Jeremy Cameron column: Why I love living on the farm and those Collingwood goals

There aren’t many AFL players who get the chance to live on a farm like I do, obviously we have big ‘Hawk’ – Tom Hawkins – and Rhys Stanley at our club who have some land but it’s pretty rare.

So I was keen to give more of an insight into what life is like on our farm by restarting my YouTube channel recently.

I hope I have a good five years of footy left in me but since turning 30, I have realised it is getting towards the twilight of my career and so I have been thinking about what I want to do once I hang up the boots.

I sat down with our club’s great player development guru Mark Worthington recently to chat about it and ‘Wortho’ is great helping us with how our transition will look into retirement and we spoke about giving a bit of the video stuff a go.

All I do is just carry a camera around to do the same stuff I do each day and it’s great fun and I get into editing it all myself.

I put up my second video on Thursday running through a new Titanium Caravan we just landed.

It’s an incredible space and I could easily live the rest of my life in a caravan with no issues – but my partner Indi couldn’t!
I find it really fun to go behind the scenes and into what life is like and trying to entertain people in my own way.

I’ve really enjoyed showing people what I’m up to on my little farm and we’re a bit busy at the moment with new lambs wandering around.

Even in this cold you have to get out there pretty often to check on the lambs.

I take a step back around game day but otherwise I try and hop out every four hours and take a break when I’m watching something on the telly with Indi and my daughter Macey just to make sure they are all good outside so I’ll go for a spin for a couple of minutes.

Foxes are the big danger given they are keen on lambs in the first couple of weeks of their life but also this winter weather can be an issue.

I even had to enlist my good mate Brad Close recently to help me with one of the random jobs you have to do, by giving some of my sheep a foot bath.

When it is so wet out all the time, the sheep can get really soggy and irritated in their feet and start limping around so I have already given some of my lambs and ewes a foot bath in zinc sulfate and water – even if they didn’t enjoy it too much – and they were back to normal in about six hours which was pretty good work.

It’s only a little farm really we are on at the moment, it’s just 50 acres, but I have been loving learning everything on the go.

I get a bit of help but I love the research side of things, I have never been a farmer before so I am still wrapping my head around everything and having stock and sheep is obviously not as simple as putting them in a paddock and putting a fence around them and hoping we get lambs.

I was never big on homework at school but I find myself always researching and getting into it.

We have seven steers out as well as the 25 sheep, a ram and our little lambs at the moment and I’m hoping to expand as we go but I think we are best set up for sheep at the moment.

It was obviously a different time and there were doubts when we decided to move on from living in Sydney and playing with the Giants.

Having settled down here now near Geelong and after Macey came along, I even said to Indi the other night on the couch that it is just a great, warm feeling what we have done in the last few years in moving down here and setting up a life on our farm.

Plus, of course, there was that incredible premiership last year.

A BIG FORTNIGHT AHEAD

Speaking of footy, we are pretty well aware of what is ahead for us in the next two weeks.

We know we have to win to stay alive and we haven’t even thought about the final round game against the Western Bulldogs, we are only worried about beating St Kilda on Saturday night.

We are still so strong in our belief that our best footy is really competitive and we can give it a shake but we know we have to get it done on Saturday before even thinking about what comes next.

I was back in the news a bit last week with a couple of goals I kicked where the ball may have been out of bounds.

I honestly had no idea at the time whether I was in or out of play for the mark or the second goal against Collingwood, which shows how hard it is to umpire our game.

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I didn’t even know what the Magpie players were worried about when they were talking to the umpires after ‘Closey’ handballed me the second goal, and the Pies players didn’t say much to me afterwards.

It’s all a bit funny, there’s nothing I can do about it and we have to make sure we all respect what a tough job it is for umpires in our game.

Check out my YouTube channel by searching for ‘Jezzacameron’.

Originally published as Jeremy Cameron column: Why I love living on the farm and those Collingwood goals