Farm Work
I came to Australia for the purpose of doing a farm-work, firstly to get a second year visa and secondly for the experience. Thus, I did it during 5 months.
In all farms, there are 2 mains parts.
Firstly, there is the work in the shed where fruits are sort out by size and quality and then are packed on boxes. Girls take care about this part. After that, one or two guys transport these boxes on palettes which will be moved until the delivery point.
Secondly, there is the paddock work. Here, work changes regarding to the kind of fruits and veggies.
My first farm was Zugno, which was a mangoes farm in Mutchilba. I've worked mostly in the shed where I carried all the boxes and moved palettes. It was extremely fast and the temperature was mostly of the time around 35°c.
I've also worked in the paddock and it was more relax. Indeed, we had to pick mangoes with a stick and then put it on the tractor which was spraying a chemical product. The little extra was we could eat ripe mangoes directly picked from the tree. The taste was incredible.
However, the big problem with mangoes was the sap. In fact, the sap gives the mango rash and you get patch of bumps in all your body which is really REALLY itchy and you could have your face swelling. A lot of people went to hospital ans some get disfigure.
My second farm was the OZ Orchards farm, an avocados and paw-paw farm. Because they started the season before the others farms, we mostly did pruning. Temperatures were around 35°c until 40°c;
there was no shade and;
there were dangerous spiders in EACH tree and always a different one (I saw all the size and colors of spider)
But the problem was not really those hard conditions. The problem was about the boss who put a lot of pressure so we had to be super fast. In this way, we had to enter on the tree headlong to prune but it was impossible to know before where spiders were. So sometimes, we realized that the spider was 10 centimeters under your head, and that's happened with a RED BACK, which one is plainly the second most dangerous spider.
For the paw-paw, we had to pick fruits with a scale distinguishing males and females. Here again, spiders were huge and frightening but it was easier to spot them. The problem was the sap which was extremely acid and gave skin burning. Consequently we decided with Matteo, Marco and Nika to stop this shitty farm after 2 weeks for the inhuman conditions.
My third farm was Howe Farming. This farm grew bananas, coffee beans, berries and avocados. I've worked for almost 4 months mostly on bananas. This farm is huge and appreciated by workers.
You have to know that banana farms are a concentrate of chemical products and I became disgust by bananas. Here are all the different positions on the paddock:
- Humper: Hardest job, the humpers pick banana bench which can weigh until 80 kg.
- Bell Injector: They injected everyday poison on the banana bells . Just few centiliters could kill a man.
- Deleafer: With a big sickle , they remove useless leaves to give a better sun exposition.
- Disucker: That was my main position. With a machete, I had to cut all the "suckers", that means trees which sucks the water from good trees. First of all, to understand what is a good tree, you have to know that mothers are trees with banana benches and that around this one, will grow many little trees and we call them "daughters".
Then we have a direction to respect in the raw. It's either mother-daughter or daughter-mother. Thus, we'll check if there is any gap between 2 mothers which should be around our arm span. Everything between the good size of gap has to be cut. Finally, we will keep just ONE daughter regarding to the her size and her position.
Dieseler: With a diesel pack on back connected on a gun, those guys follow disuckers and inject gasoline in EACH trunk cut. I had the responsibility to drive and to fill every morning the car with the gasoline tank and every morning I put around 100 LITERS. You can imagine who bad it is for the fruits...
We had also the two most dangerous snakes in the world. Fist the Taipan which is very aggressive and can kill a man in 20 minutes with a bite. I was cutting trees when I realized that this one was in 50 centimeters of me. So I did a big jump and I ran. After I asked why he didn't attack me and we answered me it was probably because it was to young... We also spotted a brown-snake which is as well dangerous but not aggressive and some none dangerous as a tree-snake and pythons.
Another danger was the machette. Indeed, we had shin pads to protect against little pokes but not against hard one. The machete on our skin was the same than a hot knife on butter, that means the job could become easily dangerous.
The last danger in long term was the quantity of chemical used on farms. During two weeks they put a product called "lime" and the raws - without lie - were totally white and we received this powder in our face and we briefed it. You can see on pictures below my white clean tee-shirt completely destroy by farms chemical.
