Macadamia Nuts

For just over two weeks I went to work on a macadamia nut and mango farm. Sadly they hadn't had any mangos at all this year due to too much rain (yes this is in Australia) but they did have plenty of nuts. I spent most of my time there sorting them. This wasn't the most interesting of jobs as I'm sure you can imagine but I am now quite an expert. Macadamia nuts are one of the only things native to Australia that are exported. You have to wait until they fall off the trees and then collect them from the ground with machines that pick them up using brushes. This process happens three or four times a year. The nuts then go through a machine which takes off their outer husks, then fall through onto a conveyor belt where I would sort out the bad ones to be thrown away - if they were cracked or discoloured, had insect stings or had been eaten by rats. The nuts that were left would fall from the conveyor belt into containers of water. The good ones would sink and be pushed up a pipe to a sloped half pipe type thing which they would role down and be taken from the bottom up into silos. The nuts that floated were sold for macadamia oil. Once the silos were full all the nuts went through the machine again, this time without the dehusker being on a lot slower than the first time so that you could remove any of the remaining bad ones that had been missed. This was the most tedious part of my work and if it wasn't for my music without any doubt I would not have survived. Quite often stones would get stuck in the dehusker so you'd have to open it up, take out any nuts that were in there and remover any stones. This came as a welcome brake from the sorting. Sometimes other things would go wrong too and if you didn't notice in time there would be a lot of picking up to do. Bits of shell could get stuck in the half pipe which would cause all the nuts to build up and eventually overflow. When the silos were nearly full you had to climb up a ladder and push the nuts to one side so more would fit in, again if left a little too long the nuts would overflow and go everywhere. Did you know macadamia nuts can bounce a very long way?