As the summer fruit season draws to a close, thousands of migrant pickers are preparing to go home – and Nikola Tukarchikova and Michaela Romanova from Slovakia were among them. This was the girls’ first summer in Ireland, spent picking strawberries and raspberries on Green’s Berry Farm in Gorey, Co Wexford.
“I liked Ireland, though the summer was a bit wet,” said Tukarchikova, 21, who returned to Slovakia last week. “If there is work next year I might come back.”
“We went to the seaside a few times and we even went swimming,” said her friend Roman-ova, also 21. “But only once. The water is too cold!”
The two young women say they worked hard on the farm, showing little wounds and scratches on their hands caused by the raspberry bushes. But their job was nothing compared to that of pickers a decade ago.
Until very recently, virtually all strawberries in Ireland were grown in the open field, unprotected from the elements. But the farmers were losing too much produce to floods. And after three wet summers in a row, most moved their plants under cover.
Today a typical strawberry plantation consists of rows and rows of tunnels covered by white plastic. The plants are grown in troughs filled with peat and elevated above the ground. This system makes the job of pickers much easier.
“This year we were one of the last to grow on the ground,” says the farm’s owner, John Green. “The pickers’ job is completely different now. They have a little tray and trolley with their punnets and they just wheel along and pick the berries. It’s much easier than before.”
One of the farm’s older hands, Piotr Shventakhovsky from Sieradz in Poland, remembers that time well. Shventakhovsky has been coming to Ireland for the last 10 years to pick strawberries.
“It was backbreaking work,” he says. “You would have to squat all day in the mud. Sometimes the sun would burn you, sometimes you’d have to work under the rain. You would get all wet.”
“Now the work is very good,” says his friend Emil Maulepshy, who also hails from Sieradz. “You don’t get so much tired. But still you have to work. Nobody pays for nothing, you know.”
The only downside to the new system is that fewer hands are now needed on the farm.
“There used to be much more people here,” recalls Shventakhovsky. “Everybody was chatting and joking. The owners would take us for trips. It was great fun.”
Still, he enjoys his job here and is looking forward to coming back to Ireland next season. But what does he make of Irish strawberries?
“The strawberries here look better than in Poland,” he observes. “But the taste is always better at home!”
