Farmworkers, Laborers
Employer
2297 GA Highway 56 W
Uvalda, GA 30473
United States
Job description
Employees will be expected to perform work activities related to planting, weeding, cultivating, harvesting, and packing onions and watermelons. Workers will be expected to harvest, clip, bag, and/or load produce.
Pull Onion Plants: Workers will pull 100 plants; place them together and put rubber bands around the bundle. According to the maturity of the plants, the supervisor may vary the number of plants per bundle. Workers will cut tops and place bundles into field bags. There are 3,000 plants per field bag. Workers must bundle the correct number of plants and put the correct number of bundles into bags.
Plant Onions: Workers will pick up plant bundles and take off rubber bands. Workers will put one plant into each hole made by the pegger. In most cases a plant bed will be 100 feet long and four rows wide, with plants being 4 inches apart. There will be cases where a plant bed will be 100 feet long and four rows wide with plants being 4.5 inches apart. Before they start a field, workers will be advised what plant distance they will be planting and the correspondent piece rate applicable. Workers must be careful to place the plant all the way into the hole made by the pegger.
Walker: The walkers will walk fields and count bundled bags produced by each worker. They will also examine the quality of onion planting and report to supervisor.
Loader: Workers will load field bags of onion plants onto the truck to be transported to the field where the onions are planted.
Throwing: Workers will give the bundles of onions gathered in the seedbeds to the workers in the fields to be transplanted.
Plant watermelon: Workers will carry a tray of plants down the row, or ride on a transplanter, and gently place seedlings into holes previously made by the equipment and adequately place dirt around each plant.
Harvest, grade, sort, and load watermelons: During the cutting process, a farm worker walks in a designated area selecting mature watermelons to be harvested by sight only. Once a watermelon has been selected for harvest, the cutter will sever the watermelon from the vine with a knife and place it in the designated area. The selection of mature watermelons to be harvested is based on appearance only considering the variances in shape, size, weight, and external color while also considering other factors such as location of vine, age of crop, number of times crop has been cut, growing conditions of crop, as well as variety of watermelons. Once the watermelon is severed from the vine, cutters determine the grade or class of the watermelon and discard any watermelons with defects which render them unmarketable. During the loading process, a farm worker walks in a designated area while lifting preselected watermelons, then passes the watermelons to another farm worker who catches the watermelons and passes them to another farm worker or gently places them in the designated area or transport vehicle. Watermelons are unloaded and packed by hand using aid of conveyor belts and sizing machines.
Packing watermelons: Workers unload watermelons from harvest transport vehicle where employees lift watermelons from harvest vehicle and pass to another employee who gently places the watermelon on the in-feed conveyer. The watermelon then travels into the packing facility where it is graded by hand and disbursed to the correct packing station by the sizing machine. Worker then lifts the fruit from the sizing station and gently places watermelons in bin while assuring count and pack layout for each bin is correct for their sizing station. Erecting boxes, placing pallets at stations, and placing boxes at stations is a duty necessary to keep production flowing and is part of the packing process.
General Activities During Operations General: All Crops: During field operations, workers may be required to operate forklifts, drive a truck, pull weeks, move irrigation pipe, clean and repair housing, and perform farm and field sanitation.
Special Requirements
Workers will manually pull, plant, and load onion and watermelon plants. Workers must exercise extreme care not to drop farm produce any time during handling. Able to work in hold, cold and/or humid weather bending or stooping to reach ground level crops, and able to stand on feet for long periods of time. Workers should report to work on their own suitable clothing.