Guy_s Revolution - Farming A labour of no love

I'm afraid we've got to pay more for our food. Our strawberries are beautiful strawberries but you know I'm not ashamed to say they are expensive. You know that's what it costs to produce them. No one grows strawberries like this anymore where they're actually in the soil because it's just really really hard work. You're on your knees all day reaching in and at the end I see the pickers at the end of the day you know they're you know especially some of the older ones one of them gets on his bicycle and I worry whether he's going to make it back up the hill. We fuss about, you know, the ergonomics of our keyboard and our screen and whether it's absolutely perfect. I mean, God, compare it to this, you know, where you're bent double all day. So we are finally, after 30 years, it's like I feel I've learned how to grow strawberries and really beautiful tasting strawberries. I mean, these are the very best strawberries you can buy, but the problem is getting them picked. I just don't think people are willing. Possibly they're not even physically capable of doing this sort of work anymore we have expectations have really really changed and I think that's probably the same over the country so I guess one has to ask why is it like that and and maybe what the solutions are. Historically this sort of seasonal physical Agricultural, in particular horticultural work, has largely been done by those who live on the fringes of society, let's say. So when I started we had a lot of New Age travellers who were, you know, living in caravans and buses who would arrive during the strawberry season. And then a lot of East European labour, you know, which most of whom have been required, you know, have to go home now, so that's not available post-Brexit. You know a lot of UK people just don't want to do this work. I mean I've got a lot of sympathy with them. It is extremely hard work and mostly you know not particularly well paid. I don't think it's surprising. I'm afraid to say that I think a lot of farmers have really got quite lazy in their employment practices. There's all been an underlayer of, you know, you've got to call it modern day slavery. There has been some very dubious, illegal use of labour within the horticultural industry, something that we should be ashamed of. And you know, why is that? Well, the reason we are in that situation is because the amount we spend on food has just gone down and down and down. It's now, I read on the internet, 8% in the UK. And we want it to be less, you know, we're entering an economic crisis, people are hard up, everyone's talking about food, it's got to be cheaper, what are we going to do about it, you know, fly people in from... Nepal or, you know, I mean, is that the world we want to live in, where we eat food that is produced by some sort of abused underclass? Is that really what we're happy with? You know, I'm not. So, you know, what are we going to do about that? We have to make the work more acceptable, you know, in the modern world that we live in. So I have been experimenting with giant raised beds, a bit like a hedge of strawberries, which I'm quite excited by, actually. Okay so you know 98% of the strawberries you buy in a supermarket will be grown either hydroponically, so there will be gutters at sort of waist height, with a Sometimes rock wool, the stuff you have in your attic for insulation in there, and water kind of trickling through it and the plants are rooting into that getting their nutrients and the fruit hangs down so it's incredibly kind of convenient and quick to pick or alternatively they grow them in peat bags again on tabletops. You know the use of peat is environmentally horrendous you know we really shouldn't be digging up peat bogs which are stores of carbon and and then using them that as a disposable medium and throwing them away I'm afraid I think that is completely horrendous and environmental insanity. So what we've done here in this experiment is build these kind of giant hedges to bring them up to about waist height and planted the strawberries in the top. These are grown in soil and the relationship of the plant with the soil I think contributes to their not only to their flavour having a deeper and subtle flavour but also I think it will be shown that they are nutritionally superior as well so we'll be able to pick maybe twice as fast here but maybe even more importantly than that we'll be able to pick for eight hours without being totally crippled at the end of the day and I think it might be the way forward.