It’s getting harder and harder to attract workers

After falling out with a family of core pickers last autumn, it has been tough to gather together a new crew capable of picking the 1,000 stems an hour that is required for them to make the minimum wage.

Pick of the bunch: Doina Seiceanu, one of the pickers in Darragh McCullough’s daffodil fields

Darragh McCullough on his farm in Meath

Pick of the bunch: Doina Seiceanu, one of the pickers in Darragh McCullough’s daffodil fields

Darragh McCullough on his farm in Meath

February 07 2023 02:30 AM

I’m writing this sitting in my jeep on the headland of my daffodil field. We’ve been picking since the middle of January but the flowers have been reluctant to push on out of the ground, with the night-time temperatures hovering around 2-3˚C.

That all changed in 24 hours over the weekend, when suddenly we switched from hunting up and down the rows for stems that were long enough to pick, to a point where masses of the chalk-green heads were hitting the critical 30cm length.

The sudden turnaround has re-energised the pickers, who were getting frustrated with working half-days. Over the last three weeks, men and women have been arriving at the farm in ones, twos and threes from Budapest, Bucharest and Moldova. All are keen to make money.

After falling out with a family of core pickers last autumn, I had been anxious about whether I would be able to gather together a new crew that would be capable of picking the 1,000 stems an hour that is required for them to make the minimum wage.

It’s tough going, especially when the wind and rain is blowing, the mud is sucking your boots into the drills, and the constant bending and pulling leaves your limbs tired and tender.

Thankfully, a good number of the Romanian crew I’ve been employing for over six years turned up ready to reap the harvest.

A Moldovan crew are slowing getting up to speed, so it’s only the Hungarians that I’m concerned about at this stage.

From the moment they landed in Dublin and introduced themselves in their flawless English, I was concerned that they might not cut it in the daffodil fields.

They had degrees in social work, experience in tour guiding and retail, and had somehow decided that picking flowers in an Irish field in January sounded like a fun adventure.

After nearly two weeks, they are still struggling to pick even 50pc of what my experienced Romanian pickers are managing.

One has decided to quit, which is demoralising for everyone since they will have barely saved enough to cover the cost of the flights back home.

But the remaining crew still manage a bright jó reggelt when I arrive to collect them each gloomy morning as dawn struggles to break.

It’s their way of teaching me some basic Hungarian greetings so that I can add it to my repertoire of key Romanian phrases.

The Moldovans seem to converse in Romanian, which suits everyone fine.

But with every passing year, I’m becoming less and less confident that I will be able to attract people to tog out for the work I have on offer in my 100ac of daffodils.

Of course, some genius will figure out how to automate picking with a robot at some point over the next 20 years, but even if a machine was rolled out tomorrow for the biggest daffodil producers in the world (who have 4,000ac by the way), it would be well over a decade before it would be affordable for small fry like me.

Luckily, conditions have remained remarkably dry so far, so we haven’t had to deal with some of the regular issues of mud on the stems, tractors getting stuck and general hardship trying to stick to a spray and fertiliser programme.

But this is very early days. We have only about 10pc of the crop harvested at this point, so the next seven weeks are when the true story for my 2023 harvest will emerge.

Already this morning I saw my sales plan take a speed wobble when I opened my emails to find one export customer politely inform me that after a good night’s sleep, he had decided that it was better to cancel the order for the rest of the season.

I could feel the panic curdling in my gut. I was banking on selling about 20pc of my crop to this customer.

It seemed out of character, since we had traded without any issues for the last few years, and the only possible explanation was that he was annoyed that I hadn’t prioritised his deliveries over my biggest customer.

A quick phone call later it emerged that this was exactly the problem, and in fact the email had been sent after a very bad night’s sleep!

Thankfully, when I was able to promise a couple of pallets on the next truck heading for Amsterdam, and my gut settled itself back down again.

But it is disconcerting how much of what happens in life is so dependent on the whims and humours of people and how they get on with each other.

It almost makes a joke out of all the effort that goes into perfecting the farming techniques used to grow the best product possible.

Darragh McCullough runs a mixed farm enterprise in Meath, elmgrovefarm.ie