A new life as a farm labourer in England

“I’ve always liked being in a helping profession,” Beth Blease, 24, explains over the phone while taking a rest in between duties at Claremont Farm in the Wirral, in the north west of England. “I love the outdoors, I absolutely love hard grafting [working] jobs, although it exhausts me. And also doing something that benefits others. This [job] couldn't be any more perfect for me.”  

Blease is one of the many Britons who have signed up to work as seasonal farm labourers this summer after losing their jobs or being furloughed due to Covid-19. Farms have been desperate to hire, as the thousands of mostly Eastern European seasonal workers who normally travel to the UK every summer were unable to cross borders and planes were grounded. 

Blease was travelling and working in Ireland when the pandemic struck, and had to return home to Hoylake, a town in the Wirral. A personal trainer by trade, she was unable to work due to the lockdown, but also thought it might be a good time to try something different as she was beginning to find her professional environment too macho.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I can't just sit and do nothing. What can I do?’” she recalls. “I was searching for ages and hardly anything was available.” A friend who was already working as a fruit picker referred her to Claremont Farm, which is a mere 20 minute drive away from her home and needed labourers. 

Six days a week, at 8 am, Blease and several other seasonal workers – including a trainee pilot and a freelance photographer – arrive at the polytunnels (the long, curved, plastic structures that plants are grown under), ready to pick strawberries and raspberries. Three hours later they head to the warehouse to pack the berries and send them to the farm shop, where they are sold to visitors. “Before that we were doing asparagus,” says Blease, who has the bright, glowing face of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors. “That was a bit more taxing. You'd have to lean down, chisel at the asparagus and then bunch it all together. So that was quite intense work.”

When the picking is done for the day, the seasonal workers help out with general duties around the 250 acre farm. “After picking all the fruit and packing it the other day, there was some planting to be done for cabbages, sprouts – all the winter veg,” says Blease, who explains that her car doubles up as storage for her work clothes, as she never knows whether she’ll need to be in shorts or thermals. 

Blease loves being outdoors, but working as a picker – which often means being on the farm six or even seven days a week – is certainly not for everyone. Even though farms have been overwhelmed with applications for seasonal jobs, the retention rate has been patchy. “Members are reporting up to 50% turnover of their UK workers, with many leaving within the first two weeks,” writes Ali Capper, chair of the National Farmers’ Union horticulture and potatoes board, on the union’s website. 

It’s a problem that Blease’s boss, farmer Andrew Pimbley, is certainly aware of. The Pimbleys have been tenant farmers here since 1906, growing everything from gooseberries to potatoes. For the past 20 years the farm had relied on a crew of Polish seasonal labourers to help bring in the harvest – until Covid-19 meant they could no longer travel. “We were just having a nightmare with English people [before] … the ones that we recruited were unreliable, they just couldn’t handle it,” says Andrew of his past attempts to hire locally.

A neighbouring farmer had introduced him to his Polish workers, who came from farming backgrounds, and after that they’d come to stay and work at Claremont every year. “They already know how to drive a tractor, they know the basics of agriculture,” he says.

Britain, which grows more than half of its vegetables and about 20% of its fruit, relies heavily on seasonal farm workers from abroad. About 70,000 people are needed between April and October each year to plant, pick and pack the produce. Brexit and the uncertainty around the future freedom of movement for EU workers brings with it another layer of anxiety. 

Although the number of British workers on farms is usually below 1%, recent estimates show that this summer 25-30% of pickers on UK farms were locally recruited. But as lockdown eases and people begin returning to their former jobs, farmers such as Pimbley are left wondering what will happen this time next year. 

He is, however, extremely pleased with his most recent intake, attributing their can-do attitudes to an already well-established work ethic. “We sold them this horrific job that was seven days a week, dusty, backbreaking, all the rest of it. And they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it, we want to do it,’” he says. “Anyone who you [try] put off and still wants to do it, you know is worth taking a punt [chance] on.”

For Blease, her time here has certainly been a learning curve. “It takes skill to be able to turn up and do your best, to self-motivate and self-drive and think on your feet,” she explains. “You know, there might be times where you are working on your own, something happens and you’ve got to think very quickly because you're in the middle of a field.”

She adds: “I’ve learnt that I can be more independent than I thought. Even after running my own business, I've probably had more independence here. Because there are always going to be elements of danger on a farm. There's heavy equipment, sharp objects, and you've got to trust that you can do it.” 

Has it given her a new appreciation for the kind of skills continental European labourers bring to their work on UK farms? “One hundred per cent,” she says. “You’ve got to be prepared to walk through about six cobwebs every hour. Prepare for rain. Prepare for intense heat. You've got to be patient. Expect the unexpected. And just be very flexible with what the day will bring. Because the weather affects how the fruit grows, so it might be a day where the fruit doesn't grow at all. And so you've got to go and clear out a big warehouse shed full of potatoes and hay and straw bales. You need a very can-do attitude, otherwise you just won't survive.”

Both Blease and Pimbley believe there is a lack of appreciation among the local population about where food comes from and what it takes to grow it. A government scheme for school children to learn the basics through visiting farms such as Claremont has recently been cut. “It's just absolutely bizarre that people don’t even know what certain vegetables are that have been on the shelves for ages,” says Blease. “They'll just be like, what's asparagus? But they'll know what a Maccy's [McDonald’s] cheeseburger price is.”

Working here has given her a deeper understanding of food, including “how it grows and how different climates affect different growth rates and sweetness. It's fascinating and it does make you feel a lot smaller, but in a good way.” Would she come back next year? “Definitely. I’ve worked at Claremont so intensely for a while now so I'll know everyone's name and they'll recognise me straight away.”