When Broccoli Harvesting Turns Shit

By Jonny Blair


With travelling comes strange and amusing stories. This one, though slightly disgusting just highlights the amusement you can look back on, and in this case laugh at myself a couple of years down the line. Did I really shit myself in a broccoli field? Yes!

I ended up doing extensive broccoli farming for about 3 months, on 13 different farms in Tasmania!! It was an amazing experience and I would highly recommend it. Cutting broccoli for a living was fab.

So when you work in broccoli cutting a tractor follows you down never ending rows of the green vegetable and your job is to slice it, de-leaf it and throw it into the box. You're kind of stuck on each row doing your job, so you don't want to leave the row, even if you need to go to the toilet. You can carry water with you and drink it at the end of each row, where you can also have a quick piss while the tractor turns around. I admit this is a bit easier for a guy than a girl.

One day I was working on a massive farm in East Sassafras, in Northern Tasmania. There was a hill at the top of the paddock and once you go over the hill you are miles from the base (the place where you park your car, eat your lunch and they have a portable toilet there). Now I was an experienced broccoli cutter at this stage.

I remember the date - 18th March 2010 as the night before I had partied in the local pub Molly Malone's with Chaz Fitzsimmons a fellow Northern Irishman. It was St. Patrick's Night.

We got up and started work at 7am and everything was fine. After lunch though we had got about half way through one of the rows when mother nature was calling. I needed a poo. This was the first time I had been in this situation on a broccoli field. Rebecca Gaby our boss was a great lady and was luckily working alongside us that day - I shouted over at her "Rebecca I'm off - I need a poo!" and off I ran - I had thought about running all the way back to the actual portable toilet but it was miles away, so I had to just crouch down at the side of the paddock. Things had got out of control let's just say!

A few seconds after taking my trousers and boots off which wasn't easy I then had to use leaves from broccoli plants to clean myself. It wasn't enough so my underpants were used as toilet roll and then dumped behind a tree near the fence. It was then that my team and tractor appeared back at the top of the hill. They knew I had ran for a shit, but now they saw me with my trousers down, running desperately back to cut more broccoli.

It was a decent day in the field apart from that incident. That night, I obviously washed all of my clothes, suddenly admitting that I couldn't tell the difference between mud and shit. Don't Stop Living!




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