Stories From First Year: Sheep and Beef

This one was in New Zealand, and again all I did was odds and sods. I put up some electric fences sometimes, but mostly I rode shotgun in the tractor, jumping out to open gates. Fortunately the old farmer I was with was very fun to talked to and loves making friends with international students (he introduced me to some other international students).

He also let me drive the tractor once. I am totally into that. I even parked it perfectly. Little me, up in this massive tractor, roaring down the farm track at like... 10kph. Well maybe it was faster than that. I don't remember. It was an automatic transmission so I didn't have to do much work at all, but it's something to cross off the bucket list.

The other thing I really liked was watching the farm dogs work, because they are so beautiful and well trained.

The most annoying day for me was sorting wool. Good god. It wasn't even shearing time, it was just crutching--taking the wool off around their bums so they don't get covered in poo--so it was way less wool than I would have had to face at shearing time. Still, that was one unpleasant day. From eight in the morning until I left at five in the evening, we were in the wool shed, with an endless stream of sheep, just me and the socially awkward shearer. I had a sort of stick thing that I used to sweep the wool off the platform, which sometimes involved sneaky maneuvers around his feet or behind him. Then, since it had just rained of course, I had to lay out anything super wet to dry, because apparently if you pile up wet wool it explodes. 

My skin is sensitive to wool, so by the end of the day, not only did I have a cramp from wielding my wool-stick, and not only were my hands covered in wool grease, they were also all red and itchy. It was also a bit of an adventure trying to get all the wool into the wool compressor thing. At first it went well, but around lunchtime the bin was pretty full, and there wasn't anywhere else for me to put the wool. So after that point I had to periodically climb up into the bin and jump up and down and stomp around on top of the wool until I made enough room to fit more in. Then of course when I did that, I got behind, because the shearer just kept on going, so the wool on the platform would amass and I'd have to frantically try to sort it out before it built up into some sort of wool ocean.

The worst part was that we didn't quite finish, and I had to come back and do more the next day. Ugh my hands were prickly needly greasy itchy sore globs of death.