While welcoming aspects of the changes announced by Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse, Hoggard said the three-year maximum duration for lower skilled and lower-paid essential skills visa holders would be problematic.
After three years those people had to leave the country and stand down for a minimum period before reapplying.
Hoggard said employers already had complex paperwork to complete each year to keep those staff. Having them for only three years would add to that inconvenience.
After three years farm owners had trust and confidence in those staff, who had the skill and knew what was expected of them but they would be forced to leave the country and someone else would have to be employed.
“We’ve got all the pressure of the environment and animal welfare. We need staff who are engaged and want to be on the job.”
Hoggard said regional variations and challenges should be recognised.
“What I think we need is recognition of regional labour shortages in certain areas.”
Employers looking for staff should be required to initially test the local labour market before employing a migrant but in some areas they were difficult to find.
He was looking for staff for his Manawatu farm and said the number of applicants was noticeably less than in previous searchers.
Government changes included the introduction of remuneration bands to determine the skill level of the holder of an essential skills visa and set a maximum three-year visa for those with lower-skilled and lower-paid essential skills.
Other changes were to the residency settings, the ability of essential skills visa holders to bring children and partners to NZ and a project determining which occupations were seasonal to ensure the visa length aligned with peak labour demand.
Hoggard welcomed changes to residency requirements, which included the introduction of remuneration thresholds that counted towards qualifying for residency.
That recognised the contribution and seniority of migrant farm workers.
“The changes recognise that someone earning over $73,000 a year is quite highly skilled and doing an important job on a farm.”
Hort NZ chief executive Mike Chapman said the migration changes would have little impact on the sector because it did not rely on workers with visas the changes addressed.
The seasonal workers employed in the sector were not migrants but here on short-term visas.
Changes to the skilled level visas could catch out some orchard managers but Chapman said their income was above the threshold counting towards residency.
Statistics provided by Immigration NZ showed 2654 visas were granted in 2015-16 for farmers and farm managers in the aquaculture, cropping, livestock and mixed crop and livestock sectors.
The figures for the previous two years were 2554 and 2094.
In 2015-16 1359 visas were granted to migrant workers in the aquaculture, cropping, forestry, nursery, livestock, mixed crop and livestock and other farm, forestry and garden sectors.
That was lower than in the previous year when it was 1598 and 1381 in 2013-14.
The livestock industry made the biggest use of migrant farm managers with between 2000 and 2550 visas issued for each of the last three years and about 1000 visas for each of the last three years for farm workers.
The figures did not include migrants working on farms under open work visas such as Working Holiday and Partnership visas.
