Fieldwork

South of Hornington is Toslam Farm. I hadn't walked the footpaths that lead across the farmland in several years; when I first arrived in the area there was some controversy over the planning permission for Toslam Farm's polytunnels, and now there are hundreds of acres of them. The farm produces soft fruits - raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries - on a vast scale. Possibly smarting a bit from the criticism it endured a decade and more ago, the company that runs it has opened its own footpaths leading across the land to add to the public ones, and positively encourages people to wander.

So this was where I was walking on Thursday: it's a strange, somewhat bleak landscape in the early Spring, with stretching rows of budding plants and flapping polytunnels that need a bit of repair before things get going in a couple of months. The time will come when these fields are busy with work, but barely a human being is to be seen at the moment.

As I walked through the rows of plants just coming into bud I saw these little slips with QR codes stuck on the poles. My first thought was that the names were varieties of whatever-it-was the plants were, and then I realised they referred to the workers and that the slips are something to do with crop checking or harvesting.

Farming has always been hard work but this environment is a new kind of hard and I admire the people who work in it. Spare a thought for Marilena, Emiliya, Akile, and all the others whose names I read pasted on the poles.