Day 282: When I was a kid, our Fall Break from school was called Spud Harvest, and it was not a break. It was hard work. The local farmers needed so much help getting those famous potatoes out of the ground, that schools would close and youngsters would go to work. Many of the school districts in Idaho still do this today.
It was a great way to make some money in a short amount of time. I liken it to the Utah County students who do summer sales by knocking doors for pest control and alarm systems. Somebody’s gotta do it.
I remember feeling excited when I was old enough to work the harvest and make some money of my own.
I rotated through the jobs of rock picker, sorter, and seed cutter. I don’t remember if that was typical, or if they were merely trying to find something I could do successfully.
We would arrive at the crack of dawn and enter the cavernous potato cellar, where a long conveyor belt would either move the potatoes from the truck at the mouth of the cellar toward the back, or vice versa. As the potatoes passed by on the belt, we “picked” the bad potatoes and the rocks and the dirt clods off the belt and threw them behind us into the dank darkness. Needless to say, it was not wise to walk behind the pickers unless you wanted to get nailed in the head with a dirt clod.
If you were a sorter, you sorted the potatoes by size. And if you were cutting seed, you would grab a potato and cut it in half against a vertical blade in front of you. If you were a seed cutter, you wore very heavy gloves so you could just push the potatoes against the blade with your hand. Dicey. I know.
Everything moved fast. It was hard work. I remember one morning there was a short of some kind on the conveyor belt and once in a while electricity would jolt through the machinery and send us flying backward. My hair stood out like a science experiment. After that happened, my mother seemed to need me more at home. Of course, this was all thirty-something years ago, and I’m sure it’s a much more efficient process now.
To all you hard-working Spud Harvest students who just went back to school this week, good for you! Don’t spend all that hard-earned Spud Money in one place.
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