Desperate Houseflies: The Magazine

Feel free to pull out your trusty fly swatter and comment on what is posted here, realizing that this odd collection of writers may prove as difficult to kill as houseflies and are presumably just as pesky. “Desperate Houseflies” is a magazine that intends to publish weekly articles on subjects such as politics, literature, history, sports, photography, religion, and no telling what else. We’ll see what happens.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The Quaterly Book Report, In Which Nary a Book is Mentioned

I got a letter from Pepperdine about a week before I was supposed to be back here for some of those before-school meetings. I was ready to come back, although I could have used a day or two more of notice. But I had a good summer. I got to spend a good amount of time with my nephews, walk with my parents most mornings, hang out with JU a few times, as well as eat lunch with Al, and watch the first two seasons of The Office with Terry (a regular commenter) and Terry's family.

I also got to spend quite a bit of time with one of my uncles and cousins on their watermelon farm. Since I've been back in California, I've been thinking a lot about this summer's watermelon harvest. Mostly because it's an interesting conversation starter, but also because there are a lot of complicated issues involved in the harvesting of watermelons. Economics. Migrant farm workers. Technology. Environmental issues. Science. Don't worry, though, I won't talk about all of those things.

Anyway, for no other reason than I don't have a book review written that I'm overly excited about, I thought I'd share a couple of observations about farming. I may take Al's lead and do this over the course of a couple of weeks, as to save you from reading too much nonsense at once. I'll probably also just start by describing a few things and then maybe try to analyze them later. What I'm posting today would cover a time frame of 3 hours: roughly 6:00 in the morning until maybe 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning.

K. was a thirteen year old girl. M. was seven. They got to the warehouse at 7:00 every morning, with M.’s mom, and started sweeping the place out. A warehouse in the middle of a field acquires a lot of sand and dirt everyday, so they spent a good 2 hours sweeping out the warehouse before their real work began. They wouldn’t leave the warehouse until around 10 at night. (That sounds horrible when I type it out, as though my uncle runs a sweat shop -- but these were family members, so it probably wouldn't fall under any type of labor issue -- K. and M. didn't have to work, necessarily, but they did have to be there, so they worked.)

The watermelon crews got to the fields around 5:30 or 6:00 every morning. Anywhere from 30 to 40 men and women. Three of them would start walking through the field and cutting the melons. Then rest of the crew would stand around waiting for their particular task. The lucky ones got to drive a bus or a tractor. (Odd fact – old school buses are used for harvesting watermelons. The buses are gutted and the windows are all broken out, so you essentially have this really long, covered wagon with it’s own engine. They also have the advantage over tractors of being able to go faster on the highway, so lots of time is saved between field and warehouse. Plus, I mean, it’s just kind of neat to see old beat-up school buses loaded with melons.)

I’m not sure if many people know what a watermelon field looks like. So, a short description. Rather than imagining an entire field, I’ll just describe a single pass through the field. A “pass” is the road, more or less, that the bus or tractor drives down. On either side of it are roughly 6 rows or watermelons (I’m guessing at that), each spaced 3-4 feet apart (again, I’m more or less guessing). Although, there are weeds everywhere, so it’s kind of like walking through a really short, really thick forest – you get tangled up and tripped and the weeds cut and scratch and it really isn’t a pleasant experience. Anyway, a field is, oh, say, about 10 or 15 of those “passes” side-by-side.

So the bus takes off down the field. On each side are 4 or 5 crew members. 1 or 2 are standing in the bus on both sides. They “walk” the fields, picking up the watermelons cut by the cutting crew and conveyer-belt style pitch the melons to the bus. The melons weigh between 18 and 35 pounds each. There’s no shade. They’ll do this for the next 12-14 hours.

I think my uncle has 6 buses. So the crews work until the buses are all full. Then my uncle has 6 trailers that are pulled by tractors. After the buses are full, they fill the trailers. And then the operation moves back to the warehouse. Except for the cutting crew, who remain in the field to cut more melons. Because the buses and trailers will come back empty in a couple of hours.

As I mentioned earlier, farming is an amazingly complicated ordeal. I might try to tackle some of the economic issues next week. Or I may just talk about the level of organization and the technology involved (old buses notwithstanding), because it is almost bewildering. Seriously, we had people come and just watch how it all works. For no reason other than it’s just plain cool. The process is stramlined to the point that once the melons leave the field, they could, theoretically, be on the aisle in the grocery store within 24 hours. I’m not sure how often that actually happens, but it is very possible that they could actually be there more quickly than that, if everything is working properly. I’ll try to get the melons off the buses and onto the trucks next week. Although, with the beginning of the school year, and given my tendency to post once every three months, it might be Easter before you hear anything more about watermelons.

10 Comments:

Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

Are you going to go all John Steinbeck on us? Cuz it sounds like you're going to go all John Steinbeck on us.

I'm curious about the pace of the lifting and pitching. Can you give us a sense of how many melons a man on the "walking crew" will handle in, say, an hour?

2:28 PM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

I am gonna go all Steinbeck. Deal with it. You like Grapes of Wrath.

Hmmm...hard to put numbers on individual melons. They are sold by the pound rather than by the piece. So I never really counted individual melons. But, kind of guessing on how many melons we moved a day, they would have handled, say, 750 melons an hour. It's a fairly constant motion with the arms. Pretty much as quickly as you pitch one, another one is headed toward you. And pretty much the only time they stop is at the end of each pass through the field.

2:56 PM  
Blogger Terry Austin said...

Sandi, I think we've found a career option for you!

:)

7:47 PM  
Blogger juvenal_urbino said...

750 melons an hour

Mamma mia, atsalotta melons!

Seriously. I think I slipped a disc just thinking about it.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts relating to immigration. I'm rather old school about it.

10:31 PM  
Blogger Terry Austin said...

Old school like the real Americans who are living on reservations these days, or old school like, Them furriners need to stay where they is?

Hey, Mikey: Be sure to tell about the coyotes.

6:43 AM  
Blogger Sandi said...

I'm sure it would help with upper body strength.

What does "old school" mean in this context?

8:29 AM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

I'm kind of torn about the immigration issue, but I'll try to get to that next week. Because it is such an important aspect of farming. And it's affects definitely influence the price of food in the stores.

9:33 AM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

And the lungs, Sandi. Besides the muscle-building aspect of pitching melons, you're walking through a sandy-bottomed forest, of sorts, and my lungs always start burning after a while. So it's a good total-body workout!

9:35 AM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

I chopped cotton, too, Whitney. I'm one of the few people in the world who actually didn't mind chopping cotton. I always chopped with my grandpa and he told stories constantly. This summer while my cousin and I were working together, we spent a lot of time re-telling some of the stories grandpa used to tell us while we were in the fields.

12:05 PM  
Blogger Terry Austin said...

With regard to hiring illegal aliens in this neck of the woods, the phrase that pays is no pida, no diga.

12:08 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Locations of visitors to this page