How Much Do Fruit Pickers Earn?
Since I arrived in Canada fairly late in the summer season (July 1st), most of the good jobs were already taken. The fruit-picking season had just started, though, so I went for that. If you pick cherries, they pay 40–50 cents per pound. For other fruits, it’s an hourly rate of 19 CAD.
As a fruit picker, you usually start picking around 5 AM and stop when the temperature hits around 27°C, typically between 12 and 1 PM.
With cherry picking, a lot depends on which trees you get and how efficient you are with your ladder. At the beginning, most people pick around 120 pounds per day—that’s 54 CAD. Pre-tax! Not a lot.
After a couple of days of practice, and on a day when I got a tree full of cherries, I picked 552 pounds, which earned me 220.80 CAD.
Some days we don’t pick cherries at all for one reason or another—in that case, it’s an hourly rate. So, there are bad days and there are good days. There are other things to do around the farm - fold boxes, weigh and pack fruit, gardening and propping the trees.
After 14 days of working, and a total of 72 hours (a mix of piece rate and hourly work), I earned 1,329 CAD post-tax. That works out to about 18 CAD per hour post-tax.
The good news is—we don’t pay rent. You live literally in the orchards: some in tents, some in their vans, and some in little wooden houses. We only pay a daily camp fee of 5 CAD.
My weekly groceries are around 100 CAD, so it is possible to save some cash for travels—but not loads. I haven’t worked other jobs yet, but I’d say if your main goal is to earn a lot of money, maybe Canada isn’t the right country for that. At least not in fruit picking. My fellow pickers had worked in New Zealand and Australia before and said they actually made good money there.
I’m here for different reasons, and this is just my personal experience.