AN INSTANT village to house 900 foreign agricultural workers is springing up in Herefordshire. Dozens of mobile homes will house the students from Russia and Eastern Europe, who will be permitted to stay for up to six months.

The new village, on a five-acre site at Brierley, near Leominster, will include shops, a health centre, a swimming pool, disco and even a sauna.

The aim is to keep the workers, mainly university students in their early 20s, from overwhelming the ancient hamlet of black and white, half-timbered houses, which has a population of 30.

Articulated lorries have been winding their way along narrow country lanes for several weeks, delivering the mobile homes. They will welcome their first residents in May, when the migrant workers will begin picking strawberries which, for the first time, are being grown all year round at a 350-acre farm in Brierley.

Last year the Home Office increased the numbers of seasonal agricultural workers allowed into Britain from 10,000 to 25,000. The initiative was in part of an attempt to break the grip of gangmasters who exploit workers who have overstayed their welcome by paying them a pittance.

Each student will work a five-day week, earning up to £125 a day, and the strawberries they pick will be sold in supermarkets across Britain.

Most will stay for three months, although some will stay as long as six. The seasonal pickers, from universities in Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and China, can earn more money in a few months in England than they can in several years in their home countries.

The project began after S&A Produce, which already operates a strawberry farm at nearby Marden employing 800 foreign workers, bought a 350- acre former hop farm last summer. Graham Neal, the managing director, said the scheme should also provide 200 jobs for local people.

He said: “About 900 students in their early 20s are coming under a Home Office-backed scheme for seasonal agricultural workers. “Eight or nine hundred people is a lot to a village so the solution is to have one site where they are accommodated where we’ll take care of their health and entertainment.”

Laura Rimkute, 24, a Lithuanian student on her second strawberry-picking season at the Marden farm, said she was using the experience as a case study for a degree in agricultural business administration.

She said: “I’ll be writing my diploma about the practices I’ve learnt here. I enjoy my time here. When someone’s leaving they always ask, ‘When can you come back?’ ” Unusually, the prospect of an “invasion” is welcomed by villagers. John Clark, who has lived in Brierley for 19 years, said: “We were apprehensive at first. We heard rumours but we had a meeting with them and basically we are fairly happy about the way things are going.”

Alan Pryce, 40, a farmer, said: “It’s modern farming and you have to do what makes money. Whether it pleases everyone I don’t know.”

His neighbour, Jocelyn Poole, who has lived in the village for 30 years, said: “They have kept us well informed about what they are doing.”

Catherine Fothergill, a councillor in Leominster, was afraid that noise from the site could cause a problem. “We’re concerned about importing a load of non-local people to work up there and we’re worried about the massive recreational complex, which will have a disco and bring a lot of noise.”

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