Avocado Orchard Life

After leaving Auckland I headed up to an area called the Far North, a region of the country so remote that there is only one road leading there. My reason for travelling there was my first agricultural job: picking avocados for eight days on an orchard.

I was pleased to have some employment as it took some time to find it. Having sent over 40 emails to farms all over the North Island, I received fewer than five responses. I was advised that e-mailing the same person more than once helps your chances here in New Zealand, so I did do a bit of repeat mailing and ended up lucky.

Eventually I got a reply giving details of the job but warning that the same e-mail had been sent to many people even though there was one space- I rang right away, secured it and packed my bags.

If you're going to climb a tree in order to make someone rich
off avocados, you may as well appreciate the view

The work was 400km away but thankfully I didn't have to eat in to my work profits with an expensive bus ride or try my thumb at hitching; another new avocado picker was making the long drive up on the same day as me and I got a lift with him.

I must have gotten lucky as the work turned out to be relatively easy. All I had to so was clip an avocado off the tree with a special cutter/gripping rod and then trim the stalk after I caught it. The part of the vine that touches the fruit, the 'button', needs to be left in or the fruit will ripen too fast. And that's the job. At other orchards there might be tough quotas to fill or stressful time constraints, but here it was pretty chilled and I enjoyed working in the beautiful environment.

Nathan trimming the stalks so that the button does not fall out.

As well as getting me outdoors and earning money, I also got a chance to get to know some Kiwis who worked on the orchard. Soon I was used to hearing colleagues addressed as 'brutha', 'bro' and 'cuzzie', and understood that 'sweet as' and 'choice' were terms used  to express satisfaction. My ears were also attuned to the booming call of 'Smokoe!!' which meant it was time for a break.

''Clip that avo and then its smokoe cuzzie, sweet as!''

At the end of my first week I was using my climbing skills and picking avocados in a tree. From up there I overheard the site manager, Malcolm, talking to Tim- an experienced picker who was as friendly and laid back as per the Kiwi-stereotype. Malcolm was discussing extra work on our day off, which everyone is after, so I thought being pro active would be a positive.

I called from my perch: "Hi! I'm free tomorrow and I'll work if you need me to!"

"Yes but I don't know if you're any fucken good now do I?" Malcolm growled.

I was thrown by this response as I didn't know this guy at all. My only interaction with him was when he gave me a safety briefing and told me not to take any of his fruit. Maybe he was having a laugh, albeit an odd one. I decided to brush it off and try again.

Steeling myself, I suggested: "You can ask Tim how good I am", who had been working with me all week and would vouch for me- he appreciated that I could climb to the places he cold not reach.

Which was met by "Well why don't you do some work now rather than sitting in a tree talking to me?"

I was getting severely dissed by a 71 year old at this point...

But since the 30 day probation period basically means they can fire anyone at will, I decided to forget it. He was obviously an arsehole and beyond reasoning with.

Old Malcolm obviously didn't see me posing like this-
or he would have known I was the real deal.

That old guy aside, the team were fun to work with and my supervisor, Larry, was a great person to have in charge. A Maori man, built like a horse and with the bold traditional tattoos, he had a relaxed working attitude. He also drove an enormous tractor around like it was a toy, sometimes rushing down the orchard at employees with such ferocity that they (maybe slightly) feared for their safety. He used the tractor to move huge bin of avocados which he said were worth about NZD $800  (£464, $560USD) each when full.

Have you ever seen so many avocados?
They sell for up to $2 (£1.20, $1.4USD) in the city,
so this would be worth heaps!

But Larry didn't just use the tractor for transporting goods. He was happiest when snapping large tree branches by driving in to them with the powerful tractor (something that I'm sure he should not have been doing since usually orchards require trees to have branches). He would always laugh like a manic when indulging in this past time and it was funny to watch.

One day he revealed 'I like to pretend I'm breaking the arms of people I hate- HAHAAAHAAH!!! Mentioning no names of course...' 

He revved the tractor in to a branch the size of his own enormous calf and it snapped like a firecracker. 

Then as he sped away, he bellowed over his shoulder: 'The fella with the white hair!! HAAHAAHAAAHA!" Clearly meaning his boss, the heptagenarian dickhead Malcolm.

I later learned that Larry had served four years for armed robbery, and got his tattoos in prison. 

Nice guy.

*Some names may have been changed