When Broccoli Harvesting Turns Shit

By Jonny Blair


I've done a lot of random things in my time travelling and with that comes the oddest of tales. If you're eating,put your food away, I'm about to talk about the day I did a shit in a broccoli field. Oh really? 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.

If you've ever done processed or manual broccoli cutting you will know that a tractor follows you down the countless paddocks of broccoli, you just cut it as fast as you can and throw it into the crates on the tractor. The thing is, once you start a row, you have to go to the end. There is no respite - so basically carry water in your pocket and sip it at the end of each row, where you can also go to the toilet if you need. Admittedly this is much easier for guys.

So one day I was on a big farm in a place called East Sassafras, northern Tasmania. There was a hill in the field, and beyond the hill you would be miles away from the base. The base is where you park you car, munch your lunch and yes, there is a portable toilet there! I had become quite an experienced broccoli cutter...

This story is taken from the 18th March 2010. I know that because the previous night was St. Patrick's Night and I was down the local Irish Pub Molly Malone's partying with Chaz Fitzsimmons, also a Northern Irishman living in Tasmania.

Next morning was a 7am start as usual and nothing was a problem. After lunch however, we were about half way through a stretch of broccoli when I knew I needed to go to the toilet, of the number 2 variety. It was the first time this had happened while on a broccoli field. Our boss and top lady, Rebecca Gaby was working alongside us that day and I yelled over, "I'll catch you up, I need a shit" and off I ran. Initially I was going to run all the way back to the portable toilet but it was about a kilometre walk, so I pulled over at the side and crouched down in the paddock. It was out of control let's just say.

Just after taking my trousers and boots off I used leaves from broccoli plants to clean my bum. It wasn't really enough so my underpants had to be used as toilet roll and were then dumped in behind a tree near the fence. Just then my team and tractor arrived back at the top of the hill. They had known I had ran to take a shit, but now they could see me running with my trousers down desperately trying to make it 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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