For example if you're North American and need a Visa to, let's say, Portugal, then you have to go to the Portuguese Embassy in the United States of America to require a visa and other significant information regarding the stay in Portugal.
To do such work, you need to be young, fit and mentally tough, and, as Chris Chinn saw several years ago, when Cobrey Farm tried to recruit workers from areas of high unemployment in the North of England, the younger generation of Britons no longer has the stomach for it.
'Just look at all those people on the dole,' she said indignantly, when I mentioned that I could only find Peruvian blueberries in the store, despite their abundance nearby. 'It's all wrong. Why don't they go out and pick them?'
No; just the passport will suffice.
It has led to the arrival of 1,250 students from university agriculture courses in Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, to be followed by others, from Georgia, Belarus and Barbados. However, the farmers I spoke to dismiss this gesture as a 'drop in the ocean'.
I asked the Government what action was being taken to offset the dearth of pickers. A spokesman said the international post-Brexit overhaul of the immigration system would benefit everyone in Britain, including farmers.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
Last Wednesday, though, only about 100 were working the fields in their orange-and-green overalls — just half the number needed to strip all the beans and pluck the ripened berries before they begin to rot.
If you have any type of concerns concerning where and ways to use Invest Golden Visa, you can call us at our own web site. However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.
'If we had enough workers to pick all our fruit, you would have found our blueberries in Monmouth M&S, not Peruvian ones, because we supply the company and they are generally very supportive of British suppliers,' the 38-year-old farmer told me worriedly.
Four welfare officers are employed to handle their daily concerns. Unfortunately, however, for many Romanians and Bulgarians, these perks are no longer proving sufficiently attractive to lure them away for several months of the year.
The latter two countries now supply 95 per cent of Cobrey Farm's casual labour-force, which peaks at 1,000 in summer. Though the work is long and tiring, they are paid £8.21 an hour and can earn between £300 and £500 a week with bonuses and overtime.
If it is not addressed soon, she fears, the British horticultural industry could shrink significantly, leaving shoppers ever more reliant on imported fruit and veg, which can be about 30 per cent more expensive than home-grown.
Meanwhile, in Sussex, 150 tonnes of lettuce have had to remain uncut in the past few weeks and during the summer eight tonnes of Class One Scottish strawberries went unpicked. Pictured: Family-owned fruit farm Cobrey Farms in Herefordshire
Perhaps so. Yet our arable farms need 70,000 overseas casual workers each year to maintain full productivity, and given the improving fortunes of citizens in EU nations such as Romania, they are highly unlikely to come here in such great numbers ever again. What, then, can be done?
The overseas pickers were permitted to work temporarily in Britain under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Scheme (SAWS), which was passed after World War II amid determined efforts to increase food production, and ran from 1949 to 2013.
The farm lobby says the next influx of pickers will have to come from outside the EU, from huge countries where low wages and unemployment remain a problem. Places such as Ukraine — which already sends tens of thousands of seasonal farm-workers to Germany — and Russia.
The main reason, he says, is Romania's recent economic boom, which has seen job vacancies soar and the average wage rise by 9.4 per cent. Until recently, a Romanian doctor could earn four times more picking fruit in Britain than practising medicine, but the gap has narrowed considerably.
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
'I don't want to accuse them of being a generation of lazy people. I don't think that's true. [But] if you are in a settled situation, you are probably not going to risk losing your benefits for a couple of weeks on an asparagus farm.'
To do such work, you need to be young, fit and mentally tough, and, as Chris Chinn saw several years ago, when Cobrey Farm tried to recruit workers from areas of high unemployment in the North of England, the younger generation of Britons no longer has the stomach for it.
'Just look at all those people on the dole,' she said indignantly, when I mentioned that I could only find Peruvian blueberries in the store, despite their abundance nearby. 'It's all wrong. Why don't they go out and pick them?'
No; just the passport will suffice.
It has led to the arrival of 1,250 students from university agriculture courses in Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, to be followed by others, from Georgia, Belarus and Barbados. However, the farmers I spoke to dismiss this gesture as a 'drop in the ocean'.
I asked the Government what action was being taken to offset the dearth of pickers. A spokesman said the international post-Brexit overhaul of the immigration system would benefit everyone in Britain, including farmers.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
Last Wednesday, though, only about 100 were working the fields in their orange-and-green overalls — just half the number needed to strip all the beans and pluck the ripened berries before they begin to rot.
If you have any type of concerns concerning where and ways to use Invest Golden Visa, you can call us at our own web site. However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.
'If we had enough workers to pick all our fruit, you would have found our blueberries in Monmouth M&S, not Peruvian ones, because we supply the company and they are generally very supportive of British suppliers,' the 38-year-old farmer told me worriedly.
Four welfare officers are employed to handle their daily concerns. Unfortunately, however, for many Romanians and Bulgarians, these perks are no longer proving sufficiently attractive to lure them away for several months of the year.
The latter two countries now supply 95 per cent of Cobrey Farm's casual labour-force, which peaks at 1,000 in summer. Though the work is long and tiring, they are paid £8.21 an hour and can earn between £300 and £500 a week with bonuses and overtime.
If it is not addressed soon, she fears, the British horticultural industry could shrink significantly, leaving shoppers ever more reliant on imported fruit and veg, which can be about 30 per cent more expensive than home-grown.
Meanwhile, in Sussex, 150 tonnes of lettuce have had to remain uncut in the past few weeks and during the summer eight tonnes of Class One Scottish strawberries went unpicked. Pictured: Family-owned fruit farm Cobrey Farms in Herefordshire
Perhaps so. Yet our arable farms need 70,000 overseas casual workers each year to maintain full productivity, and given the improving fortunes of citizens in EU nations such as Romania, they are highly unlikely to come here in such great numbers ever again. What, then, can be done?
The overseas pickers were permitted to work temporarily in Britain under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers' Scheme (SAWS), which was passed after World War II amid determined efforts to increase food production, and ran from 1949 to 2013.
The farm lobby says the next influx of pickers will have to come from outside the EU, from huge countries where low wages and unemployment remain a problem. Places such as Ukraine — which already sends tens of thousands of seasonal farm-workers to Germany — and Russia.
The main reason, he says, is Romania's recent economic boom, which has seen job vacancies soar and the average wage rise by 9.4 per cent. Until recently, a Romanian doctor could earn four times more picking fruit in Britain than practising medicine, but the gap has narrowed considerably.
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
'I don't want to accuse them of being a generation of lazy people. I don't think that's true. [But] if you are in a settled situation, you are probably not going to risk losing your benefits for a couple of weeks on an asparagus farm.'
