In Rural France, Picking Strawberries with Colombian Undocumented Workers
These days, many people are beginning to think seriously about the value and meaning of rural life, and some are even considering farm labour and country living as part of their plans for the future. In this age of uncertainty and risk, Foodthink hopes to support young people who care about food and agriculture—especially those who want to work in agroecology—helping them find their own path and replant themselves in healthy soil.
Building on our experience from the previous four intakes, Foodthink launched recruitment for the 2026 Agroecology Internship Programme in mid-December. The moment the post went live, we received an enthusiastic response. Applications close tomorrow (7 January), so if you are interested in crop-growing techniques, farm planning and operations, or simply the specifics of daily life on a farm, scan the code and sign up!
I. First Arrival at the Farm
The process was not complicated, but it required a mutual fit: length of stay, personality, practical skills, intensity of work, visa matters—even where you sat on the ideological spectrum—all played a part in this two-way match. Some farms could not be reached by public transport, some required outdoor camping, and others simply had availability windows that never quite lined up, so none of those worked out. Eventually, through a stroke of luck, I connected with a work-exchange farm in western France with a good rating.
La Rochelle faces the Atlantic, a quintessential French port city still cradling the ruins of its medieval fortifications. One day in May I flew in from London, stood in the eight o’clock sea breeze for a while, and waited for the intercity coach to depart. Just over half an hour later, the coach deposited me, all on my own, at a stop on a country road. As far as the eye could stretch: wheat and maize, flat and endless, with a few scattered white wind turbines on the horizon. The scenery was hardly idyllic, and after such a long journey I was already exhausted before I had even started working. I was just about to turn around and head home when a rattling van pulled up, and a man past middle age, in a frayed sleeveless shirt and sports sunglasses, walked towards me. Thus began my month-long stint as an unpaid farmhand in France.
Ari was in his sixties, Argentine by birth, and had lived in France for half his life. He was full of vigour, speaking and moving with brisk decisiveness—you could tell he was always the one leading from the front, fully living up to his name, Alexander. His entrance should have been scored to a bullfighter’s march.
His wife, Annette, was French and Jewish. She wore a pair of red-rimmed glasses, the corners of her mouth always turned downward, and met ninety per cent of conversations with the quintessentially French “ah, bah…”, followed by a shake of the head. Get to know her over time, though, and you realise Annette is a fake cynic—as if she were trying her hardest to project the laid-back ease expected of a French person, but really a loopy child at heart.
Apart from flour, milk, building materials and rennet (an enzyme from a cow’s stomach, used in cheesemaking), the couple had virtually no outgoings. A five-acre farm like this has no workers on payroll, because the daily labour is carried out by volunteers like me through work exchange. Volunteers flow like water; the stone manor stands. Young people from all over the world who are curious about farming join the couple to tend the animals, do the farm work and renovate the house inside and out.
Whether it is agroecology, animal husbandry, cooking, winemaking, building, furniture-making or mending a kayak, the volunteers who come from far afield do not simply give their labour—they always pick up something along the way too. After all, when people choose to cross half the globe to work on a farm, what they seek is to broaden their experience of life, adding a few new skill points the way one might unbox a mystery parcel—skills that a tiny cog in the urban machine would never otherwise have had the chance to learn.
II. My Farming Companions
I pushed open the dormitory door and found three other people inside. Joanna was twenty-three, not very tall, and was sitting on her bed checking in on her Duolingo French. Danny was Joanna’s younger brother. When they met Ari, this Colombian pair’s European tourist visas had already expired and they had no plans to go home. They had been working illegally in a small town in Spain. Ari told them they could come to France and stay at his place as a stopgap; he would send them the invitation letter required for a volunteer visa.
I had assumed the backbone of work-exchange volunteering was either young people with money to spare, there for the experience, or carefree travellers who spent every penny when they had it and slept on a sofa when they did not—the “nomads.” What I had not expected was the presence of undocumented workers who had come to Europe from Latin America. Many European industries depend heavily on imported labour; European agriculture, for instance, has an enormous appetite for seasonal workers willing to do hard physical work—one in four agricultural workers is a mobile, foreign, temporary worker, and that figure covers only those on contract. Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2023, over two million workers in Europe had no legal status.
After several months of day-wage jobs in Spain, Joanna and Danny realised what they needed most was legal residency. A smallholding like Ari’s did not demand much of them. There was no pay, but it did not leave them at the mercy of an arbitrary deportation either. And so they came here to do odd jobs without wages in return for board and lodging, waiting for the right moment to secure a formal work visa.
Then there was the boy with hair gel in it: Miguel. Miguel was not an undocumented worker and did not know Danny or Joanna; he just happened to be from Colombia too. He had gone to an international school, liked chips and sushi, had no interest in manual work, and plainly did not want to stay another day.
Of the three, Miguel had the best English and chatted to me the most. My conversations with Joanna were reduced to rudimentary English, Google Translate and body language. Danny did not speak a word of English. He called me “hen” (the Spanish pronunciation of “Jen”), yet we shared a rapport like cellmates.
III. Labour and Life on the Farm
In front of the house ran a drainage ditch, with two vegetable plots either side. Occasionally a mother swan would glide past with her cygnets. Apparently the farm had once kept pigs, but by the time I arrived they had already been turned into sausages. There was also a Border Collie called Lyra and four free-roaming kittens.
In the mornings, Miguel collected eggs from the hens and ducks, Danny set about mowing the lawn with the strimmer, Joanna tidied up, and I pulled weeds by the front door. Odd jobs—trimming and tying branches, sanding planks, fixing the plumbing—fell to whoever happened to be free.
In spring, the plot by the front door held only strawberries and beetroot; most of the crops were still in the nursery in the greenhouse. Picking strawberries meant crouching among the plants and rummaging through the leaves, and the moment you finally spotted a plump, ripe one, more often than not a snail or a grub had already claimed it. I watched in dismay as our hard-won half-basket of strawberries, gathered over a painstaking few hours, was pulped and churned into ice cream. Harvesting beetroot was far easier—you simply pulled it like a radish, and the instant it came free you’d wager yourself on its size. The bushiest plants sometimes hid nothing but a tiny nub, while the most unassuming shoot concealed a great swollen globe. Cucumber and watermelon-radish seedlings still lay tumbled and toppling in their trays. Before I left, I finally got to taste my first half-ripe tomato.
The most vivid memory was the wall-repair job in my last few days. That meant demolishing the outer layer of the wall and re-rendering it with lime. Swing the right arm, bring the hammer down with full force, shatter the existing shell of old lime. Because the walls were being renewed in stages, hitting lime was bearable—a few strikes and it would crumble away—but when the hammer struck concrete, nothing budged, no matter how hard I swung. I glanced at my companions still labouring around me and kept going. At seven o’clock, with the sun sinking, I squatted on the scaffold and thought: this is the ultimate form of unpaid labour.
IV. Jewish-Flavoured French Farm Food
Breakfast was Annette’s homemade bread with jam and butter. By eight-twenty we’d eaten and were off to work. The ten-thirty break meant two madeleines and an espresso. Lunch was usually hearty: braised pork knuckle with kidney beans and rice, polenta with sausage, or duck confit with bread—the kind of continental spread that in Beijing would set you back three digits per head. After eating we’d collapse for an hour, then at two a fresh coffee and a small cake, back to work on the dot.
Dinner was always beetroot-leaf soup, bread, and homemade cheese. May was peak beetroot season. Miguel spoke fluent American English and his favourite film series was Rocky, the Stallone action movies, but every evening while simmering the soup he’d moan that he couldn’t get a burger. Nobody paid his Hollywood fantasies any heed.
Annette snipped off the leaves, dropped them into a pot of boiling water, added salt, then blitzed it all with the hand blender. Six of us gathered around one great pot of dark green soup, too exhausted to speak most nights—nothing but the clink of spoons against porcelain. We also ate globe artichokes for a few days. They look like the flower buds of a Jurassic plant: cut off with the secateurs, steamed until tender, then peeled petal by petal. The bases of the petals are soft enough to dip into whipped mayonnaise. The further in you peel, the more delicate they become, and the artichoke heart is the final, glorious mouthful. When the artichokes ran out, we were back to beetroot-leaf soup.
And what had become of the beetroot that could have been borscht? It had been tinned. The five of us together tackled a heap of beetroot the size of a small hill: peeled, boiled, jars sterilised, then packed with a mix of diluted white vinegar, bay leaf, peppercorns and salt, poured over the beetroot and sealed. That wasn’t the end of it. The jars went into a great steaming vat the size of a water butt, sat on the gas hob to be steam-sterilised through and through. Unlike a jar of sauerkraut, tins done this way never ferment or turn sour; open one in winter and it still tastes of beetroot.
One day the cheese ran out. Annette took me to a dairy farm nearby and we came back with ten kilos of raw milk. A few drops of an enzyme unique to ruminant stomachs went into the bucket, stirred, and by the following morning the casein had coagulated and the whey could be drawn off. From there it was simply down to the magic of time. The longer the fermentation, the richer the flavour of the cheese.
Homemade cheese called for Pineau des Charentes, a sweet aperitif wine popular in western France, brewed on the farm. When Ari was in a good mood he’d crack a bottle open for no reason at all. But either way, every Friday evening this bottle would make its appearance in the kitchen.
Friday evenings are the Jewish Shabbat. Apart from enriched breads such as croissants and Danishes, the everyday French loaf eaten here as a staple is usually just flour, water, salt and yeast. But every Friday Annette baked challah: a braided loaf enriched with eggs and milk, spread with hummus and served with homemade tinned chicken gizzards in oil. Before we ate we lit nine candles, stood in a circle, linked hands and said a prayer. When toasting, we raised our glasses and wished each other “L’chaim” (לְחַיִּים, Hebrew)—”to life.”
Weekends were our own to spend, but “fun” was not easy to come by. Miguel and I went into town. With no transport, the nearest bus stop was over an hour’s walk away, meaning a six o’clock start, and since the country lanes had no streetlights, we had to make it home before dark. I thought of the arduous walks to school I had read about in books from the older generation. As it happened, I made the trip to La Rochelle only once.
Occasionally Ari and Annette would treat everyone to a beer in one of the small villages nearby, each with a population under a thousand. The van disgorged a middle-aged couple, three Latin Americans, one East Asian, and a golden-haired, blue-eyed Israeli girl. In the pub, the half-drunk locals mid-game of Jenga each dropped their wooden piece and raised a glass to toast this gaggle of foreigners.
V. The Non-Commodified Rural Society
Looking back on that month afterwards, my people-pleasing temperament may well have earned me a degree of “special treatment”: I was more eager to work, more willing to chat with the hosts, and so never got saddled with particularly grueling tasks. Miguel, by contrast, was rather more burdened by his own image—always wanting to distinguish himself from the other two Colombians. His little manoeuvrings were soon seen through by everyone, and Ari and Annette could not always conceal their impatience—though it was hardly malice; more the kind of warm-and-cold indifference one reserves for a little brother.
Sustaining this kind of emotional labour within a household you are neither born into nor bound by is, for many people, hard to call a romantic rural experience.
Still, the counterpart of work-exchange volunteering is not a simple longing for the material abundance of the consumer world. One week the hosts had to travel and handed the house and the farm entirely over to Joanna. For those days we lived a strange, tranquil life: very little talking, all three of us following Joanna’s lead. Apart from an hour’s extra nap and allowing ourselves a small extra dinner—stir-fried duck eggs, no less—our daily labour was no different from when the hosts were home, yet we felt far more at ease. Labouring and living in the countryside could actually be this uncomplicated: no need to constantly gauge boundaries, no need to seek permission from the hosts at every turn.
It was this very contrast that made me see more clearly the value of urban public life. In theory, a well-ordered society extends protection to individuals through law and civic community. Though birth and luck consign many to being victims of being “stuck somewhere,” in truth most people still retain a “worst-case” way out: work for wages, earn a basic living.
In the countryside, things are different. Food cannot simply be bought (unless you drive forty-five minutes to a Walmart), so eating becomes a real problem. Work-exchange volunteers own no land and possess no food; maintaining a good relationship with the “landlord” inevitably becomes, on some subconscious level, a basic survival strategy. When things go smoothly, it holds. The moment your health falters, the problem surfaces at once: no familiar labour-rights protections, and even taking a rest carries a faint unease.
Of course, Ari and Annette never let anyone go hungry and never short-changed me. And that is precisely the problem: family-run smallholdings and work-exchange arrangements—micro ecological communities—run almost entirely on personal goodwill, yet lack any necessary oversight or mechanism for defending one’s rights. Perhaps for this very reason, many “ecological communities” founded on the best of intentions ultimately peter out.
But then, so be it. For me, once this kind of life had passed its “best-before date,” it at least still left open the possibility of walking away at any moment. After the volunteering ended, I wandered through a market in Toulouse on my own, picking up the appetite for shopping that had long since deserted me. Back in the familiar world of consumption, nobody expected me to get up at dawn and work; for a dozen euros or so I could buy myself a whole day’s lie-in, and every meal could be a croissant.
But without that month of unpaid labour, I might never have understood so viscerally what makes modern society precious. The flip side of the “alienation” we so often talk about may not lie in returning to traditional village-community bonds, but in whether one possesses the space and the right to move freely in and out of the established social order.
All the same, people are bound to yearn for poetry and far-off places, spinning all manner of fantasies about rural life. But short of stepping in yourself and experiencing it for what it truly is, you can hardly know whether such a faraway place tastes of honey or of arsenic.
All images in this article are provided by the author
Editor: Tianle