My brief life as a farm worker Part 2

During the summers of 1970 and 1971 between years of college I worked at Yoder Brothers commercial horticultural plant in Redwood City, California as a farm worker. 

Women's Work in the Greenhouses

As I wrote in my previous post the primary work that we women did at Yoder Brothers was take cuttings of 2 and 1/2 inch shoots from chrysanthemum plants that were then shipped to other Yoder Brothers plants to be rooted. This constituted about 80 percent of our work load. 

But before the plants could grow to a point to have their shoots harvested, it was necessary to plant them. Planting was also a job that women did. The beds were prepared by the men. Preparation included sterilization of the beds. Each bed was tightly covered in plastic and scalding steam was piped under the plastic. Fertilizer, fresh top soil and other chemicals were applied to the sterilized beds by the men.  Then the women went to work. 

Taking cuttings was a job that could be done standing up, but planting could only be done kneeling. The beds were about a foot and a half high, so that even kneeling we sometimes had to lean over to work in the soil.  The packed dirt isles between beds were about 3 feet wide, which was enough to comfortably kneel perpendicular to the edge of the raised bed. We were given thick rubber cushions to strap over our knees, however, the isles were always dusty and often muddy so the bottoms of my pants, my socks and the tops of my shoes were usually filthy after a day of planting. 

Of course, I did seem to get dirtier than everyone else. Probably because I didn't mind getting dirty, because I was luckier than most of my work mates for whom this job was the difference between survival and starvation or homelessness. I had a home with my parents and was earning money to pay for college. Also I could afford to have clothes (even if only old ragged jeans and work shirts) that I only wore for work in the greenhouses. When I got home I could dump my clothes into the washer and put on something fresh. Many of my fellow workers could not afford separate sets of work clothes and home clothes; a lot of them would cover up at least their tops with old, worn, over-sized men's shirts to prevent staining. Some of it was a matter of choice - the young women did not want their novios or husbands to see them in dirty work clothes. I on the other hand had no one to impress with my femininity at that point in my life. Also many of them lived in apartments where they had to pay for laundry while I did my laundry for free in my parents' washer. Note that I did do my own laundry and did not leave it for my mother to do. I was often teased about getting so dirty. They said I was like their niños, who loved playing in the dirt. 

While the beds as a whole was three feet wide, thick wooden sides left the planting surface was about 30 inches. The surface of the bed was marked off in 5 inch squares by wire, so there were six squares across the width of each bed. We were given huge plastic trays of seedlings, each in it's little square of soil similar to the tomato or pepper seedlings at your local greenhouse or Lowe's in the spring. We had to make sure that the wooden stake labeling our tray of chrysanthemum seedlings had the same type name and number  to the wooden stakes labeling the bed we were planting in.  Rarely two women worked together on the same bed, one to a side facing each other, but most often we worked alone doing first one side and then the other. 

The soil was soft so we used no tools, only our fingers and hands. There was always dirt under my finger nails during those summers. We began with the square closest to the middle (the third square in from the side), so that we would not crush plants closer to the edge as we leaned out to reach the middle. Three seedlings were planted in each square in a triangle, the apex of the triangle pointing away from us.  I would gently pull a little seedling with its attached soil out of the tray with my left hand, while I simultaneously created a thumb sized hole in the bed with my right. I would plop the seedling in, and use my thumb and fingers to pinch the soil of the bed around it. Then reach for the next seedling and poke the next hole. I would usually do all of the third row squares I could comfortably reach from one kneeling location first, then the second row, and finally the first row, before "walking" on my knees to the next location. The pressure to be productive meant that there really wasn't time to stand up and straighten out between each location, just scooting on our knees. 

Physically planting was far more difficult than taking cuttings. Even with the thick rubber pads being on my knees for hours hurt. I'd get cramps in my calf or my thigh sometimes. In the early mornings there was greater risk of burning oneself on the heating pipe running around the bottom of the bed. But mostly it hurt my back to lean out over the bed to reach the middle rows.  And yet, I actually liked planting more than cutting. 

When you were cutting even though the job was really repetitive and boring you always had to pay close attention because you had to be counting the number of cuttings. The quality control was really strict, your 200 cuttings per box had to be exactly 200, not 199 or 201. If you let your mind wander while taking cuttings and lost count, you would have to stop and carefully count every cutting in your hand to make sure you knew where you were. Of course, stopping to recount cost time and that cut into your production which you couldn't afford to do if you wanted to keep your job. 

But planting required almost no thought at all, it was a purely mechanical process. So my mind could wander wherever I wished. Sometimes I sang softly to myself. Sometimes I composed letters or stories in my head. One could just simply daydream while planting, so time spent planting generally passed far more quickly than the hours spent taking cuttings. On those uncommon occasions that two women were working across from each other on the same bed one could actually have conversations, something not at all possible while you are counting cuttings. Too bad that planting was such a small part of the job during the summer months. The permanent workers did much more planting, being responsible for getting all the beds started in the late winter and early spring. 

Taking cuttings was the biggest part of the job, next in frequency and importance was planting, and finally when the productivity of plants had ended, we had to rip dead plants out and clean up the beds so the men could come in and prepare them for the next round of planting and harvesting of cuttings.  This was the only job that was truly social. It was always done by at least two women at a time, and sometimes a whole crew of women might be assigned to work on cleaning up an entire greenhouse. Since all we were doing was yanking plants out of the ground and piling them in huge piles there was plenty of opportunity for conversation, joking and singing. It was working on ripping crews that taught me all my best Spanish curse words, most of which are unfit for publication. 

Most of the time ripping out and cleaning up was a very short lived task centered on a few beds in an otherwise active greenhouse with many other rows of green, growing plants being actively harvested for cuttings. I have very vivid memories, however, of one afternoon in my second summer (1971) a crew of six of us were set the task of ripping beds in a greenhouse where everything was dried, brown and dead or dying.  This was a large task that was going to take the six of us the entire afternoon to complete. 

In an active greenhouse full of green, growing plants it was very humid and the high temperatures were usually in the high eighties or low nineties. That's not particularly pleasant, but its bearable and one becomes adjusted to the heat.  This particular greenhouse we were sent to work in was dry as a bone, and the temperature in that greenhouse when we started was 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It would reach 124 degrees before we were finished. We knew this because there were thermometers hanging from the overhead pipes. It was awful!  As the heat rose and it because harder and harder to work, I had a sudden inspiration. I stood up on one of the beds and turned on the faucet of the overhead water pipe and stood under it. I soaked myself completely my hair and clothes were dripping wet. Most of the others followed my example. We could then work in reasonable comfort for a period of time enjoying the coolness of the evaporating water. Within about 20 minutes I would be dry again, and need to soak myself once more. This tactic allowed us to complete the task without anyone succumbing to heat stroke or heat exhaustion. The only downside was that all the dust and dry leaves stuck to us and we were totally filthy from head to toe by the time the work day ended. 

We were required to be on the job site by 6:45 AM, but could not clock in until a minute or two before 7 AM. We were luckier than most open field workers in that there was a toilet with running water on the property, but we were only suppose to use it before we clocked in, during the 10 minute morning break, and during the 30 minute unpaid lunch period we were given. Most of us found ways to slide into the bathroom when nature demanded, especially when moving from one greenhouse to another without getting into trouble. The end of the day came at 3:30 PM. 

The Yoder Brothers and Scientific Horticulture

The job was hard, hot, dirty and mostly tedious, but Yoder Brothers (now Aris Horticulture, Inc) as a whole was a fascinating business. Begun in 1920 by two Mennonite brothers Menno and Ira Yoder of Barberton, Ohio, Yoder Brothers had grown by the 1970's to dominate the chrysanthemum market in the US.  Some eighty percent of all chrysanthemums blooming in the U.S. in the 1970's had begun their life in one of Yoder Brothers' greenhouses. Even in 1997 the greenhouse in Letcher County, Kentucky where I got my autumn mums bought their chrysanthemum seedlings from Yoder Brothers. 

One of the reasons I think that the plant manager hired me was that he wanted someone he could talk to. He was proud of the organization and its "scientific" techniques and found me a willing listener.  So I learned many details about the Yoder Brothers corporation and its operations that the other workers knew nothing about. 

Yoder Brothers was engaged in plant research, and had developed a highly systematized, rationalized, program to maximize chrysanthemum output and quality. They collected extensive data from each of their plants on temperature, moisture, and production, then developed complex formulas and programs to predict the most efficient and efficacious was to produce chrysanthemums. Each week the plant in Redwood City California received computer printouts mailed from the company headquarters in Ohio. The printout dictated precisely which beds in which greenhouses would be targeted for harvesting that week, which beds would be uprooted and cleaned out, which would be sterilized and treated for new planting, and which would be planted with new varieties.

We greenhouse workers often made fun of these printouts as they frequently dictated harvesting from beds that were producing almost no new shoots, while telling us to tear up beds that still had days if not weeks of production left in them. However, it appeared over the two summers that I worked there that on the average the computer program optimized their production.

Each day, at the end of shift, the precise number of boxes (each with 200 cuttings) of each variety of mum and each bed in each house, would be tallied on a sheet.  Because the first summer I was the only employee other than the manager for whom English was a first language, I was tapped to report each day's production to the home office.  I had to make a long distance call to Ohio and recite pages and pages of variety names, location identifiers, and numbers of boxes. These numbers would then be fed into the computer program that determined what the activities for each bed would be the next week. For some reason the need for concentration and accuracy on this task would trigger a yawning reflex in me. Halfway through the task I would start to yawn, which would make me struggle to continue reading the numbers.  Just writing about this has triggered a bout of yawning for me. 

Towards the end of my first summer, the home office sent a huge teletype machine to California to be used for reporting the production information. The plant manager (who spoke little Spanish) trained me how to use the teletype, and then it was my responsibility to teach the process of typing the report to my fellow worker and friend Gloria, an immigrant from Mexico who had been a executive secretary in a large corporation in Mexico and could type much faster and more accurately than I could, but who had no English at all. At that point I spoke Spanish fluently but my vocabulary was limited in odd ways: I knew the word for push, but not the word for button! But Gloria was smart and a quick learner and she filled in the gaps.  I was glad to give up the job of reading all those numbers every day and the weird yawning fits that it brought on. 

Stay tuned for part 3, where I will talk more about the women I worked with, made friends with, and cared about. Also I'll talk more about the Hispanic immigrant community at that time in that place. And at one funny story about speaking Spanish.