Strawberry season has begun in Latvia. To get the berries to buyers, growers are looking for helpers to pick them and promise to pay as much as eight euros an hour. However, the number of people willing to do this job is not as high as the farmers would like.
For the most part, farmers are paid by the job done. According to the advertisements, this year the pay per kilogram of strawberries is between €0,40 and €0,70. Quick pickers can earn between seven and eight euros an hour. Those who are not as good at picking berries can earn around three euros an hour.
Picking berries for pay is not the same as picking berries in your own garden. Some farmers have strict rules that they will not take children under the age of 14 as helpers. The berries must be picked carefully, without damaging the berry, and all the ripe berries must be picked, not just the largest ones. Work starts at 4 am on some farms and at 7 am on others, so that the picked berries can be delivered to the buyers in the early hours of the morning. Some farmers pay the travel costs, others drive themselves to pick up their helpers. There are farms that treat their strawberry pickers to coffee, lunch and let them eat as many strawberries as they wish. But despite this, there is a shortage of strawberry pickers on several farms.
Andris Apsītis, the owner of the strawberry farm in Sidgunda, tells Zanda Ozola-Balode, the correspondent of LTV's “Panorāma” program, that fifteen workers are enough to maintain the 20 hectares of strawberry fields on a daily basis, but during the high season a hundred strawberry pickers are not enough. But finding people with a few months to spare in the summer is not easy. Andris said that he knows several strawberry growers who have stopped growing berries because of the lack of labor. On his farm, half are local and half are migrant workers during the season. On Saturday, when the LTV film crew visited the strawberry fields in Sidgunda, the Ukrainian language was the predominant language spoken. The hard-working pickers had been hired even before the war started.
Yulia came here to work for three years, but later met her husband in Latvia, got married and now lives nearby. She does not complain about the hot working days. She admitted, however, that when the temperature rises above 30 degrees, she does give up work. On such days, work starts earlier and finishes later, and everyone uses the middle of the day to rest.
LTV also met Snezhana in the strawberry fields. She came to Mālpils with her two children, fleeing the war in Ukraine. "They gave us a place to live, a job, and we are very happy. We like everything and we are happy that we have come here," said Snezhana.
City dwellers who would like to earn some extra money picking berries like strawberries during their summer holidays are also deterred by the fear of the State Revenue Service. They believe that strawberry picking should be declared as income and therefore taxable. Then the meagre income from picking the berries will not be much of an income.
The Rural Support Service (RSS) and the State Revenue Service (SRS) remind us that in 2014, a seasonal farm workers' tax was introduced in Latvia. The tax rate is 15%, but not less than €0.70 per day of employment. This year, the tax has been extended to 90 days (previously 65 days). The tax is only valid seasonally, from April 1 to November 30, and in order for it to apply, a number of conditions must be met, namely that the farmer who wants to benefit from this type of tax must own, permanently use or lease agricultural land used for the production of fruit trees, berries or vegetables, and employ seasonal farm workers for harvesting, sorting fruit, berries and vegetables, and for stone-picking in sowings, plantations and grassland areas. The farmer must be a beneficiary of the single area payment. The farmer must not be a micro-enterprise taxable person. A seasonal farm worker must not be registered on another farm on the same day.
A seasonal farm worker must also meet a number of criteria, namely: he must not have been employed for more than 90 calendar days in seasonal agricultural work for one or more farmers; his income from seasonal agricultural work for one or more farmers must not exceed €3,000 per season; and he must not have had an employment relationship or an enterprise contract with the same farmer in the four months before starting seasonal agricultural work for the farmer.
If a seasonal farm worker is employed on the same farm for 90 consecutive calendar days and his monthly income exceeds €3,000, such a worker must be registered as an employee with the State Revenue Service and must pay the full amount of personal income tax and compulsory state social insurance contributions on his income, explains the SRS.
Evija Kropa, an expert at Swedbank's Institute of Finance, reminds that the seasonal farmer tax also applies to children who want to earn money harvesting crops in the summer. At the same time, if a student aged up to 19 years works a summer job from June 1 to August 31 and is registered as a dependent, parents retain the dependents’ incentives of €250.