Classification Essay

Picking From The Picking Crew

Harvest on our farm has changed a lot since we first started.  We haven’t always had a harvester to do most of the heavy potato lifting.  Way back when, about ten years ago, you would have seen my family and me out in the field with a two row potato digger and a team of roughly 15 middle school kids.  They were our harvesters back then.  We would show them how to pick and what types to pick from, and they would bring the full buckets over to the collection trailer to be marked down and get to a fresh bucket.  It was simple piece rate work that brought out a wide variety of kids, all with some very different ideas of what work really was.  

First you had the suck-ups.  They are the epitome of teacher’s pet, and just couldn’t leave you alone if you worked on the collection trailer.  Now, they weren’t poor pickers by nature, and they got alright bucket scores when it came down to it, but they spent a lot of their time trying to get a job on the cart, hoping to get paid hourly.  They would take a few minutes longer when they went to pass their bucket in, tending to chat up the hourly workers on the cart. They would help bring some of the other kids’ buckets over when we were busy, and brought back empties on their way back.  There were always a few that made it their goal for the season, to get an hourly job for next year.  And the best way I can describe those individuals, is persistent.  And sometimes, it even paid off for them in the long run. 

The dilly-dalliers, boy were they trouble.  They sure weren’t trying to get any promotions down the line.  They were content to sit and lounge all day, relaxing and farting around, and possibly picking a bucket or two.  The biggest problem this type of picker poses?  Their attitude.  It becomes almost contagious under the right circumstances.  Occasionally we would have groups of three or four pickers gathered in a circle, and just not get much of anything done.  If one of the main crew would go try and break it up, about 15 minutes later the goof-offs would be circled around again, exchanging fart noises.  It must have been more of a social club for them.  How else would you explain sending your child in to a workplace where they spend a whole day, and they come home with at most half of the pay of the other kids working? 

Lastly, you had the over achievers.  These guys would always knock it out of the park.  They would go all out, all day long, pushing to get to that hundred bucket mark.  Because they knew that if they did, there was a 25% increase for every bucket there forward.  It was just too sweet an offer to pass up.  Some would get family and friends to come and help, or get a friend to help and share some of their buckets with theirs.  But the ones we really looked for were the solo acts.  The ones that busted all day long by themselves, and could walk away with 150 -175 dollars a day.  Those were the employees that we generally chose.  They were there to score high, and if they stayed, most got a job working hourly later in the year. 

The suck ups and the dilly-dalliers.  Lazy among cunning, but don’t forget the over-achievers.  With such a wide variety of pickers we never knew what to expect.  Each year brought a new round of problems and answers, and we dealt with them as required.  As time went on we used the harvest season more and more to pick and choose who we would hire later in the season to help package and ship out all of those vegetables.  A lot of the pickers knew, and those that acted in accordance got a leg up.  I’d say our selection process was a success, although it sure didn’t help our population of suck-ups from hanging around and giving everyone a headache. 

Graf #18

As I'm researching a subject, I’ll pick up on a reoccurring feature that sticks out to me and go into further detail.  It gives me a little hook into the subject, something to keep it fresh.   Finding new research that that intrigues you, research that fuel’s that learning?  Well for me it was the most recent pages I read on “gray water usage”.  In some of them they discussed what types of crops would be safest to produce with various qualities of recycled water and why.  Now there is a bad stigma here, but it’s beginning to look like much of the concern about using gray water for vegetable irrigation is misplaced.  The biggest issue that they have with it is in relation to method of distribution.  One of the stipulations they speak of in length is that you should not use gray water too water directly on top of plants in your garden.  Now with trees, both ornamental and fruiting, it seems to be a completely acceptable way to go, but they do throw up some concern when it comes to using gray water on edibles in your garden.  This will have to be addressed when it comes time to choose what quality water goes where.  At first, when I set my plan of attack for this paper, I believed that I would be filtering all of the water together and using it in the appropriate places distributed evenly.  But after more research into gray-water techniques, I may want to consider splitting up my reservoir and dividing the different water qualities for different uses. 

Graf #14 ISearch Plan

        Where would you go to find info on collecting and filtering water if you were in dire need and only had access to some very rudimentary supplies?  Sounds like quite an emergency situation to me.  Now who would know all about emergency situations?  Possibly the military, special forces, FEMA?  I’d like to look up guides released by other countries in a similar climate and see what their take on emergency water filtering is.  If not there, I could jump over to some general survival guides and see what sort of systems they would have.  I’m not sure if any of them will have something to the scale of gardening though, but it will be a good place to start I believe.  For irrigation I have a few different options.  For some real experience in the field I could ask around to my father and various other farmers from the state that would know a thing or two about those types of systems.  One reassuring factor about my paper is in the breadth of the topic matter.  Unless someone else has tried this exact experiment, I don’t think I’ll be coming across any sites that answer all of my questions.

Graf #19

        The two topics hit me like a brick wall.  I just sat there and stared at them, befuddled at what to write about.  So I reread the passage again, hoping for something to pop out at me.  I needed to get something that would flow, something I could really run with.  And I was going to need to if I had a chance of finishing something even remotely close to an essay in time.  But I broke eventually; and finally gave in to my fallback.  I resorted to writing about farming again, not exactly the most enticing topic I know…  I mean, who wants to hear about dirt?  I'm still not sure how I feel about the completed product yet.  Maybe I can find a better angle next time, a better method of translating all of the complexities of our farm into a neat essay structure.  Maybe our example essay will be a good place to try that out.    

(#1) One Hour Prompt on "Dirt"

Here on our organic farm we believe in the soil.  We know what possibilities lay just under the surface out there in your garden.  We want to maximize the soil, and we do it with some not-so-conventional techniques Some new and some old, all in support of the soil.  Building the soil up, keeping it drained, and supporting microscopic life to thrive.  That’s us doing everything we can to have the best veggies and the biggest harvest.

Soil structure is an incredibly important factor to us.  Keeping that soil structure allows for roots to grow freely and develop into large healthy plants.  To keep that soil structure we try and manage the level of compaction in the soil.  One way we do that is to be careful of working the soil in wet or rainy conditions.  When the soil is moist, if driven over it tends to become compacted, hard and thick like cement.  This makes drainage difficult and just cycles the problem more.  Some big farms aren’t as concerned about such soil structure.  You can tell just by the machines they have parked out back.  If you have ever seen a wet lime spreader you can tell.  They have four to five foot wide wheels made for one purpose, to help float on wet fields when they’re spreading fertilizer.  Those conditions would be just about the least likely that you’d find us spinning our wheels in the field.  So hopefully those tires really help them float, or else they’re going to end up with some pretty dense soil.   

When it comes to what we put on the soil, it’s a whole different ball game than that of the big guys.  We don’t tend to use any of their chemically synthesized herbicide and fungicide.  We stay to the nature friendly side of things, using manure and natural sources to enrich our soil.  And we don’t just use one kind, oh no, we always have two or three different kinds when it comes time to spread.  Lately it’s been a mixture of chicken, cow, and sometimes pig manure.  Now while that whole concoction sounds lovely going into the mix for my veggies, I sure as heck don’t want a load of it to be dropped off in my front yard to wait while it gets spread.  But when it does happen, it reminds you that it’s just one more reason why this is a labor of love.

The manner in which we rotate our crops in the fields is also different than most conventional farmers.  Now in a rotation, each year you have a different crop on each field.  For conventional farmers the norm tends to be a 2-3 year crop rotation with just a few crop types to maximize production of a single crop.  But on our farm we do a four year rotation.  That gives the soil time to heal after a particularly demanding crop is grown there.  This increase in time for the field to rest is for multiple reasons.  It gives our soil a little more time to recover from growing our main crop, potatoes, and allows for more time to replenish the soil with all of that lovely manure.  The addition of rotating crops with long and short root structures has also shown to do great work for soil structure.

  We’re all called farmers.  But we all tend to do things a little different.  And when you compare us organic guys to the conventional, the differences can be stark.  But that’s what makes our products stand out.  It’s the quality, plain and simple.  When you’re on the scale of most of the big potato famers around here you’re concerned about one thing and one thing only, “Who is going to by your crop for French fries?”  That scale just doesn’t work for us.  Working at that scale means you’re going to cut corners and more than likely rather often.  But we here aren’t about settle for that.  We are steadfast by our promise to take the most time and care to raise these vegetables right.  For you, from us.    

Contrast 2nd Graf

They were from two completely different sides of the spectrum.  Not polar opposites, and I'm sure they had plenty in common, but still as different as could be.  Penny is a sweet, middle-aged woman of Mexican descent.  Mother of four, she always brought her shining attitude from home with work, and she quickly moved up the ranks to shipping room manager.  Matt was from a different world entirely.  He was raised in Massachusetts, and moved up to northern Maine to settle down and become a Mennonite.  I'm not sure if that lifestyle change was the pivotal point that stressed him to become as “pig-headed” as he was, or if it was something from his childhood that provoked it.  But he sure didn’t leave it down in Massachusetts when he moved.  Two people from different backgrounds usually don’t have any reason not to get along.  But Matt made sure to give all the reason in the world.