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Pick For Britain: UK workers needed as foreign workers flown into UK amid crisis in farming sector

The theory is that it helps one reduce ones meat intake - quality over quantity.

I shall be testing such theory in the near future as I don’t wish to give up meat as it is tasty and full of nutrients that a vegetarian diet lacks.
what nutrients are lacking in a vegetarian diet?
 
Mrs T's Cabbage patch is superb.
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I read somewhere that these harvesters will be expected to adhere to social distancing rules. Kinda hard on a plane, no? :facepalm:
Yeah...guess how many seats on a 737 ...near enough 150. Cosy. (I expect it would be a 737 sized thing)
 
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Heres a thought...from what i understand the fruit picking season is in summer, and the vegetable picking end of summer/autumn.
If people sign up as pickers now whilst being furloughed workers < a big part of the appeal that Pick For Britain is being based on - there's a high chance the people will be going back to their old jobs in those periods, as lockdown restrictions are eased off however temporarily. This might happen relatively last minute, leaving the recruiters short staffed and without as much time to fill the quota
 
It will be kicking off with salads.iceberg lettuce, then asparagus. These can't be mechanically harvested...and then they are washed, any prep done and packed, all in situ.
 

I see the paywall has come up. Basically the FT article discusses how UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy farming industry all use East European labour for harvesting. Spain and Italy also use north African. Heard that in Spain and Italy Africans arent treated well. All these western European countries have the same problem due to the health crisis.

This is a Europe wide problem.

People coming from the poorer Eastern European countries mainly.

The article shows that across Europe Western farming industry has based it business model on cheap flexible labour who it has no commitment to.

What this pandemic shows is the inequality that has become entrenched across Europe which suits business.

This isnt about workers of individual countries won't do the work. This line of argument really winds me up.

If any good comes out of this pandemic its to shows that the economy can't go on like this.

Larry Elliot in Guardian has said this:


As he points out the workers here have not recovered from the last economic recession in terms of wages.
 

Cambridge univerity are working on this. Lettuce is a difficult vegetable to pick so developing would mean other crops could be picked.

As agribusiness has had access to pool of cheap labour the incentive to transfer this backbreaking work to robots is low.

In the video noticed the human pickers were under pressure as had to fill machine behind them. This is semi atomated already using people to fill the moving machine. So not only backbreaking but like factory work. The pace of work is set by thr machine.

Robots can also work 24/7 . They reckon it will reduce food waste as robot can learn to pick only ripe crop. Then go over same field to pck again.
 
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We foolishly went (paid) strawberry picking in the mid 1970's as students in the Vale of Evesham , utter slavery and very poorly paid. Paid on results , and they would reject a picked tray with no feed-back. The camp site made a Festival camp site seem like utter luxery. So we organised a walk out. Made them sweat.

Picking broad beans was "marginally" better , no crawling around on the ground - we soon worked out that if you put a "base" of beans and a "wall" of beans inside the net, you could then rip up some plants , stuff them in - and get ahead in the productivity stakes.

I can totally understand the un-desirability of the job. Always looked for more amenable Summer work after that , bar and security work. Credit to those who did (and do) it....
 
Someone locally was saying there was a problem with the application website and you couldn't apply.
 
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