Farmworkers, Laborers

Descrição do trabalho

Workers will perform assigned duties as instructed by their supervisor, either in the squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos fields. Workers will need to be able to work in a team environment, while multi-tasking in a variety of situations. Ability to communicate clearly and effectively with supervisors, and other maintenance/ workers, in a noisy and fast-paced work environment. In the field, workers will be expected to participate in farming, picking squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos. Workers will be assigned a row or series of rows and will be required to pick by hand according to criteria described and demonstrated by managers such as size, color and maturity of the squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos and place them in buckets. Workers may be asked to drive farm equipment on the farm to assist with row marking, hilling, tillage, planting, fertilizing, mowing, irrigation, and drive squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos from fields to squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos shed. Some farm equipment may have tractor attachments such as row markers' arms usually equipped with disks, furrowers, chain markers, to create visual guiding lines or hilling cultivators, bed shapers to form soil ridges around growing squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos. Other attachments include disk rippers, subsoilers, or shank rippers that may also be used to break up compact soil layers. Other duties include leveling fields, managing crop residue, and preparing seedbeds for planting. Workers may also have to load or unload containers, or conveyor systems with fertilizer, and chemicals using equipment like forklifts, or manual methods (shovels/scoops). Worker may operate specialized, tractor mounted, or hand-pushed tools to create accurate, uniform, and straight row spacing, optimizing, planting efficiency and allowing for proper cultivation of squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos. Workers will also assist with keeping planting equipment, such as central-fill planters or row-unit planters, continuously supplied with fertilizer, and sometimes water. Continuing, workers may also be asked to manually plant, shovel, haul, spread manure, dig holes, ditches, trenches, stake rows or tie off plants, cultivate, weed, harvest, count, load, and unload vegetables (squash, zucchini, okra, jalapenos and green beans). Hand tools the workers may use are shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, and knives. Also, workers may be asked to repair fences, farm buildings, and land improvement projects as well as clean farm equipment, as needed. Other tasks workers may perform are irrigation duties such as watering squash, zucchini, okra, green beans, and jalapenos fields, moving and weed whacking pivots and wells, checking well dripper oil, drops and sprinklers for leaks, trimming headland tree limbs, and retrieving fertilizer tanks. This also includes cleaning and rinsing fertigation tanks between rounds, as well as assisting in the changing of draining gearboxes, and flat tires on pivots. Workers may also perform daily checks on equipment, basic maintenance, cleaning, troubleshooting, and repairing minor issues in the fields. All workers will complete safety training before working around any farm equipment.