Farming in Cornwall is often a focus of nostalgia, seen as a bastion of tradition, but traditional ways of working have been superseded as efficiencies demanded by supermarkets and the global economy exert pressure on the industry.

Cornish farms have always used ‘migrant’ labour in the shape of gypsies and travellers, but today’s influx is on a larger scale, with an estimated 50,000 migrants, mostly from Europe, working in the South West of Britain.

Modern farming is big business, driven by the imperatives not only of the weather and the seasons but of contracts and delivery dates. With this, a way of life for casual workers and travelling people has all but ended.

Ian Johnson, spokesman for NFU South West, said: “The itinerant lifestyle is considerably more difficult these days – it’s not easy to be a traveller.

“It’s quite different now – you can’t just go where you will, and there’s the propensity of landowners to block off anywhere where these wagons can pull off. You don’t get large convoys like there used to be going back 15 or 20 years.”

He added: “Nowadays the labour provided by Eastern European people is indispensable, and farmers find it very difficult to get anyone local interested.

“You can call it progress – a lot of people won’t – but unfortunately it’s the way of the world and nobody can disagree that it’s happening. For better or worse, the pattern of labour required, the way it is used and the way it is deployed, has changed.