Picking Strawberries with Colombian Undocumented Workers in Rural France
Today, many people are beginning to seriously consider the value and meaning of rural life, with some even attempting to incorporate farm work and country living into their future life plans. In an era fraught with risk and instability, Foodthink hopes to support young people interested in food and agriculture—particularly those wishing to pursue agroecology—in finding their own path and ‘replanting’ themselves in healthy soil.
Building on the experience of the first four iterations, Foodthink launched recruitment for the 2026 “Agroecology Internship Programme” in mid-December. We received an enthusiastic response as soon as the announcement was posted. This recruitment window closes tomorrow (7 January). For those interested in agroecological cultivation techniques, planning and operations, or the specifics of farm life, please scan the QR code to apply!
I. First Arrival at the Farm
The process wasn’t complicated, but it required mutual consent: the length of stay, personality and practical skills, work intensity, visa issues, and even ideological leanings were all factors in this two-way selection. Some farms were inaccessible by public transport, some required outdoor camping, and others simply didn’t have availability that matched my dates. Eventually, by a stroke of luck, I connected with a well-rated work-exchange farm in western France.
La Rochelle, facing the Atlantic, is a typical French port city that still retains remnants of its medieval fortifications. One day in May, I flew in from London and stood in the 8 a.m. sea breeze, waiting for the intercity bus. Half an hour later, the bus dropped me off alone at a stop on a country lane. As far as the eye could see were flat plains of wheat and maize, with a few scattered white wind turbines in the distance. The scenery was hardly pleasant, and combined with the long journey, I was exhausted before I had even started working. Just as I was feeling regretful and thinking of heading home, a rattling van pulled up, and a middle-aged man in a frayed sleeveless shirt and sports sunglasses walked towards me. Thus began my month-long experience as a free farm hand in France.
Ale was in his sixties, Argentine, and had lived in France for half his life. He was full of energy and acted with decisive efficiency; it was clear he was always the one to take charge, a trait fitting for a man named Alexandre. His entrance theme should have been a Paso Doble.
His wife, Annette, was a French Jew who wore red glasses and always had a slight downturn to the corners of her mouth. She responded to ninety per cent of conversations with the quintessential French “ah, bah…”, followed by a shake of the head. After spending time with her, you’d realise that Annette was a pseudo-cynic; she seemed to be doing her utmost to perform the ‘effortless’ detachment expected of a French person, but in reality, she was a whimsical child at heart.
Aside from flour, milk, building materials, and rennet (an enzyme from cow stomachs used to make cheese), the couple had very few expenses. On the seven-hectare farm, there were no paid employees because the daily labour was primarily carried out by work-exchange volunteers like me. A revolving door of volunteers, a permanent estate. Young people from all over the world with an interest in agriculture came to help them look after the animals, do farm work, and renovate the house inside and out.
Whether it was agroecology, animal husbandry, cooking, winemaking, house building, furniture making, or repairing kayaks, the volunteers who travelled from afar didn’t just provide labour; they always learned something in the process. After all, those who travel thousands of miles to volunteer on a farm are seeking to broaden their life experiences, adding skill points—like opening a blind box—that the ‘cogs’ of the city would never have the chance to master.
II. My Farm Mates
I pushed open the dorm door to find three other people inside. Joanna, 23 and petite, was sitting on her bed practising French on Duolingo. Danny was Jo’s younger brother. When they met Ale, this Colombian sibling pair’s European tourist visas had already expired, but they had no intention of returning home and were working illegally in small Spanish towns. Ale told them they could transition through his place in France, and that he would provide the invitation letters required for volunteer visas.
I had previously assumed that the main force of work-exchange volunteers were either wealthy young people seeking life experiences or ‘nomads’ who spent money when they had it and slept on sofas when they didn’t. I hadn’t expected to find undocumented labourers from Latin America. Many European industries rely heavily on imported labour; for instance, European agriculture has a huge demand for seasonal workers capable of hard labour, with one in four agricultural workers being a mobile temporary migrant—and that’s just for contracted workers. Meanwhile, between 2016 and 2023, there were over two million workers in Europe without legal status.
After several months of day labour in Spain, Jo and Danny realised that what they needed most was legal residency. A small farm like Ale’s didn’t have high demands for their labour, and while there was no salary, it didn’t leave them in a position where they could be deported at any moment. So, they came here to do unpaid odd jobs in exchange for food and lodging, waiting for the opportunity to obtain formal work visas.
Then there was Miguel, a boy with gelled hair. Miguel wasn’t undocumented, nor did he know Danny and Jo; they just happened to all be from Colombia. He had attended international schools from a young age, loved chips and sushi, had no interest in hard work, and was clearly unwilling to spend another day there.
Among the three, Miguel’s English was the best, so he spoke with me more. Communication between Jo and me relied on simple English, Google Translate, and body language. Danny didn’t speak a word of English; he called me “hen” (the Spanish pronunciation of Jen), yet we shared a rapport akin to that of cellmates.
III. Work and Life on the Farm
In front of the house, there was an irrigation ditch and two vegetable patches. Occasionally, a mother swan would glide past with her cygnets in the channel. I heard they used to keep pigs, but by the time I arrived, they had already been turned into sausages. There was also a Border Collie named Lila and four free-roaming kittens.
In the mornings, Miguel would gather the chicken and duck eggs, Danny would use the mower to trim the lawn, Joanna would do the cleaning, and I would pull weeds by the front door. Odd jobs like pruning and tying branches, sanding boards, or fixing water pipes were handled by whoever happened to be free.
In spring, only strawberries and beetroots grew in the front garden; most of the crops were still in the nursery greenhouse. Picking strawberries requires crouching in the dirt and rummaging through the leaves; by the time you finally spot a large, perfectly ripe berry, there is a high probability that a snail or a slug has already claimed it. Watching a small basket of strawberries, collected over several hours, be crushed into ice cream left me sighing at the waste. Harvesting beetroots was much easier—similar to pulling carrots. The moment they were pulled, I would bet on the size of the root: sometimes the lushest leaves hid only a tiny root, while the most inconspicuous sprout might conceal a massive beetroot. Unformed cucumbers and light-green varieties lay tumbled in the seedbeds. Just before I left, I finally got to taste the first tomato, though it was still half-raw.
What left the deepest impression was the work we did renovating the external walls in the days before my departure. This involved smashing off the outer layer of the walls and reapplying lime plaster. I would swing my right arm, putting all my strength into hammering the wall to shatter the existing lime shell. Since the walls had been renovated in stages, hitting a lime layer was fine—it would flake off after a few strikes—but hitting cement was a different story. No matter how hard I hit, the wall remained unmoved. Looking at my companions still working around me, I could only carry on. At seven in the evening, as the sun dipped, I squatted on the scaffolding and thought to myself: this is the ultimate version of unpaid labour.
IV. Jewish-style French Farmhouse Meals
Breakfast consisted of bread made by Annette, served with jam and butter. At 8:20, once finished, we headed to work. The 10:30 tea break featured two Madeleines and an espresso. Lunch was usually more substantial: pork knuckle stewed with kidney beans and rice, polenta with sausage, or duck confit with bread—the kind of Continental feasts that would cost hundreds of yuan per person in Beijing. After eating, I would pass out for an hour in a food coma, then at two o’clock, another coffee, a small cake, and back to work on time.
Dinner was always beetroot leaf soup, bread, and homemade cheese. May is the peak harvest season for beetroots. Miguel spoke fluent American English and his favourite films were the Rocky action series starring Stallone; while the soup was simmering in the evening, he would always complain about the lack of burgers. But no one paid attention to his Hollywood fantasies.
Annette would clip the leaves, throw them into a pot of boiling water with salt, and then blend them with an electric mixer. The six of us would huddle around a large pot of deep green soup, often too exhausted to speak, the only sound being spoons clinking against porcelain bowls. We also ate artichokes for a few days. Artichokes look like the buds of some Jurassic plant; after being cut with garden shears and steamed, they are peeled petal by petal. The base of the petals is tender and can be eaten with a dollop of whipped mayonnaise. The deeper you peel, the more tender it becomes, with the artichoke heart being the final, delicious bite. Eventually, the artichokes were picked clean, and we went back to the beetroot leaf soup.
But where did the beetroots—which could have been used for Borscht—go? They were canned. The five of us processed a mountain of beetroots: peeling, boiling, and sterilising the jars. Once canned, we poured in a mixture of watered-down white vinegar, bay leaves, peppercorns, and salt, then sealed them. This wasn’t the end; the jars were then placed in a giant steamer, the size of a water tank, and given a “sauna” on the gas stove to thoroughly sterilise them. Unlike fermented pickles in a crock, these canned beetroots would not ferment or turn sour; when opened in winter, they would still taste of fresh beetroot.
One day, the cheese ran out. Annette took me to a nearby cattle farm, where we collected ten kilograms of raw milk. We added a few drops of rennet—an enzyme unique to the stomachs of ruminants—into the milk pail, stirred it, and waited until the next day for the casein to coagulate so the whey could be drained. The rest was left to the magic of time. The longer the fermentation, the richer the flavour of the cheese.
Homemade cheese was paired with home-brewed Pineau des Charentes, an aperitif sweet wine popular in western France. Whenever Ale was in a good mood, he would open a bottle just for the sake of it. But regardless, every Friday evening, this fine wine would invariably appear in the kitchen.
Friday evening is the Jewish Shabbat. Aside from enriched breads like Danishes, the bread the French here eat as a staple usually contains only flour, water, salt, and yeast. But every Friday, Annette would make challah: a braided bread made with eggs and milk, served with hummus and homemade canned chicken gizzards in oil. Before we ate, we would light nine candles, form a circle, hold hands, and pray. When making a toast, we would say “L’chaim” (לְחַיִּים, in Hebrew), meaning “to life” or “to your health.”
Weekends were our own, but finding “entertainment” was no easy feat. Miguel and I ventured into town once. With no transport of our own, it was over an hour’s walk to the nearest bus stop, meaning we had to set off shortly after six in the morning. Because the country lanes had no streetlights, we had to scramble home before dark. It reminded me of the stories I’d read about the hardships previous generations faced on their way to school, yet I had only made the trip to La Rochelle once.
Occasionally, Alain and Annette would treat us all to beers in a nearby village of fewer than a thousand people. The minibus would unload a motley crew: a middle-aged couple, three Latin Americans, one East Asian, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Israeli girl. In the local pub, a group of men on the verge of alcohol poisoning were gathered around a game of Jenga; they paused their blocks to raise a glass to us foreigners.
V. The Non-Commodified Rural Society
Looking back on that month, my people-pleasing nature perhaps earned me a certain level of “care”: I was more proactive with the work and more willing to chat with the hosts, so I wasn’t assigned the particularly grueling tasks. In contrast, young Miguel was somewhat burdened by his own image, always wanting to appear different from the other two Colombians. This pretension was quickly seen through, and Alain and Annette would occasionally show their impatience—not out of malice, really, but more like the indifference one shows a bothersome younger brother.
For many, performing this kind of emotional labour within a household of strangers can hardly be described as a romantic rural experience.
However, the opposite of the volunteer life is not a simple longing for the material abundance of a commodified society. One week, the owners had to travel far, leaving Joe in complete charge of the house and farm. During that time, we lived a surreal and peaceful existence: there was little talking, and the three of us simply followed Joe’s lead. Aside from sleeping an hour longer at midday and allowing myself the luxury of frying a duck egg for dinner, our daily labour was no different from when the hosts were present—yet it felt far more liberating. It turned out that working and living in the countryside could be effortless when you didn’t have to constantly second-guess boundaries or seek permission for every move.
It was this contrast that made me more acutely aware of the value of urban public systems. In theory, a well-functioning institutional society protects the individual through law and urban communities. While birth and luck leave many as victims “trapped” in certain circumstances, the truth is that most still possess a “last resort” escape route: working for wages to secure the basics of life.
In the countryside, it is different. Food cannot be bought on a whim (unless you drive forty-five minutes to a Walmart), and eating becomes a genuine problem. Volunteers own neither land nor food; maintaining a good relationship with the “landowner” inevitably becomes a subconscious survival strategy. This is sustainable as long as everything goes smoothly, but as soon as you feel unwell, the problem manifests: without the protection of familiar labour rights, even taking a rest becomes slightly anxiety-inducing.
Of course, Alain and Annette never let anyone go hungry, nor did they mistreat me. This is precisely where the problem lies: micro-ecological communities, such as family farms and work-exchange stays, operate almost entirely on individual goodwill, yet lack the necessary oversight and mechanisms for protecting rights. Perhaps this is why many “eco-communities” started with the best of intentions eventually fizzle out.
Still, for me, once this way of life had passed its “best-before date”, I at least retained the possibility of leaving at any moment. After my time as a volunteer ended, I wandered the markets of Toulouse alone, rediscovering a long-lost desire to shop. Returning to the familiar world of consumption, no one expected me to wake up at dawn to work; for a dozen euros, I could buy myself a full day’s lie-in, and I could eat croissants for every meal.
Yet, without that month of non-wage labour, I might never have understood so intimately the preciousness of modern society. The other side of the “alienation” we often discuss is perhaps not a return to traditional village community relations, but rather whether one possesses the space and the right to enter and exit institutional society freely.
That said, it is human nature to yearn for “poetry and distant lands”, and to project many fantasies onto rural life. But unless you step into the game and experience it firsthand, it is hard to know whether such a destination tastes of honey or arsenic.
All images provided by the author
Editor: Tianle