticultural workers in Australia in 2022 saw a seismic shift away from paying piece rate toward hourly wages. It wasn’t unusual to hear cries of “piece rate is dead” or even “piece rate is illegal”. With labour costs continuing to rise, we examine what’s happening a few years on.

Growers are typically using one (or more!) of three pay methods: piece rate, hourly wages, or hourly wages plus bonuses. Below, we outline the advantages and challenges of each method.