For those of you who haven't heard of 'farm work' before - if you're on a 417 Working Holiday Visa in Aus (which being from the UK I am) you can complete 3 months of regional work to extend your visa from 1 year to 2. One of the great things about it is you don't have to do both years together; I'm planning to finish my first year, go home and then maybe use my second year sometime in the future.
When planning my trip to Aus, farm work was barely even on my radar, so it wasn't until I started looking that I soon realised it was nowhere near as easy as I first expected. I thought I'd just ring a farm, tell them I was after work & off I'd go... Yeah right hun! I casually forgot about all of the other backpackers who'd decided to leave Sydney in May in search of farm work because it was quite literally getting colder than back home. So I've put together a few tips which might come in handy if you're looking for farm work yourself & maybe even save you a bit of time.
WORKING HOSTELS
Working hostels can be a good way to get yourself a farm job. A lot of the time working hostels will have relationships with local farmers and a waiting list for work. When you arrive at the working hostel, you live and pay rent there from the start and wait until work becomes available on one of their farms. I’ve even heard of the odd one or two places that won’t charge you rent until they’ve got you work, which is a nice little guarantee. The best thing to do is ring ahead to check they have space and get an idea of how long their waiting list is.
HOURLY VS PIECE RATE
Most people you talk to will probably tell you to avoid piece rate like the plague, but it deffo does have its place. Some of the lads on our farm were fit enough to be super quick at picking and took home a really good wage pretty consistently; don’t get me wrong it’s not for everyone and there are some farms where the rate is just too low, but you shouldn’t always write it off straight away. Basically, if you’re strong / fit / motivated enough to put in the graft it could be for you, but if you’re looking for an easier time and guaranteed rates I’d stick to hourly.
ASK AROUND
In the first day of looking I was buzzing, I thought I’d found somewhere that had hourly paid work available right away and cheap rent. There wasn’t much about the working hostel online so I asked about it on the Facebook page ‘Irish Around Sydney’ (side note - great group to join that can answer pretty much any question you might have about life in / around Sydney & Aus in general really) and got a message from a girl who had been promised all the same things at the same place to arrive to no work, and when there was work the hourly rate was shockingly low. That little bit of advice saved me time, money & stress so it’s always worth asking; there will be plenty of people who’ve done farm work before you so make the most of the fact that their experiences might be able to help you!
OPINIONS AREN'T FACTS
As great as people’s advice can be, remember it is their opinion, based on their experience. A lot of people will have opinions on where you 100% should / shouldn’t do farm work, and if you took every single one as gospel, you’d probably end up more confused than when you had no information at all. Try and find out why their experience was good or bad so you can get a bit more of an objective idea of the places that they’re talking about.
EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN
No matter how prepared you are and how much research you do, chances are you won’t know exactly how things are going to go when it comes to farm work. Farm life can be extremely last minute & pretty weather dependent; sometimes we didn’t know until the 6am on the day whether we would be in work or not. If you get a job with set, guaranteed hours week in week out then you’ve got lucky! So much of farm work comes down to nothing more than luck… some people were earning a load of money, but had next to no time for fun in between all the hours they were working – others had almost too much free time and weren’t earning anywhere near as much money as they had hoped. There’s pros and cons to both situations, either way just make the most of it! Farm work is like no other experience, you’ll make some great memories, meet some amazing people & probably struggle to explain to anyone back home just what it’s really like!