‘My family need my support to eat’: how Indonesians came to work on a Kent farm

theguardian.com:

Sitting in a caravan in the hot Kent countryside, Banyu’s face is etched with worry. It is July and he is less than a month into a job picking fruit at Clock House farm near Maidstone, which supplies strawberries, raspberries and other soft fruit to leading supermarket chains.

He says he arrived from Indonesia this summer £5,000 in debt to an unlicensed broker in Bali, handing over the deeds to his family home as surety. He only has a six-month visa for the picking season and is scared that the work is not as lucrative as he hoped.

“Now I’m working hard only to pay back that money,” said Banyu (not his real name) on a video call from the caravan he shares with five other men. “Sometimes I get stressed. I cannot sleep sometimes. I have a family who need my support to eat. And meanwhile, I think about the debt.”

Clock House, which featured in a Marks & Spencer advert last autumn and operates under the slogan “Growing a better tomorrow”, employs about 1,200 people a season to pick raspberries, strawberries, plums, blackberries and apples.

Brexit had already made finding pickers tough, a situation exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Last year the majority of Clock House’s workers came from Ukraine, and the farm had been expecting about 880 to return.

After war broke out and men were told not to leave Ukraine, Clock House went to a licensed British agency to find workers from Indonesia and Vietnam.

The farm’s recruitment manager, Jane Packham, told BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today that when it tried to source British workers, 7,000 people got in touch, but only 100 actually started the work and “about one” stuck it out.

Packham said this was “probably unsurprising”. “It’s a different sort of job, we’re not used to it – I