Kids on the Farm

We moved from Worcester, MA to a more rural Florence,  MA when I was 7. My father accepted a position as teacher and the principle of a vocational high school that had a well respected agriculture program. As a child I remember playing among the chicken coops and in the dairy barn as well as frolicking through the fields and orchards. The school grounds were not expansive but to a child they seemed to stretch for miles.

During my first summer in my new home I was surprised to see a school bus full of kids rumbling down the street picking up mostly boys but some girls little older than me. I learned that this was not a summer school bus but was taking these young workers to the local farms to work. Most of the kids worked at the wrapper tobacco farms that blanketed the Connecticut River valley but some went to vegetable farms picking cucumbers for pickles, asparagus or sweet corn.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I took employment on one of the tobacco farms, nine hours a day 6 days a week, for farm wages which were a bit south of minimum wage. My dad figured the long hours and hard work would keep an active teenager out of trouble. He was right for 54 hours a week, the other hours were another story. In any case the farms at that time still employed bus-loads of tweens picking and hauling the tobacco leaves out of the fields.

It is still common for the children to help out on family farms, but the fact is you won’t find many born Americans working as farm laborers. I read a story in the New York Times about an apple producer in Washington who fired half of their pickers because they were illegal and they couldn’t find enough non-immigrant to work those jobs. It’s too bad, because even though the work was long and hard I never found it unsatisfying.