16/04/20 - Seasonal workers, wild garlic and rural mental health

Farming Today

• Episode: 16/04/20 - Seasonal workers, wild garlic and rural mental health
• Website: Farming Today
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj8q/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:13:25
• Published: 2020-04-16 07:00

A chartered flight carrying 180 Romanian farm workers is due to land at Stansted today. It's not the first such flight bringing pickers from Eastern Europe to help out with harvest work, and won’t be the last. But with tens of thousands of British workers now registering their interest in working on farms this summer is it necessary or wise to fly workers in? Wild Garlic is popular with foragers and has been used as a source of food for centuries, flourishing in the hungry gap before the new season of UK crops arrives in earnest. And although we think of it as a wild plant, one farming couple have started selling the seeds online. We hear from the beautiful, secluded valley where the garlic grows. This week a group of farming charities are getting together to offer support to people in rural areas - Farming Help incorporates 6 organisations from the Prince’s Countryside Fund to RABI and Forage Aid, which can offer help to people or businesses in need. And our latest Farming Today Audio Diary comes from a dairy farm in West Wales. Presented by Charlotte Smith Produced by Heather Simons