Orchard Workers

Work description

Crops and Agricultural Duties: Crops include fruit and nuts, peaches, pecans, vegetables, trees, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, green beans, okra, squash, corn, pumpkins, zucchini, flowers, melons, aquaculture, and berries. Duties include tilling soil; digging holes to appropriate depths; planting and transplanting; weeding, thinning, pruning, cultivating, tending, and harvesting crops; and cleaning, grading, sorting, packing, and loading harvested products. Workers must have a general understanding of how pruning affects competition with fruiting wood and how thinning provides adequate nutrition to developing fruit. Improper pruning can negatively affect fruit load, fruit size, disease severity, and overall production. Workers must follow instructions regarding proper spacing when thinning and which peaches are to be left or removed. Only specified fruit is to be picked as instructed. Desirable fruit must not be left on trees, dropped, or left on the ground. Workers must use care when picking, grading, and packing to prevent damage or bruising and must take care not to break limbs or strip all peaches and leaves from trees. Workers must harvest fruit at the desired stage of ripeness. Workers will manually cultivate, harvest, grade, sort, and pack peaches and other agricultural products. Duties include discarding inferior or defective products and foreign matter; weighing or estimating product weight visually or by feel; placing products into containers according to grade; marking grades, identification numbers, and other required information on containers, tags, shipping, receiving, or sales records; measuring, weighing, and counting products and materials; and examining containers, materials, and products to ensure packing specifications are met. Workers will record product, packaging, order, grade, and identification information on specified forms and records; remove completed or defective products to conveyors or designated areas such as loading docks; seal containers using glue, string, nails, and hand tools; peel, slice, and load materials or products into package-processing equipment; assemble, line, and pad cartons, crates, and containers; clean containers, materials, supplies, and work areas using cleaning solutions and hand tools; stack boxes on pallets; and operate fillers. Workers will grade, sort, or classify agricultural products according to size, weight, color, or condition. Duties also include planting, cultivating, tending, and picking blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries; harvesting pecans; planting, cultivating, pruning, and maintaining pecan trees; and planting, harvesting, and performing ongoing maintenance of green beans, okra, squash, corn, pumpkins, zucchini, flowers, melons, berries, and other crops as directed. Orchard and Grounds Maintenance: Ongoing orchard maintenance includes planting, pruning, and thinning trees as instructed. Workers will use hand tools including shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, knives, pruners, and picking totes. Duties include maintaining farm buildings, structures, fences, irrigation tape or tubing, ditches, fields, orchards, and other work areas; cutting and dragging broken tree limbs from fields; and removing vines, suckers, shoots, and debris that may interfere with the function or growth of trees. Workers will apply pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and fungicides to crops and assist with Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) policies. Workers must wear assigned personal protective equipment when required. Farm Equipment and Vehicles: Workers may operate farm vehicles, implements, and equipment, including chainsaws, weed eaters, blowers, tractors, forklifts, mowers, bulldozers, backhoes, and other hand-held equipment, to plow, harrow, fertilize soil, plant, cultivate, spray, and harvest crops.