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Founded in 1925 in the garden behind his grandfather's pub, as well as growing blueberries, it is now the country's biggest asparagus supplier and produces a variety of fruit and vegetables for the major supermarkets.
how far is it from Arcadia Park to Legg Lake
no all you need is just your country passport
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
This is the season for gathering blueberries and French beans, however, and on a golden October day the rolling hills would ordinarily teem with legions of pickers — almost all migrant workers from Eastern Europe, these days — filling plastic crates.
So why on earth could I only find £5 packs of blueberries from far-distant Peru on the shelves of the Marks & Spencer store, in Monmouth, last week, but none from the nearby farm — which has a contract to supply the supermarket chain?
Critics claim this was done to show she was tough on immigration — apparently ignoring the fact that seasonal workers stay in Britain for only a few months (during which they pay taxes and National Insurance) and do not even count towards the Government's own migration figures.
They also appear well cared for. They pay £52.85 a week for on-site lodging in mobile homes, have use of a new social centre with games, computers, free wifi and a canteen serving Eastern European food.
Meanwhile, in Sussex, 150 tonnes of lettuce have had to remain uncut in the past few weeks; during the summer eight tonnes of Class One Scottish strawberries went unpicked; and at Haygrove, a major soft-fruit farm near Ledbury, Herefordshire, 87,000 punnets of raspberries have just been written off through lack of manpower.
According to Adrian Apostol, who first came to Cobrey Farm eight years ago and has worked his way up to a permanent supervisory job, Brexit-related uncertainty over the future status of Europeans in Britain has also discouraged some pickers from coming this year, and persuaded others to leave the country early.
However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Should you have any kind of queries relating to where as well as tips on how to employ Mercan Grooup, you can e-mail us from our own web site. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
'If we had enough workers to pick all our fruit, you would have found our blueberries in Monmouth M&S, not Peruvian ones, because we supply the company and they are generally very supportive of British suppliers,' the 38-year-old farmer told me worriedly.
Last Wednesday, though, only about 100 were working the fields in their orange-and-green overalls — just half the number needed to strip all the beans and pluck the ripened berries before they begin to rot.
The latter two countries now supply 95 per cent of Cobrey Farm's casual labour-force, which peaks at 1,000 in summer. Though the work is long and tiring, they are paid £8.21 an hour and can earn between £300 and £500 a week with bonuses and overtime.
'We'd send a ten-tonne stock-lorry around the estates, and they'd clamber in the back and spend the day working in the fields. Some would bring their babies in prams, leaving them beside the fields, and older children might play in the hills,' he smiled.
'I don't want to accuse them of being a generation of lazy people. I don't think that's true. [But] if you are in a settled situation, you are probably not going to risk losing your benefits for a couple of weeks on an asparagus farm.'
Although 1.3 million people in Britain are officially out of work, and a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggested the true figure could be more than three times higher, the welfare benefits system may also deter people from taking seasonal work, he suggests.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
The farm lobby says the next influx of pickers will have to come from outside the EU, from huge countries where low wages and unemployment remain a problem. Places such as Ukraine — which already sends tens of thousands of seasonal farm-workers to Germany — and Russia.
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.
Founded in 1925 in the garden behind his grandfather's pub, as well as growing blueberries, it is now the country's biggest asparagus supplier and produces a variety of fruit and vegetables for the major supermarkets.
how far is it from Arcadia Park to Legg Lake
no all you need is just your country passport
They are demanding that the Government grants immediate entry to the 70,000 workers they need so as to compete with the multinational farming giants that have colonised great swathes of South America and Africa, and are intent on flooding Britain's supermarkets.
This is the season for gathering blueberries and French beans, however, and on a golden October day the rolling hills would ordinarily teem with legions of pickers — almost all migrant workers from Eastern Europe, these days — filling plastic crates.
So why on earth could I only find £5 packs of blueberries from far-distant Peru on the shelves of the Marks & Spencer store, in Monmouth, last week, but none from the nearby farm — which has a contract to supply the supermarket chain?
Critics claim this was done to show she was tough on immigration — apparently ignoring the fact that seasonal workers stay in Britain for only a few months (during which they pay taxes and National Insurance) and do not even count towards the Government's own migration figures.
They also appear well cared for. They pay £52.85 a week for on-site lodging in mobile homes, have use of a new social centre with games, computers, free wifi and a canteen serving Eastern European food.
Meanwhile, in Sussex, 150 tonnes of lettuce have had to remain uncut in the past few weeks; during the summer eight tonnes of Class One Scottish strawberries went unpicked; and at Haygrove, a major soft-fruit farm near Ledbury, Herefordshire, 87,000 punnets of raspberries have just been written off through lack of manpower.
According to Adrian Apostol, who first came to Cobrey Farm eight years ago and has worked his way up to a permanent supervisory job, Brexit-related uncertainty over the future status of Europeans in Britain has also discouraged some pickers from coming this year, and persuaded others to leave the country early.
However, Eastern Europeans had a very different mind-set. Should you have any kind of queries relating to where as well as tips on how to employ Mercan Grooup, you can e-mail us from our own web site. Desperate to escape low-paid jobs and better themselves and their families, they were perfectly prepared to slog all day, in wind and rain and cloying mud.
'If we had enough workers to pick all our fruit, you would have found our blueberries in Monmouth M&S, not Peruvian ones, because we supply the company and they are generally very supportive of British suppliers,' the 38-year-old farmer told me worriedly.
Last Wednesday, though, only about 100 were working the fields in their orange-and-green overalls — just half the number needed to strip all the beans and pluck the ripened berries before they begin to rot.
The latter two countries now supply 95 per cent of Cobrey Farm's casual labour-force, which peaks at 1,000 in summer. Though the work is long and tiring, they are paid £8.21 an hour and can earn between £300 and £500 a week with bonuses and overtime.
'We'd send a ten-tonne stock-lorry around the estates, and they'd clamber in the back and spend the day working in the fields. Some would bring their babies in prams, leaving them beside the fields, and older children might play in the hills,' he smiled.
'I don't want to accuse them of being a generation of lazy people. I don't think that's true. [But] if you are in a settled situation, you are probably not going to risk losing your benefits for a couple of weeks on an asparagus farm.'
Although 1.3 million people in Britain are officially out of work, and a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggested the true figure could be more than three times higher, the welfare benefits system may also deter people from taking seasonal work, he suggests.
The fall in the value of the pound — largely caused by uncertainty over Brexit — is another important factor. Romanians still willing to travel abroad for work increasingly prefer other European countries, particularly Germany, which has introduced incentives such as tax-breaks to entice Eastern European farm labourers.
The farm lobby says the next influx of pickers will have to come from outside the EU, from huge countries where low wages and unemployment remain a problem. Places such as Ukraine — which already sends tens of thousands of seasonal farm-workers to Germany — and Russia.
There are several reasons for this, and they vary depending on who you speak to. Alexandru Barbacaru is director of Bucharest-based Est-Vest Services, an employment agency which supplies British farms with temporary workers.