It’s hard to fathom the motive behind a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s early morning ‘outdoors’ programme, Open Country. Richard Uridge’s (usually competent and engaging, if cliché-spattered) commentary on the strawberry factories of Herefordshire sounded like a big puff for the socio-economic virtues of strawberry-growing vandals, S & A Davies Ltd.
The programme focused on the value to the local economy of the large influx of eastern European migrant workers (some of whom have become permanent residents).
I have no objection to this influx. On the one hand it has swelled congregations among the local Catholic churches; on the other it has provided the delights of seeing in the area a plethora of slender, beautiful young eastern European women who have grown up on food-balanced diets without the excesses of fat and stodge, unlike the generally overweight, flabby indigenous ladettes that roam the streets of Hereford Leominster and Ludlow.

But this does not justify covering hundreds of thousands of acres of Herefordshire with hideous, landscape destroying white plastic tunnels, which cost millions in lost tourist business and produce in the end a fruit that is a strawberry shaped ball of cotton wool. It has marginalised most of the surrounding traditional, seasonal (and far more delicious) strawberry growers.
I refuse, for reasons of taste and principle, to buy or eat a plastic nurtured strawberry and those who love the traditional British landscape of Herefordshire should do the same. There’ll always be other jobs for hard-working Poles, Lithuanians or Bulgarians, if that’s what they want. The local under-achieving youth aren’t going to bother with tough physical work when they can draw the dole, draw disability benefits for being too fat, drink cheap Tesco Alcohol and play video games all day, are they?

I expect Richard Uridge will soon be putting the other side of the story – what the tunnels are costing the county to achieve the benefits he was promoting.

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