This article reminds me of my experience as a farm worker during the summers of 1970 and 1971 between years of college. Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) which I attended between September 1969 and May 1973 expected students with financial aid to earn income during the summers to contribute to their own education.
Unlike the young men described the NPR article, the job I worked on was not out in the open fields, but in greenhouses; the workers lived in their own homes and commuted to work every day, so we did not experience the dreadful living conditions of most fieldworkers. Nonetheless, the work was physically hard, very hot and humid, very low pay and seasonal without any benefits or security.
How I Came to Become a Farm Worker
At the end of my freshman year I was really tired of being cooped up indoors, so when I returned home to California for the summer in May 1970 I decided to inquire about outdoor jobs. San Mateo County on the peninsula just south of San Francisco was a mixture of very urban/suburban and rural farms. The urban/suburban belt was on the east side of the peninsula along the San Francisco Bay. Up the spine of the peninsula was the low coastal mountain range that in the 1970's was mostly forest and open land, including a large protected areas such as state and county parks and the large Crystal Springs reservoir sitting right on top of the San Andreas fault. The western side of the peninsula facing the Pacific Ocean was in the 1970's mostly agricultural land with a few very small towns. There was vegetable farming (brussel sprouts and pumpkins I remember in particular), but most of the farm land in San Mateo County was devoted to the growing of flowers. The floral industry was a major economic factor in the county.I contacted the Cooperative Extension program staff in my county about outdoor jobs, such as working in agriculture. They did not keep any type of systemic clearing house, but the man that I talked to happened to know that a large commercial horticultural company, Yoder Brothers, was hiring summer workers for their greenhouses. He gave me the number and I put in an application. I was surprised to discover that Yoder Brothers plant was not in the western, agricultural part of the county, but situated right in the middle of Redwood City, the county seat of San Mateo County, surrounded by shops and businesses, and residential areas.
The manager of the Yoder Brothers plant in Redwood City didn't quite know what to think of me. All of his other workers were Hispanic immigrants, most legal, but some illegal (as I learned later that summer). Many spoke no English, and only one woman I met there was fluent in English having immigrated as a child. The manager never had anyone who was not from the Hispanic community inquire about employment before. But he was willing to take me on. I think he looked on me as someone to talk to, as his Spanish was limited and his wife who worked in the business was deaf.
I started work the second week in June 1970 and worked full-time until time to leave for Ohio again at the end of August 1970. Despite the physical demands and discomforts of the job, I liked the people I worked with enough to come back the next summer between sophomore and junior year.
A Description of the Greenhouses and the Workplace
The Redwood City Yoder Brothers' plant was located off one of the city's major arteries Woodside Road, between two major north/south routes El Camino Real and the Alameda de las Pulgas. The plant had about 10 large greenhouses made of wood and glass lined up along a central narrow paved road off Woodside Road. Six greenhouses were on the west side of the road into the plant and four were on the east side. The east side also had a large, blue, metal building near the entrance to the plant that contained the offices, the shipping dock and provided storage for some of the machinery used.Most of the greenhouses were about 60 feet wide and 80 to 85 feet deep, front to back, a couple were slightly smaller. A wide isle perhaps 5 feet ran across the front of each greenhouse and a slightly narrower isle at the very back of the greenhouse. The greenhouses had from six to eight raised beds running from the front of the greenhouse to its back, a distance of about 70 feet. Each bed was about 3 feet wide and raised about a foot and a half above the ground. There was a 3 foot isle between each bed. The isles were packed dirt, which could at times become very muddy.
Insulated pipes ran along the bottom outside of every raised bed that carried hot steam to warm the beds during winter time and chilly, foggy summer nights. Even though the heating pipes were insulated, I had to be careful not bump bare ankles or calves against them in the morning because burns were possible. Water pipes ran overhead about 5 feet above each bed to provide water for the plants. Thermometers dangled from the water pipes in several places around each greenhouse. I was often obsessed with seeing if I could guess what the temperature was and checking my guesses against the thermometer. I got so that I could accurately perceive very small differences in temperature change. An afternoon that was 84 degrees felt different (and more bearable) than one that was 86 degrees.
Cooling for the greenhouses on sunny days was provided by six huge 5 foot diameter fans across the back of the greenhouse. In front of of each fan was a fiber mat through which cold water trickled continuously; the moving air from the fans was cooled by passing through the mist of water on the mats. This is a cooling method that works well in dry climates like the California coast. I learned to my dismay many years later that a swamp cooler (smaller version of the greenhouse cooling system) did not work at all well in humid Pennsylvania.
The outside temperature in Redwood City in the summer could range from the low 40's or 50's 6:30 AM when we arrived for work to high 70's and occasionally low 80's by the late afternoon when we clocked out. Inside the greenhouses, however, steam heat overnight meant that the morning temperatures were always at least in the mid-60's and then as the sun rose through the day interior temperatures were normally between 80 degrees to 98 degrees with 100% humidity in greenhouses filled with living, productive plants. It would be marginally cooler at the very back of the greenhouse within a few feet of the fans.
My first summer (1970) at Yoder Brothers I was also taking an evening class in cultural geography at community college in San Mateo. The professor in that class was a big fan of "environmental determinism" and spent some time talking up a book he'd recently read titled Hell is a Hot Place. One particularly hot and difficult day working in the greenhouses I decided that hell was indeed a hot place, but "heaven is the back of the greenhouse".
The Organization of Work in the Greenhouses
Work at Yoder Brothers was segregated and assigned by gender. A small crew of six or fewer men operated the machinery that tilled, prepared and sterilized the growing beds. The men were also responsible for the frequent, heavy applications of pesticides and herbicides to the beds and the growing plants (more on this later). Men also monitored and recorded the temperature multiple times a day in each section of each greenhouse. They turned on and off the sprinkler systems that watered the plants on a precise schedule, and they monitored and maintained the fans and water mats that were used to cool the greenhouses. About half of the men worked year round, the other half only in the summer months.The primary production jobs at Yoder Brothers belonged to women. The number of women varied during the summer months (May to August) from as few as 10 women to as many as thirty women. Less than six of the women were kept on during the winter months. Those women were all documented immigrants and slightly older than the seasonal workers. They had all been working at Yoder Brothers since the previous year, and all of them were still there when I came back again in the summer of 1971. The summer workers were far more transitory and a number were undocumented, only a couple of the summer workers I knew in 1970 came back to work at Yoder Brothers in 1971. One important example was Rosa, who had initially been a seasonal worker but in the autumn (after I'd left for Ohio and college) was hired on permanently. Not only was she there when I returned in 1971 but she had been promoted to greenhouse supervisor.
The women's jobs involved more physical labor than those of men, but no machinery. The women spent more time in the greenhouses with fewer breaks outside in cooler air compared to the men who came and went from the greenhouses frequently. The men were provided with protective gear, the women were not. All of the women's work was done with bare hands. We could have brought our own gloves, but then we'd lose much of the dexterity we needed for the task and have had to wash the gloves ourselves. It was quicker, easier and cheaper just to wash our hands.
The fact that we women had constant contact between our skin and the plants meant that we had far more exposure to the pesticides and herbicides that were sprayed on the plants than the men. They may have done the spraying, but they work protective gear, including gloves and respirators, and left the greenhouse as soon as they were finished spraying. The women frequently walked into a greenhouse to begin production work within 15 to 20 minutes of the plants being sprayed. One of the several pesticides used by Yoder Brothers was DDT which was not banned in the United States until 1972, a year after I last worked there.
An aside: In 1972 I purchased a lovely poster for my dorm room, the art was by Teresa Woodward and the poem by Henry Gibson went thus:
I have DDT in me
Inside of me is DDT
If you could see inside of me
Then you would see DDT
(Which is okay, I guess, if you like
to swallow live bugs...)
The women's primary task to cut small shoots from non-blooming chrysanthemum plants for eight hours a day. If we were lucky the plants we were working with were full grown and we could stand upright to take cuttings. But mostly plants were at various earlier stages of growth and so that one had to lean over slightly to access the plants. Sometimes we would help each other out with shorter and taller women switching beds so that each of them could work without leaning over. But this was not generally approved of by the management as it was viewed as cutting into our productive time.
The cuttings went into plastic lined cardboard boxes. Each box was suppose to have exactly 200 cuttings in it. If at the end of a row you could not find exactly 200 healthy appropriately developed cuttings, you were allowed one incomplete box, but it must hold some multiple of fifty: 50, 100, 150.
The quality control was very exacting. Boxes were inspected by the manager's wife. If you had too many cuttings that were not precisely 2 1/2 inches, or too many boxes that did not have precisely 200 cuttings you were in trouble and if you did not improve quickly you would be let go. Moreover there were quotas for the number of boxes you produced. When I first began I needed to be sure I produced at least six boxes per hour to remain employed, then the expectation rose to eight boxes per hour which was considered the minimum to retain employment. The experienced, year round workers could produce from 10 to 12 boxes per hour.
The combination of the requirement for precision and production was very stressful at first. There was no time to carefully line up each cut. I had to learn to be able to reach out, grab an appropriate shoot precisely lined up and snap it off all in a single smooth move. Each new cutting would be transferred to my left hand to hold until I had exactly 50, then I would take a moment to walk forward to box stand and put the cuttings in. After a while I got so that I could hold 100 at a time securely but without crushing them because walking back and forth to the box took time away from production.
At the head of each row or section of a particular type of chrysanthemum was a post with a white plastic bucket filled with 1" x 6" flat wooden stakes. Each stake had the name of the type of chrysanthemum in that row or section printed on it. The stick had a place to write your employee ID (a 4 digit number) and the number of cuttings in the box (preferably 200). When you filled a box, you penciled in the information and slid the stake into slots on the box as a label. Then you dropped your finished box on the ground in the isle. One of the women, usually someone who had trouble making production quotas consistently was given the task of running up and down the isles collecting the boxes and putting them in a rolling cart. When the cart was full, the gatherer would roll the cart from the greenhouse to the office building where they would be inspected and then placed in a large walk in cooler. The gatherer would pick up and empty cart and wheel it back to the greenhouse and begin gathering up filled boxes again.
At the end of each day hundreds of boxes of cuttings were loaded into refrigerated trucks and taken to other processing facilities and greenhouses where they would be placed in chemical baths to grow roots. These about half of these rootings would then be sold to commercial nurseries to produce hundreds of varieties of mums for gardens, homes, and offices - the rest would be cycled back to greenhouse facilities like ours where they would produce new cuttings.
At the Yoder Brothers greenhouses in Redwood City the plants were never allowed to flower. The flowering of chrysanthemums is triggered by the declining length of days (which is why the majority of chrysanthemums are sold and displayed in the late summer and autumn. To prevent any of the plants from flowering growing lights automatically came on before sunset every day and stayed on until past sunrise. The plants were fooled into thinking it was perpetually mid-summer so they never bloomed.
This was the most frustrating aspect of the job, all that hard work and we never actually saw a chrysanthemum blooming! I wondered then what the bloom of the variety called Fuji Mefo looked like, because the name intrigued me. Today, because of the miracle of Google and the internet, I finally know what the flower looks like.
This is a good stopping point. Stay tuned for Part 2 of My Brief Life as a Farm Worker!
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