While the agricultural and food manufacturing sectors have a good record on investing, one way of meeting the challenges of the new immigration policy is for the food supply chain, assisted by innovative and well-designed Government schemes, to become more capital intensive and both drive forward and exploit technological opportunities. However, this will take time to have an impact, and it is likely that many roles throughout the food supply chain will be difficult to affordably mechanise for many years, especially for smaller businesses. This further points to the difficulties the industry faces with the sudden changes to the availability of labour as a result of the Government’s new immigration policy.