Fernweh: AUS Childers

Avocado Picking

Moving up the career ladder as a farm worker, I have now an hourly paid job at the biggest avocado farm in the southern hemnisphere.

I started as a ground picker, meaning that I walked up and down the rows of a 100 trees length to pick everything in reach from the ground. It is basically the same procedure as for apple picking: Filling up a bag with 60-80 avocados and carry them to a bin. Apart from the physical strength, this job was mentally challenging as well. I had to get creative to keep the mind busy, while walking in silence for 8 hours over a huge field of avocado trees.

The symptoms of repeatitive physically hard work become visible now, towards the end of my days as a farm worker. My back was relieved when my supervisor gave me a pruning job for a couple of days. The new task included dead wood pruning (cutting off dead branches) and chucking the wood into the middle of the row. After a couple of days, our only task was to drag dead branches and leaves towards the middle of the row; Needless to say that we got overly bored pretty quick doing this day in and day out. Luckily my supervisor has put me on a cherry picker from now on and I'm racing up and down the trees to pick avocados in up to 8m hight.

Mobile phones are not allowed during work due to safety regulations. However, during the pruning job I was able to sneak some pictures of our work.