Holy sheit! You have some great stories from the South. I picked apples a few times about 40+ years ago and even then I was an outlier being a non migrant and all. I remember when I went to the office where they call the farmers and the guy called me clean cut. Undoubtedly code for speaks English and not a migrant.

.51 so far and STILL CLIMBING.

Classic four corners low is making for some Colorado rain and high country snow. The cyclone is moving out now in the familiar west to east path across the plains states. Nebraska, Iowa, and Great Lakes states can get a soaker.

When I briefly lived up in Okanogan County it was staggering the amount of migrant help which flooded the area during harvest in September/October. Seriously overwhelmed the area’s service capacity and some of the farms were beyond sketchy with their HR practices. The biggest was Gebbers Farms (I think they’re still up and running) and they had multiple encampments near me which were third world minus. They were 100% of the work force in the orchards during that period and the in turn the lifeblood of the local economy. The other one that gets me is home building. One of the biggest gripes of the day (legitimately so…) is housing costs. Here locally, it’s understood that ~25% of the trades (some more than others) are undocumented. You eliminate 1/4 of an already scarce supply of trained/skilled/efficient tradesmen and I’m SURE it will apply downward pressure on the cost of home building. Not everything is so simple!

Some of it just really sucks though....not that it is a viable crop any more but cropping tobacco absolutely sucks. Never personally worked in the fields cropping, but I did have to go out and top a field by hand once. Tobacco plants grow flowers on top that pull the tar out of the leaves. The plants are 6-7 ft tall, and usually a mower type farm implement was hooked to the back of a tractor and cut the flowers off. So when that broke, we had to go out and take the flowers (suckers) off. Basically had to get in the plant and stretch my arm up as far as I could to break the flower off without losing leaves. I was covers in tobacco tar after that. My usual job was taking the tobacco after it was picked and hanging it in a drying barn. When I was a teenager, I worked in tobacco in S. Georgia. At that time, one of the employees would round up a crew from the "projects" and pay them cash under the table (so they would not lose their "benefits" and have cash to buy crack). We would get them out there as soon as it was sunrise and it used to be they would go all day. When I was there, they would quit about 12-1pm whether we were ready for them to quit or not. Migrants were just starting to settle in the area, and by the early 90's the crew from the projects refused to do the work, so the farm switched over to migrants. After a few more years, the migrants refused the work too, so the farm had to buy a mechanical picker. It did not do nearly as good a job, but at least it showed up for work! Chicken processing plants is another truly awful job. You can usually smell a chicken processing plant long before you drive past it. There has always been jobs that folks aren't really willing to do. Since we can't have slaves any more (sarcasm) we have to rely on migrants for those jobs. That said, to my comment about berry picking, it used to be that was how a vast majority of teens up here earned money in the summer but at some point, the migrants moved in and took the jobs. We tried to get my son working there, and he talked to friends and they all said it was not a viable option any more because the migrants run off all the gringo kids.