Whether it’s Nick Ferrari proclaiming that ‘anybody can pick a raspberry off a bush’ or the Telegraph’s Helen Chandler suggesting novices could earn £30 an hour on the broccoli, wayward assumptions about the nature of farm work are growing rather tiresome, especially as suggestions of significant food shortages linger.
Inaccuracies in the media are hardly surprising, however, given that the government’s own ‘Pick For Britain’ campaign was based on panicked predictions and misinformed grandstanding. If you recall, this was the mid-pandemic effort to recruit a ‘land army’ of students and furloughed workers to plug the supposedly aching gaps in the nation’s rural workforce.
When Prince Charles, ITV and Waitrose all stepped in to throw their weight behind the government’s recruitment drive in the middle of May in 2020, they did so in the grip of premature fears that had gathered pace during the global standstill of April, fears that the predominantly Romanian and Bulgarian seasonal pickers would be unable to make their customary trip to the UK’s farmlands.
But Bulgaria had already opened up commercial flights to the UK on 1 May (Romania followed suit a week later), and most seasonal workers managed to make their passage just in time to save the majority of our spring harvests. So, of the 32,000 Brits that answered the call to ‘Pick For Britain’ and applied for farm operative roles, only 4,000 were interviewed, and fewer still offered a job.
Why not just use the keen, lockdown-struck Brits and protect ourselves (and the world) from international Covid transmissions? The truth is that untrained Brits are no viable replacement for practiced workers from the continent. The homegrown workers can’t pick the homegrown produce quick enough for our farms to turn a profit.
There’s more to it than just raw inexperience though. I spoke to some of the lucky (or unlucky) Brits who did manage to get a farm gig during lockdown to find out how they got on.
‘Right outside the hostel they put us up in there were open drains leaking human shite. Next to the picnic tables everyone was meant to eat dinner on,’ claims Dave*, who picked lettuce on a farm run by G’s Fresh, near the cathedral city of Ely in Cambridgeshire.
‘The hostel was like a prison. There was no hot water for up to five days at a time. The electricity was going every other day. We were paying an extra tenner a week, on top of our £65 rent, for wi-fi that didn’t work at any point,’ adds Gerry*, another disaffected worker who spoke to me.
