Price’s Farm

I have a permanent job! It’s hard to say whether it’s a guaranteed full-time job, but for now at least I know that I have work everyday until the crops say otherwise.

Price’s Farm harvests green beans and capsicums. Lucky me, it’s the farm that offers the most hours both daily and weekly. My bus leaves at 6:30am every morning, we start work at 7am, have a 20 minute break (smoko, they call it) at 9:30am, lunch at 12pm, a 10 minute break at 3pm and we finally finish work at 6pm! Not to mention that we work 6 days on with 1 day off, usually a Sunday. After my first day today, I can tell you that this makes for a very long day!

Each workday we’re put into teams and tasked with one of three daily activities: Bean washing, sorting and packing; capsicum washing, sorting and packing or capsicum picking behind a tractor.

Each station has three different jobs that we switch between after each break. Today I worked the green beans where two or three people shifted through large piles of green beans on a conveyor belt with a hose, removing dirt clumps and stacking clean beans which fall onto a second level conveyor belt. On the second layer, a few people help to sort through all the beans, removing any broken beans, leaves or stems. Eventually the beans reach the end of the conveyor belt where 1 person stands and packs the beans into 10kg Styrofoam packaging.

While this may sound very simple, it can be extremely physical (especially the cleaning), repetitive and requires you to stand in one place for hours on end.

I’ve just gotten home and my body is aching from top to bottom. After 11 hours of work, all I have time for is a shower, cooking for tonight and tomorrow’s lunch and then I’m off to bed so that I can be up at 6am to start it all over again tomorrow! I find it very hard to turn my mind off while standing and doing repetitive tasks, so it can be frustrating to have the same thoughts running about my head over and over. There is no music and as of yet there hasn’t been much conversation either. I can handle the work, but I can tell that it’s going to take a lot out of me! I can absolutely commit to this until the end of October, but it will definitely be challenging!