A hop garden at dusk
Matej - a tractor driver and economics student
Aneta - an apple picker and psychology student
Wasted apples
Apple bins in storage before the harvest begins
Matt - the hop dryer and hop manager
Hops, frames and wires in the hop garden
One of the farm's vintage tractors
Jiri - a member of the barrow team, waiter and gallery assistant
Tomas - a tractor driver and social anthropology student
Jan - a barrow team member and nano-chemistry student
The machine shed near sunset
Spen - the machine foreman
The workshop at Barn Hill
The track through the hop garden
Charlie - the 'hook up'
Bob - a longtime apple picker
Lee - a farm labourer
Apple gauges - picked apples must be within these sizes or be discarded to rot
Andrea - an apple picker and economics student
The door to the fan room
Spen's machine oil and tools
The lower orchard at Barn Hill
Lada - a tractor driver and physiotherapist
The Bruff hop picking machine, built in 1953
Spen's hands after repairing the Bruff
Pavla - a 'passer upper' and environmental biotechnology student
Outside the hut where the hoppers and pickers stay
Shampoo in the shower room
Tereza - a shed team member and trainee teacher
Ondrej - a barrow team member and economics student
A derelict hopper hut

Hoppers & Pickers

Bullen Farm, in the Low Weald of Kent, has harvested hops and apples for four generations. As the harvest ends, the air of the Low Weald smells sweetly of apples, rotting on the ground. Mr Wheeler says the hops and apples don’t pay much any more. When the creaking hop frames fall down he won’t replace them. But the farm seems to keep going - the old tractors and the hop picking machine have been running since the 1950s. The Czech workers joke that it is like a museum.

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