Call to farms: appeal to pick food supplies on the new frontline

In a little under two weeks the first lettuces will be ready for cutting from the fields of the Fens. It’s here, on the vast open acres of Fenland, just north of Cambridge stretching up to Downham Market, that most of Britain’s lettuces are grown.

In any normal year, the lettuces are picked and packed by the thousands of seasonal agricultural workers who return each year to East Anglia from Romania and Bulgaria.

Not this year. The spread of the coronavirus has closed most of Europe’s borders, and stopped workers from travelling beyond their own territories. Unless farmers are able to find enough UK workers to man the fields, crops will rot and there will be shortages of fresh foods.

It’s why G’s Group, the UK’s biggest salad producer which grows lettuce and other vegetables on 4,000 hectares across the Fens, and on another 2,000 hectares from Worcestershire to Kent, has called on the public to form a new “Land Army” to work in the fields.

“Anyone who is fit and healthy in Britain who is free and able should consider helping us bring in the harvest,” says Anthony Gardiner, G’s marketing director.

“Working on the fields is a long day but a good opportunity to be out in the open – and of course to help your country in this time of crisis.”

Workers can expect to earn up to £550 per week.

“Feed Our Nation” is the advertising slogan being used by G’s to recruit help. Gardiner and his colleagues looked at war posters before deciding on the campaign’s name. They decided on “Feed Our Nation” because it’s an evocative play on the work carried out by the country’s Land Army – and Land Girls – during the last world war.

The biggest producers of lettuce and other vegetables play a vital role in getting that fresh food from the field to the fork on our tables. Making sure that there are plentiful supplies of fresh foods in the supermarkets is also vital in providing Britons with a balanced diet. That matters more than ever as we are now eating more at home.

Each year, G’s supplies around 250 million packs of lettuce and celery to the British market over summer season, producing about half of all the lettuces chomped by the UK’s salad eaters.

Surprisingly, perhaps, but the UK is self-sufficient in salads as well as most other soft fruits such as strawberries and raspberries during the summer months. And asparagus too, ready to be picked now if the farmers can find enough workers.

To date, G’s has had a great response to the launch of its Feed Our Nation campaign.The family-owned farming group – which does everything from seed to shelf in food production – needs about 2,500 workers for its farms to handle everything from picking to driving the machinery.

“So far more than 2,000 people have been in contact from all sorts of backgrounds,” says Gardiner. “This crisis has made a lot of people sit back and think about what they want to do with their lives, and do their bit for the country.”

Over the last few decades, British workers have shunned labouring in the fields. Even school children and students, for whom picking the season’s soft fruits was once a rite of passage and part of the fabric of long, hazy summer holidays, have scorned the open air for more indoor work.

Quite why is one of those strange mysteries and is much to do the low pay but also because working the land came to be seen as out of fashion.

Or maybe, says Gardiner, the industry has been bad at marketing itself? Who knows, but this shortage of domestic labour has meant the farming industry has become relient on around 70,000 agricultural workers travelling mainly from central European countries to the UK. Most of them return each year to the same hostels on the same farms.

But G’s is hoping the £400 pay a week, plus piece rates, which could take weekly earnings up to £550, will prove  attractive to UK workers who have lost their jobs through the crisis or been furloughed.

The Ely-based group is advertising directly to workers who have been laid-off in related sectors which have either been temporarily frozen or closed down. Industries  such as horticulture, where garden centres have been closed, hospitality and even sandwich makers as most retailers have been closed down.

Recruiters have also been in touch with horse-racing workers in nearby Newmarket, the racing capital of the country with some of the country’s finest studs and yards where hundreds of employees from jockeys to stablehands have been either furloughed or laid off.

Like the rest of the farming industry, already struggling from the impact of months of floods, Gardiner hopes there will be enough workers ready to go out in the fields on April 22, the date the first lettuce harvest is due.

Working flat out to help farmers such as G’s find a new cohort of workers is Concordia, a non-profit ethical organisation which was founded in the Second World War to mobilise German prisoners of war and exiled French troops to harvest crops as part of the national effort to Dig for Victory along with the Land Girls.

Concordia, which still helps British farms recruit seasonal labour,has joined forces with Fruitful and Hops Labour Solutions, other agricultural labour suppliers, to persuade UK students now laid off and out of work workers back into the fields.

Like G’s, they have received masses of interest from potential workers ranging from students to the retired who would like to work a few hours a day. Classified as key workers during the crisis, the industry will also be maintaining a strict social distancing policy in the fields and factories.

And the National Union of Farmers says the government’s recent decision to allow furloughed workers to be paid in new jobs will be a game-changer.

Even so, thousands and thousands more workers will be needed to make up for the shortage of overseas workers. Across the industry, every stop is being pulled to persuade the public to try their hand at picking and packing.

While the National Union of Farmers has launched its own campaign – Pick for Britain – it is working closely with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on launching a national portal through which the public can apply for farm jobs.

After health and the economy, food supplies are the third front-line in this crisis. As G’s Gardiner says: “We in the industry – and the government – need to spread our message much louder if we are to avoid disaster and have to waste food. That would be a tragedy and one that could so easily be avoided.”