IN the summer of 1974,bored with our office jobs, my friend and I quit and went to do seasonal work in Cambridgeshire in agriculture and at the Smedley canning factory at Wisbech.

The work was hard and tediously boring. Weeding onions and picking strawberries were bad enough, but worst of all was standing next to a conveyor in tremendous heat and humidity at Smedley’s watching processed peas go past, inspecting for a pea pod, a black pea or a caterpillar.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as a one-off experience, because most of the workers were young and the majority were from abroad, especially from Ireland, but even then, there were a significant number of Portuguese and a few young Polish people as well.

The point I am making is that even in 1974, British farming and food processing were both highly dependent upon unskilled foreign labour and that dependence has massively increased with the subsequent expansion of intensive agriculture, especially in East Anglia and the South of England.

I am very much in favour of leaving the EU, but if as the government proposes only skilled workers are allowed into the UK using a so-called points-based system then agriculture and food processing, (which happens to be Britain’s most successful manufacturing industry) will both suffer greatly.

There are already massive labour shortages in agriculture without making things much worse. If foreign workers are not allowed to undertake unskilled work, then there this leaves two alternatives.

Either the government can allow sections of agriculture and the food industry to go to the wall, or British young people will have to be conscripted into the countryside.

John Gilmore, Bishop Auckland.