Find your place in the field of good food

Our goal is to connect good people with good food. We advertise sustainable food jobs and training opportunities to help jobseekers and employers find each other.

Roots to Work is a project of Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming.

Assistant grower

Maple farm kelsale
Kelsale, Saxmundham, Suffolk

Posted: 7 Nov 2024

Deadline: 16 Dec 2024

Compensation: Full time (40hrs) at £11.44 (until April 25) then £12.21 April 25 onwards for those over 21 years of age

Ethnicity Confident scheme Disability Confident scheme

Paid Permanent

Job description

We are looking for an Assistant Grower to work as part of the team on our well-established organic market garden at Maple Farm, Kelsale, Suffolk. Maple Farm has been growing organic produce for over 20 years and consist of agroforestry fields growing heritage wheats and grains, free range organic chickens, orchards, traditional hedgerows, woodland and meadows as well as our market garden. We have an on-site farm shop, a new community room and an up-and-coming café, Pinch.

The market garden makes up about 4 acres, with outdoor crops and 8 large polytunnels currently grow a wide range of fruit and vegetables mostly to supply our farm shop which is much loved by the local community as well as to local chefs. We are also developing connections with other local organic growers and helping each other to grow and sell a diverse range of interesting organic produce.

Assistant Grower

We are a small but steadily growing team of experienced growers, coming from various backgrounds and with many ideas! It is essential that you have a passion for organic, sustainable food production and a desire to pursue a livelihood in it with ideally at least one years’ experience of horticultural work, ideally in food production.

We work outdoors in all weathers so the job is obviously physically demanding so being physically fit is a must. Due to the job being physically demanding and also very busy during the height of the growing season then a positive attitude to our work makes the day much more enjoyable!

Your duties will be:

• Seed sowing and general propagation, pricking out etc
• Planting, weeding, irrigation, organic pest control of field and polytunnel crops
• Harvesting and preparing fruit and veg ready for our shop or orders
• Keeping harvest records
• Working to the Soil Association Organic standards
• Using machinery to mow or rotovate, possibly tractor work
• Working either alone, as a team and also working and helping to lead volunteer teams
• Re-stocking the shop and talking to customers about our veg

Full time

Hours: 7am-3pm Monday to Friday with weekend work during the growing season

Possible accommodation may be available

Application information

Please send a covering letter and up to date CV to growers@maplefarmkelsale.co.uk 

We look forward to hearing from you!

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