My fucking farm manager
Feb 5 2007 16:23
I pushed off 45 minutes early this afternoon and the cunt phoned me up to express his disappointment. He said that I have hardly done a full day's work since I started here. The cheeky bastard! I mentioned all of the extra hours I have done for him and how I feel like I have been treated like a cunt for five months since I started the job; misled at the interview and generally ignored despite having more growing experience that anyone on the farm. Anyway yadayadayada. The amusing/enraging thing is that I handed in my notice three weeks ago and gave him three extra weeks due to the busy time of year. I was ready to go back to work and chin the fucker.... fortunately... for one of us.... my partner is pretty level-headed. Now I am awash with stress. Could be worse I suppose, I could be sitting in a cell/casualty by now. Aaaaargh! I hope he doesn't stop me working tomorrow we need the money.
Feb 5 2007 17:01
#2
Thanks LW. Kind words much appreciated at this stage in the afternoon. I know he is wrong because I ache... I should have taken it easy these past few months and given him something to moan about.
My partner is cool, a good deal cooler than me most of the time.
We have decided on a crazy plan to flee to a farm in the south of France for a while. It seems like a cool place, the owner sounds very nice and the place looks beautiful, we just have to be able to get by financially. It might prove tricky but not as tricky as me trying to hold down a job.
Thanks again LW. 
Feb 5 2007 18:28
#3
Cut his breaks like wot happened in popular television documentary 'Emmerdale'.
Feb 5 2007 19:14
#4
Hmmmmm, there's a thought. However at the end of the day the fucker's not worth it... I'll leave him to spend the rest of his working life crawling up his boss's arse and not seeing his wife and children.
The amazing thing is I work on a farm that is part of the estate of a man who is a Rt Hon, his father is a lord, Hastings no less! 941 years of hurt and the bastards still own the land and have their lickspittle collaborators. Oh I do love a lost cause!
Feb 5 2007 19:16
#5
You work on a "fucking farm"? 
Will they give me an interview?
Feb 5 2007 19:19
#6
Yes. I took my First Class Honours Degree and my Phd in history, combined them with anarchism, dope and permaculture and ended up as an organic grower. Complete failure to have enough cash for my own home or land has left me working for cunts in the fields of England just as my ancestors have for fuck knows how long.
Feb 5 2007 19:21
#7
Refused wrote:
You work on a "fucking farm"?
Ned wrote:
I feel like I have been treated like a cunt for five months
Feb 5 2007 19:24
#8
Feb 5 2007 19:26
#9
I know that staying off the drink has made you randy but this is too much..... it would be a good deal healthier for you to just go to bed with someone! Trust me I'm a doctor. 
Feb 5 2007 19:35
#10
Oh i have been don't you worry about that
i too got a humanities degree that i then found pointless in a capitalist world. i'm now doing my second degree so that i can actually earn enough money to have a family at some point 
good luck tomorrow, hope yer boss lays off a bit. any chance of any collective action with other workers there on this? sounds like he must treat you all like shit - don't the t&g 'organise' rural workers? though i spose as you're leaving anyway there's no point causing more trouble than you need to.
Feb 5 2007 20:25
#11
I have never been in a unionised workplace but you are right there the TGWU does purport to organise agricultural workers. Most workplaces are so small that they do not lend themselves easily to union organisation and truthfully most of the rural workers that I have known have not been politicised.
The farm manager does treat everyone like shit but some old hands just get away with it - and good on 'em - because they are fixtures that he knows he can't easily bully. I'd love to cause trouble; After busting a gut all winter I have been endeavouring to go slower and slower over recent weeks but he ain't seen nothing yet.
It's funny because I came more or less straight into this kind of world from living with comrades in London and having a completely different kind of life. Eleven years later and all I can report is that my experience suggests that the countryside is a pretty desperate place in lots of different ways.... I don't think that many people who live inside the metropolitan envelope of the M25 (or in urban areas in general I guess) have much conception of what it's like.
Feb 6 2007 09:23
#12
you know mate, the same story seems to happen all the time. I know fair few people who work in organic farms, or used to, and were all treated like shit. I think some bosses take the advantage of the situation that you have very keen young people who want to learn the skills and genuinely believe in the whole organic farming methods.
ok, maybe overdramatising, because i do know people who have nothing but great things to say about where they ended up working in as well.
All the best whatever you decide to do!
Feb 6 2007 12:14
#13
JDMF, thanks, I have worked on a good number of organic farms over the last ten years and my overall impression is that staff turnover is very high; dissatisfaction is widespread; and very little positive can be said about things like training, health and safety and other conditions of employment. I am sure that there are good places, I bet they are the small outfits and I bet that once growers get those jobs they hang on to them for grim death.
I am well over compromising my principles (of earthcare as well as other political stuff) in order to work in commercial organic growing.... back to Permacultural first principles for me if we can pull it together.
Feb 6 2007 12:39
#14
good fer you ned. also remember that a boss can't sack you early for handing in your notice!
perm(a)culture...
hohoho, i bet no-one's done that one before!
Feb 6 2007 13:52
#15
my wife is somewhat involved in the www.veganorganic.net network and we've heard good things about working on some of the farms involved in that network.
But aye, they are indeed smaller commercial or training farms.
Hope you get some cash together and get your own place, try moving to scandinavia, the farms are going cheaply there still
Feb 6 2007 19:40
#16
ftony wrote:
Quote:
perm(a)culture...
Don't you know that having a 70s perm is a requirement for membership of the Permaculture Association? Next time you pass some allotments have a look around and see if you can spot any permies.
JDMF wrote
Quote:
Hope you get some cash together and get your own place
Thereby hangs a tale JDMF. As you can imagine land hunger has driven me for years. A couple of years ago my Dad remortgaged his place to the hilt to help my sister start a little business, there was a little money left over - I mean more than I could ever accumulate - and he said that if we could use it then we could borrow the loan from him. At that stage I suppose we could have used it as a deposit on a box in suburbia, but I would have ended up hanging from the bannisters by my dressing gown belt (I don't own a dressing gown btw) and so we had a look for a tumbledown place in France.
Twelve years ago I was offered a house and land (8 acres) in France for £10,000 and could have borrowed that but chickened out. Needless to say since then prices in France have sky-rocketed. Well we couldn't find anything that my Dad's money would buy and we were on the verge of letting him have the money back. It was then that I found the land in the mountains.....
Hmmm, so now we own (or pay the debt for) 35 acres of land and some ruins at 800m in a beautiful valley in France. We can't move there because I owe the money to my Dad (can't stiff him) and the monthly repayments are fairly high... also we need the money for a roof on the ruins and perhaps the odd luxury, er like windows and a front door.
So, there's the tale of the land that I might, if I live that long, live on. We're heading off to a place a couple of hours away from our ruins for the summer in the hope that we will be able to camp and maybe tidy the rubble up a little bit.
In the long run I want to turn the land into a project, maybe even find some collaborators who might fancy taking on some of the ruins and starting a community in the mountains. Finding the right people.... along the lines of anarchists please! Do not apply if you believe in the healing power of crystals etc. should prove interesting.
Feb 6 2007 19:52
#17
Wow that sounds pretty cool... hope it works out for you eventually!
Feb 7 2007 09:40
#18
comrade ned, thats a great story, and i hope it will have a happy ending.
Me and .flux are doing it other way around: we are working our arses off at the moment saving every penny we can (we live almost like we did when on minimum wage, saving everything on top of that) and it looks like we are saving enough to be able to buy a place in the countryside in finland, sweden, south africa or some other random country we end up to.
We used to own a small farm with half a hectare but ran into economic difficulties and had to sell (lesson: bank owning 95+% of your property is not a solid foundation...). Gutted about that. We grew a lot of our own food there and it was amazing, we grew all kinds of stuff, differen squashes, cabbage, kale, 8 differen varieties of beans, including finnish broad bean, all the salads and greens and greenhouse stuff. really enjoyed our life there.
The way i look at it is this: so many off their head loonie hippies can pull it off, why not us? I know a lot of hippies who have moved out there, built their own houses and are managing to keep things running, growing stuff commercially and so on. If they can do it, i bet we can as well.
Sounds like you have a great base to build your dream on though, at least you own that place. I hope you can hold on to it and not be forced to sell.
awww... i am getting all nostalgic now, what the fuck am i doing in manchester?!?!?
Feb 7 2007 10:37
#19
Blacknred Ned wrote:
In the long run I want to turn the land into a project, maybe even find some collaborators who might fancy taking on some of the ruins and starting a community in the mountains.
well hello...
definitely.
Touching story ned, good luck with it all. Get one of those programs that try and give idiot bankers advice on how to develop second homes to film you and take their money.
Feb 8 2007 02:26
#20
JDMF wrote:
and it looks like we are saving enough to be able to buy a place in the countryside in finland, sweden, south africa or some other random country we end up to.
random country = New Zealand, we need more anarchists here
Feb 8 2007 12:12
#21
I have to say that New Zealand would have been my first choice by a long way but:
1) My partner remains attached to her family.... they are nice and a lot saner than mine!
2) I figured the kids would get to a certain age and go to Europe anyway.
Feb 8 2007 21:18
#22
JDMF, I do know how gutting it is to leave a piece of land behind. We spent some time trying to make a co-op work on a piece of land very near to my home town. The end of the project was a pretty rough time.
I hope that your plans work out and you get out of Manchester & back on some land as soon as you can.
Thanks to rkn and Tacks for the kind words. Having started from such a shitty place this thread has really cheered me up. One day I hope that our piece of the mountains will be a useful place for a lot of good people to live/visit/learn.
Feb 12 2007 21:25
#23
I might be up for a little visit in the summer. I can do a fairly heavy day's work if you get me drunk in the evening.
Wot a jerk!!!! They only see things the way they wanna see it huh??? Reality and a sense of perspective don't seem to figure in their skewed world views.
You partner sounds cool tho - must help a lot.
What will you be doing next Ned? Any other work of study plans?