Volunteering, Kickstarting & Learning the Land: Jack’s Story
Jack Waters is not afraid of hard work. In truth, he positively relishes it. The 21-year-old from West Keal was our Community Vegetable Garden’s first volunteer. He then joined South Ormsby Estate via the Kickstart graduate scheme, and even though he’s now busy learning how a 3,000-acre estate is managed, he still helps maintain the community plots in his own time.
Jack is currently shadowing Paul Barnes to get a feel for estate management, before rotating over to herd management with John Crutchley in July. He took time out from surveying our countryside stewardship plots to talk about volunteering, Kickstart and his plan to make a career in sustainable agriculture.
“I’m a yellowbelly and I’ve lived in the county my whole life,” said Jack. “I went to William Lovell Academy and then on to Skegness Grammar for A-levels. I did a year of a history & politics course at the University of East Anglia (UEA). I enjoyed the subject matter and I’m quite academic but I didn’t click with the environment. It felt like I was on a conveyor belt from GCSE to A-level to university. It was too structured a way of learning for me.
“I finished at UEA in 2018. I essentially pressed the pause button. I get four years of funding via student finance, so I’ve left myself the three years I’d need to do a different degree in the future. After UEA, I worked for six months in a kitchen. I was on my feet for up to 11 hours a day and it was hard work. It’s good to give things a go to see if they work out.
“After that, I was a self-employed general landscaper for a while, working in a 10-20-mile radius of home at West Keal. I also did a bit of spanner work for my dad, who’s a race mechanic. I like to be busy and my interest in being outdoors goes way back. My brother worked for Green Thumb and my grandfather farmed sugar beet and potatoes in Sausthorpe. I didn’t grow up on a farm but I did grow up in a culture of being busy and working hard; of getting your hands dirty and bouncing along muddy lanes.
“I’d driven past South Ormsby Estate along Bluestone Heath Road many times but I didn’t know what was going on there until I saw a feature on BBC Countryfile last December. I dropped the estate an email expressing an interest in helping in any capacity. I was pointed toward the Community Vegetable Garden and got involved with it from the start. I helped Toby Ridsdale get the fencing up, met a few other volunteers and took it from there.
