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RR Valley, ND; MN native | Thanks for posting that. Nearly 40yrs ago now we had about a acre of cucumbers. My sister and I got the money from that for college. I picked from about age 15-19. Our cucumbers were sold to Gedney. This was in Minnesota abt 100mi west of the cities.
Those $$ were the hardest physical work I have ever done. Anyone looking down on HARD working field workers that hand pick crops has my disdain....
Walking the beans, hand pitching manure from the calf pens, or stacking small square bales till your arms are rubber is a vacation in comparison, IMO.
I think we picked about 3 times a week for a month or so +/- from late July through most of August. Start at around 6:30 hoping to get done before it got too hot. The cucumber vines would get rubbery in the heat of the day and much harder to pick. Not to mention the gallons of sweating in the heat. Ooofff.... Sweat literally dripping from my nose.
Remember after loading up the truck, go in and clean up a little before heading to the sorting plant to unload. Pull off the rubber gloves (protection from the spines) and pour out 1/2 a cup of sweat. Standing at the sink, my legs and back start to give out and I need to hold myself up on the counter.
I soon learned that the way to save your back to keep going all morning until done was to place the burlap sacks along the rows every so far so that the 5 gal plastic bucket would not be more than about 1/2 full as you worked along the row to the next sack to dump it. A full bucket too heavy to be picked up and hoisted ahead when bent over w/o wearing you out too soon. Too much standing up and bending over also wasted time and wore out the back faster so the idea was to stay bent over and work 2 hands while the row was between your legs. Even so, your back, hamstrings, and ankles would be toast by the end of the picking session.
Full sacks weighed over 100lbs and had to be carried to the end and loaded onto the pickup. We'd often get over 2000lbs on that old 3/4t chevy and the front was light driving to the sorting plant.
These machine harvested cucumbers can only be done once as the video shows the vines are destroyed in the process. Even in the 80s when I was doing this, I heard there were machine harvesters. Our hand picked ones were picked dozens of times in the season. We trained the vines into rows so there was space to walk between them.
There used to be quite a few small plots of cucumbers around our farm that were picked by kids like me and my sister. Some larger plots or even fields hired migrant workers. By the end of the 80's it seemed all that went away in that area and you don't see those sorts of things grown around there for decades now.
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they harvest cucumbers with a machine
