Picking Strawberries in Rural France with Undocumented Colombian Workers
Today, many are beginning to seriously consider the value and meaning of rural life, even weaving farm labour and living into their future plans. In an age marked by risk and uncertainty, Foodthink hopes to support young people who care about food and agriculture—particularly those eager to pursue ecological farming—in finding their own path and taking root anew in healthy soil.
Drawing on experience from our previous four cohorts, Foodthink launched recruitment for the 2026 ‘Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme’ in mid-December. Applications flooded in the moment the post went live. Registration closes tomorrow (7 January). If you are keen to learn about ecological planting techniques, farm planning and management, or the tangible realities of farm life, scan the code to apply!
1. Arrival at the Farm
The process isn’t overly complex, but it hinges on mutual compatibility: length of stay, personality and practical aptitude, workload intensity, visa logistics, and even ideological leanings all factor into this two-way matching. Some farms were unreachable by public transport, others mandated outdoor camping, and a few had completely misaligned availability. Nothing clicked. Eventually, through a happy coincidence, I connected with a well-reviewed work-exchange farm in western France.
La Rochelle (La Rochelle) faces the Atlantic. It is a classic French port city, still retaining remnants of its medieval fortifications. One day in May, I flew over from London, took a breath of the 8 a.m. sea air, and waited for the country coach to depart. Just over half an hour later, it dropped me off alone at a bus stop on a rural lane. The view stretched out flat: fields of wheat and maize, with scattered white wind turbines dotting the distance. Frankly, the scenery was hardly inviting. Add in the long haul, and I was utterly spent before I’d even begun work. Just as I was having second thoughts and weighing a retreat, a rattling van pulled up. An older fellow in a frayed, sleeveless shirt and sports sunglasses strode towards me. And so my month-long volunteer farm experience in France was underway.
Ail is in his sixties, an Argentine who has spent half his life in France. Bristling with energy, he speaks and moves with brisk decisiveness. You can tell he’s invariably at the front of the line, which suits his first name, Alexandre. If he had entrance music, it would be a Spanish matador’s theme.
His wife Annette is a French Jew. She wears red-rimmed glasses and keeps the corners of her mouth turned perpetually downwards. She meets ninety per cent of conversations with the quintessential French “ah, bah…” followed by a shake of the head. Stay around long enough, though, and you’ll discover Annette is a phony cynic. She appears to be striving to perform the effortless nonchalance stereotypical of the French, but underneath lies a delightfully eccentric child.
Aside from flour, milk, building materials and rennet (an enzyme from cow stomachs used in cheese-making), the couple’s outgoings are minimal. The roughly two-hectare farm employs no paid staff, as the day-to-day chores are mostly handled by work-exchange volunteers like me. The volunteers come and go, but the stone-built estate stands firm. Young people from across the globe, drawn by an interest in agriculture, join the couple to tend the animals, work the fields and carry out interior and exterior renovations on the house.
Whether it is organic farming, animal husbandry, cooking, winemaking, house-building, furniture making or even repairing canoes, the volunteers who travel from far afield do more than just lend a hand; they invariably pick up new skills along the way. After all, the decision to journey thousands of miles to work on the farm is driven by a desire to broaden one’s horizons and, much like opening a blind box, acquire a handful of niche skills that a typical city cog in the machine would never have the chance to learn.
II. My Farm Companions
When I pushed open the dorm door, three others were inside. Joanna, 23, wasn’t particularly tall and was sitting on her bed keeping up her Duolingo French streak. Danny is Jo’s younger brother. When they had met Aré, this Colombian brother-and-sister pair’s European tourist visas had already expired. With no plans to return home, they were working undocumented in a Spanish town. Aré told them they could stay temporarily at his place in France and promised to send the invitation letters needed for a volunteer visa.
I had assumed work-exchange volunteering was mainly for young people with ample savings seeking an experience, or “nomads” who spent freely when money was around and slept on sofas when it wasn’t. I never expected to encounter undocumented labourers crossing from Latin America to Europe. Yet many European industries rely heavily on imported labour. Take agriculture: the demand for hardy seasonal workers is enormous. One in four farmworkers is a seasonal migrant—and that statistic only covers those with formal contracts. Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2023, over two million workers across Europe lacked legal status.
After months of daily-wage work in Spain, Jo and Danny realised what they truly needed was legal residency. A smallholding like Aré’s didn’t demand gruelling labour. There was no pay, but it at least spared them the constant threat of sudden deportation. So they arrived to trade unpaid chores for room and board, biding their time until they could secure a proper work visa.
There was also Miguel, a boy with a heavy coat of hair gel. Miguel wasn’t working undocumented, nor did he know Danny and Jo; they simply happened to share a Colombian background. Having grown up in an international school, he preferred chips and sushi, felt no pull towards physical labour, and clearly had no desire to stay another day.
Between the three, Miguel’s English was the best, so he and I talked the most. Communication with Jo relied on a mix of simple English, Google Translate, and body language. Danny didn’t know a word of English; he called me “hen” (the Spanish way of saying Jen), yet we shared the kind of tacit understanding you’d expect between cellmates.
III. Work and Life on the Farm
In front of the house ran an irrigation ditch flanked by two vegetable plots. Occasionally, a mother swan would glide through with her cygnets in tow. I’d heard they used to keep pigs, but by the time I arrived, they’d already been turned into sausages. Aside from that, the household included a Border Collie named Lira and four free-roaming cats.
Each morning, Michel collects the chicken and duck eggs, Danny pushes the mower to trim the lawn, Joanna handles the cleaning, and I pull weeds from the patch in front of the house. Odd jobs—trimming and tying back branches, sanding timber, fixing pipes—are picked up by whoever happens to be free.
By spring, only strawberries and beetroot were growing in the plot before the house; most of the crops were still tucked away in the nursery greenhouse. Harvesting strawberries means squatting low and sifting through the soil. Just when you spot a plump, fully ripened berry, you will find it has almost certainly already been claimed by snails and grubs. Watching a meagre basket of fruit—gathered over hours—get blended into ice cream leaves you sighing at the waste. Pulling beetroot, by contrast, is far simpler. Much like drawing radishes from the earth, the moment a root breaks the soil you find yourself guessing its size: the most vigorous foliage might crown a tiny beet, while the plainest seedling could be hiding a monster. The cucumbers and Chinese radishes were still sprawling aimlessly in their seed trays. Just before I left, I managed to eat my first slightly underripe tomato.
The days immediately before I left are the ones that stick in my memory, particularly the work refurbishing the exterior walls. The job involved breaking away the outer layer of render before re-liming the surface. It was a matter of swinging the right arm, driving the hammer with all your might to shatter the existing lime crust. Because the walls had been worked on in phases, striking the old lime layer was manageable—it would chip away after a few blows—but hitting patches of cement was another matter entirely. You could swing as hard as you liked and the surface would not budge. Glancing over at the others still labouring away, there was nothing for it but to keep going. At seven o’clock, with the sun dipping below the horizon, I found myself crouched on the scaffolding, realising this was the definitive form of unpaid labour.
IV. Rustic French Fare with a Jewish Flavour
Breakfast was bread baked by Annette, served with jam and butter. By 8:20, we’d finish eating and head straight to the fields. The 10:30 tea break brought out two Madeleine cakes and a cup of espresso. Lunch was usually substantial: braised pork knuckle with broad beans and rice, polenta with sausages, or confit duck with bread. In Beijing, a continental feast like that would easily cost three figures per head. After lunch, we’d doze off for an hour. At two o’clock, another coffee, a small cake, and we’d be back at work right on time.
Dinner was invariably beetroot leaf soup, bread, and homemade cheese. May is peak season for beetroots. Miguel spoke fluent American English and his favourite film was the Rocky series starring Sylvester Stallone. While the soup simmered in the evenings, he’d often complain about not being able to get his hands on a burger. But nobody paid any mind to his Hollywood fantasies.
Annette would trim the leaves, drop them into a pot of boiling water, add a pinch of salt, and blitz them with an electric mixer. The six of us would gather round a massive pot of deep green soup, often too exhausted to speak, leaving only the gentle clink of spoons against ceramic bowls. We also ate artichokes for a few days. They resemble the buds of some Jurassic plant. After snipping them off with garden shears and steaming them, you peel them back leaf by leaf. The bases are tender and can be dipped into a light mayonnaise. The further in you go, the more delicate it becomes, with the artichoke heart offering the final, most rewarding bite. Once the artichokes were picked clean, we had to return to the beetroot leaf soup.
So where did the beetroots go, the ones that could have been turned into borscht? They were canned. The five of us tackled a mountainous pile of beetroots together: peeling, boiling, and sterilising the jars. Once packed, we’d mix diluted white vinegar with bay leaves, peppercorns, and salt, pour the brine over the beetroots, and seal the lids. But that wasn’t the end of it. We’d place the jars in a cavernous steamer that looked like a water tank, set it over the gas hob, and give them a thorough steam bath to ensure complete sterilisation. Unlike a traditional pickling crock, these sealed jars wouldn’t ferment or turn sour. When we opened them in winter, they still tasted of fresh beetroot.
One day, the cheese ran out. Annette took me to a nearby dairy farm to fetch around ten kilograms of raw milk. We added a few drops of the enzymes unique to ruminant stomachs to the milk bucket, stirred it, and left it overnight. By the next day, once the casein had coagulated, we drained off the whey. The rest was simply a matter of the magic of time. The longer the fermentation, the deeper and more complex the cheese’s flavour.
Homemade cheese is best paired with home-brewed Pineau des Charentes, a sweet fortified aperitif wine popular in western France. Whenever Alé is in a good mood, he’ll crack open a bottle for no particular reason. Regardless, every Friday evening this bottle is guaranteed to make an appearance in the kitchen.
Every Friday evening marks the Jewish Sabbath. Apart from enriched, sweet doughs like croissants and Danish pastries, the everyday bread eaten by locals here relies on a simple formula of just flour, water, salt, and yeast. But on Fridays, Annette bakes challah: a braided loaf enriched with eggs and milk, served with a spread of hummus and her homemade jars of chicken gizzards preserved in oil. Before we eat, we light nine candles, gather in a circle, and hold hands for a prayer. When we raise our glasses, we toast each other with “L’chaim” (לְחַיִּים, Hebrew), meaning “to your health”.
The weekends were ours to spend as we wished, though “fun” was not exactly easy to come by. Michael and I made a trip into town. Lacking our own transport, it meant walking for over an hour to reach the nearest bus stop, setting off just after six in the morning. And because the country lanes were dark, we’d have to race back before nightfall. It brought to mind the gruelling journeys to school that older generations used to endure, only that I was merely heading to La Rochelle, and just once.
Now and again, Aré and Annette would treat the group to a few pints in the nearby village, home to fewer than a thousand souls. The van deposited a middle-aged couple, three Latin Americans, an East Asian, and a blonde, blue-eyed Israeli girl. Inside the local, the older blokes—perilously close to a serious bout of drunkenness—were huddled round playing Jenga. They all laid down their wooden blocks to raise a glass and toast us foreigners.
V. An Uncommodified Rural Society
Looking back on that month, my accommodating nature perhaps earned me a certain degree of “looking after”: I took the initiative with the work and was more willing to keep the hosts company, so I was spared any particularly arduous tasks. By contrast, young Miguel carried something of an air about him, constantly keen to demonstrate how he differed from the other two Colombians. This pretence was quickly seen through, and Arie and Annette sometimes couldn’t hide their impatience—not out of malice, but rather with the casual dismissal one might reserve for a younger sibling.
To continually perform such emotional labour within a household to which you are a stranger is, for many, hard to characterise as a romantic rural experience.
Yet the antithesis of volunteer life is not a simple yearning for the material plenty of a commercial society. During one week, the farm owner had to travel, leaving the house and land entirely in Qiao’s care. Those days unfolded in a surreal yet tranquil rhythm: conversation was sparse, and the three of us simply fell into Qiao’s routine. Aside from claiming an extra hour for the siesta and treating ourselves to a pan-fried duck egg in the evenings, our daily work remained much the same as when the hosts were present, yet it felt far more at ease. Labour and life in the countryside could, after all, be this unburdened—without the need to constantly second-guess boundaries or seek approval from the householder at every turn.
It was precisely this contrast that sharpened my awareness of the value of urban public life. In theory, a fully formed institutional society shields the individual through law and civic networks. Though background and chance may consign many to becoming victims of being “stuck somewhere”, to be frank, most still retain a “safety net” escape route: sell one’s labour for wages to secure the basics of survival.
The countryside operates differently. Food is not readily purchasable (unless one drives forty-five minutes to Walmart), turning sustenance into a concrete concern. With neither land nor produce of their own, volunteers inevitably subconsciously adopt maintaining good relations with the “landowner” as a basic survival strategy. While this holds up when things run smoothly, it fractures the moment one falls ill: devoid of the familiar safeguards of employment rights, even taking a rest becomes quietly unsettling.
To be fair, Arie and Annette never went short on food, nor did they ever treat me poorly. Yet this is precisely where the issue lies: micro-ecological communities such as family farms and work-exchange stays run almost entirely on personal goodwill, while lacking the necessary oversight and avenues for recourse. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that so many well-intentioned “ecovillages” ultimately fizzle out.
So be it. For me, once this way of life passed its “best-before date”, it at least left open the possibility of stepping away at will. After my stint as a volunteer ended, I wandered the markets alone in Toulouse, rediscovering a desire to shop that I thought long lost. Back in the familiar realm of consumerism, no one expected me to be up at dawn for work. A few euros bought a whole day of idling, and croissants could see me through every meal.
Yet without that month of unremunerated labour, I doubt I would have grasped so acutely the value of the modern world. The flip side of the “alienation” we so often discuss may not lie in a return to traditional village bonds, but rather in whether one possesses the space and right to move freely within and out of institutional society.
That said, one cannot help but yearn for poetry and distant horizons, letting the imagination run wild with visions of rural life. Yet unless you step into the arena and put yourself through the reality of it, it is hard to tell whether such a “distant place” will taste like honey or arsenic.
All images in this article are provided by the author.
Editor: Tianle