Strawberries

In the summer, when I was a child, I spent a lot of time (along with the rest of the family) picking strawberries from my father's rows of same. Strawberries which were eaten with sugar that day or, when there were a lot of them, turned into jam with even more sugar. In those days I used to like strawberries.

Then, a few year after that, we were living in the margins of a house in Hampshire which ran to a strawberry growing operation in its walled garden. An operation which involved such PC things as blasting away at the grey squirrels with shotguns as they came over the wall at night to graze on the crop and hiring ladies from the village to do the picking during the day. The strawberries were then driven to Birmingham to be sold, a better deal as I recall than sending them to London. The chap in charge told me that he couldn't stand the things: being in the stink of them all day every day put him right off.

I even put in a day or so picking myself, but retired before I was fired for not arranging the berries in their punnets in a sufficiently buyer-attractive manner.

Dogtooth at work

Detail of same

Now, given the present difficulty of getting village ladies or anyone else to pick the fruit, companies like Dogtooth (fancily illustrated website at reference 1) have spotted a window of opportunity. Robots which can do the work have more or less come of age. We are told that one person can manage a dozen of those snapped above, with each one doing the work of half a person.

But what about the gangmasters who used to make a tidy living out of supplying gangs of people to do it. Will they be able to claim anything from Mr. Sunak? Will they have to go back to being travellers?

PS 1: brought to me by the Financial Times.

PS 2: my father did not go in for rotation and the strawberries were grown in the same rows year after year. As they were in the walled garden. Maybe rotation is not applicable to top fruit - this being the allotment name for such stuff.

PS 3: one can only marvel at the technology which makes this sort of thing possible. I am sure I have noticed a robot for picking oranges in the past, looking rather like a vacuum cleaner, but cannot presently find it. Maybe it will turn up shortly. The point being that one might think that hard, robust oranges were a lot easier than soft, fragile strawberries.

Reference 1: https://dogtooth.tech/.