What is fruit-picking really like and is it reasonable work for pensioners?

I've always thought of fruit-picking as a rather romantic endeavour: young, fit men stripped of their shirts; rippling muscles bent over vines; bulging arms reaching up every now and again to mop glistening brows. The reality, though, is somewhat different. Fruit-picking is hard, physically demanding work.

While for some people picking fruit is a gruelling gap-year funder, for others it's an indispensable means to an end. Nowadays, most fruit and vegetable-picking in the UK is done by migrant workers from Eastern Europe. Agricultural technology might be improving, but the work still requires a human hand's delicate touch, and workers from countries such as Romania and Bulgaria are often the only ones willing to do the back-breaking labour.

Fruit-picking is in the news: in a new book, former Liberal Democrat minister David Laws claims that Tory Coalition colleague Owen Paterson, former environment secretary, suggested that pensioners be employed to pick fruit – for less than minimum wage – as a replacement for workers from Romania and Bulgaria who would be lost with the scrapping of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme in 2013. (Paterson disputes the allegation, saying the proposal was actually made by industry insiders.)

So what is the life of a fruit-picker really like? And would OAPs be able to hack it? Perhaps not. One fruit-picking friend, who grew up in New Zealand and used to pick kiwi fruit in the Bay of Plenty (where the bulk of the world's kiwi fruit comes from), says early morning starts were a struggle.

“Picking was from 8am to about 4.30pm with a 10-minute tea break and half-hour lunch,” he says. “The orchard was a good 45 minutes away from my house, and we were expected to be there on time or we missed the lift to wherever we were picking.”

Typically, fruit pickers are ferried to and from picking sites by gangmasters – a rather threatening name for people who essentially organise and oversee work done by manual labourers.

Some orchards, my fruity friend tells me, paid pickers by the hour, while others paid by weight. “The places that paid by weight were more brutal,” he says. “If you slacked off, then the whole team suffered, because each crew poured their fruit into the same bin and the weight was divided up equally.”

But there were ways to cheat the system. A colleague, who asked not to be named, admitted to slipping stones into his strawberry punnets whenever he took them up to be weighed, thus boosting his own pay packet. “It really hurt your back, so you ended up doing it on your knees rather than squatting,” he says. “By the end of the day, your knees would be covered in strawberry jam and that's what you smelt of.”

Another anonymous fruit-picker tells me, rather wistfully, that he spent the harvest of 1968 picking raspberries in Perthshire with a schoolfriend. “The work was pretty relentless,” he says, although he concedes that it was more holiday than hard graft.

Picking fruit is still a popular job for students and backpackers. In Australia and New Zealand, a lot of the fruit-picking work is done by tourists on a working holiday visa. In fact, in some parts of Australia, travellers can add another year to their visas in return for three months fruit-picking.

Ultimately, although not the most exhilarating of jobs, it continues to provides essential work to those willing and able to do it. “I smile when I see kiwi fruit in the supermarket,” says my New Zealand pal. “Some poor sod had to get up before sunrise on a frosty morning to pick them.”