writing: a retweet about farms, and thoughts about canning factories and realism

[elisem]

On Twitter, Kate Elliott said, "I grew up in farm country. 'Realism' in epic fantasy should have way more mentions of agriculture and food supply than rape."

I agree.

It started me thinking about agriculture-related jobs, too. When I was going off to college, I worked summers to earn money for tuition to the one school I could afford of the three that accepted me. For four summers, I worked twelve and a half hours a day, seven days a week, at the canning factory just outside the farm town of under two thousand people where I grew up. It was assembly line work, mostly. I wasn't in the front part of the factory where the beans were received and graded and sorted and cooked and put into cans. Nor was I out by the cookers, where despite the roofless middle section of the factory that enclosed them, it got so hot that a person could faint on a summer day. My jobs were in the warehouse, folding for the person running a boxer (machine that put 24 cans at a time into a cardboard box and glued it shut), picking shiners on the line (pulling cans out that hadn't gotten labelled, or had gotten mislabeled*, before they reached the boxer), or running a stacker. A stacker was a big steel plate in a sort of crow's nest way up high; boxes chugged up to it on lines, and you stood up there next to the plate, grabbed them off the line, and arranged them in the right pattern to be the next layer on the pallet just below the plate. Then you pulled the lever and the plate slid away from you, dropping the boxes the scant half-inch onto the layer beneath -- well, if you had done your job right and moved the pallet on the lift to exactly where it ought to be. Or I ran a Whallen hydraulic palletizer and did brightstacking.

Brightstacking is where there's too much production to label and ship it all at once, and you need to save some for winter because year-round employees have to work after we seasonals were gone. (Yes, the factory is where I learned what little Spanish I have. That's another story. Tip of the hat to Homero and Juan-the-dancer and the rest of the bunch.) So the hot cans came out of the cookers in crates, shining and beaded with boiling water, and most of the crates went over to the six or so labeling and boxing lines, but some went to the two lines serving the big Whallens. They looked like badly done mecha water-fishing birds, the way they hovered over the vibrating table which shook the cans marching onto it into a honeycomb pattern. When there were enough cans to fill up an entire layer on a pallet, the last can in the row hit a little switch and the feeder line stopped delivering cans and the shaker table stopped shaking, and the palletizer's big square electromagnet came down on top of the cans and pressed them into the table until the pressure told the machine "Yup, we got a load of cans!" Then it would click, and its big square head would rise up again with the load of cans hanging from it, arranged perfectly, and when it was at the top of its rise, it would pivot, and turn itself until it was positioned over the pallet. Then it would start lowering itself with the load of cans, stopping only when the cans were on the pallet and it had pushed hard enough that the pressure sensors assured it the move was complete. Then it clicked the magnet off, releasing the cans, and rise up and pivot back to wait for the next layer. If you were running the machine, it was your job to put a big square of heavy cardstock down on the layer, to get ready for the last one.

(Those heavy huge squares of cardstock made exceptional paper airplanes. The biggest downside to having a quarter-mile of uninterrupted corridor in a series of warehouses is that a paper airplane like that can fly a very long way, and it doesn't care that your boss just came around the corner and that its continuation of glorious flight is going to mean a bunch of trouble for you for goofing around. Ahem.)

I'll tell you where this all fits in with my highly negative reaction to the movie "The Phantom of the Paradise" sometime later, OK?

Anyhow, yeah, I worked four summers, seven days a week, twelve and a half hours a day, earning money for tuition. The handy thing about working that much, we used to joke, is that there wasn't really time to spend anything, and you were too tired to go out anyhow. On the other hand, if you're working night shift and there are no beans that night because it was raining in Illinois and they couldn't pick that day, you have a night off and no real need for sleep. But mostly I saved every bit, and went to the University of Minnesota, which in the seventies had tuition reciprocity with Wisconsin, and that made it the school I was going to go to, because I could afford (with a couple thousand dollars my grandmother left me for education, and some money from my parents, from Mom's job at the library and Dad's job at the plastics factory) to pay the $2600 tuition per semester (it went all the way up to $5000 my final year).

The other two schools weren't possible, though it would have been interesting. One was Michigan State, which had an excellent math program and really interested me, but it was so much more money. The third was Bryn Mawr, and there was just no way on God's green earth that was going to happen, financially. Though Sharyn November and I have joked that, had I gone, she and I would have been roommates, and we might have played goofy pranks on Ellen Kushner. Now there's an alternate universe for you!

Anyhow, yeah. Realism. Why doesn't it mean more people growing the food, processing and packing it, transporting it? You want drama? Talk to my co-workers about why they're missing some bits here and there. I only got caught in a machine once, and I got off lucky, but my thumb joint is still a little weird. (I was running the machine two years underage, so I had to falsify the accident report and say I had been picking shiners.) At least it wasn't my whole arm, like the guy on day shift. Pretty spectacular bruising there and a little laceration. Pressure-sensitive release on that big electromagnet, remember?

Anyhow, yeah. Realism. I do not think that word means the same thing to some writers that it does to me. I'm really glad Kate Elliott said what she did, and I have to think about this some more.

Comments

[melusinehr.livejournal.com]

Both this and your goose-girl post are just lovely. And both made me think, "Yes! This is the way things should be, why aren't they like this?"

[janetl.livejournal.com]

On of the things I loved about Hild was the realism - honey, grain, fiber, meat weaving...

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this (and the goose-girl quote, as well). I love these little snapshots into your past. And I'm glad you didn't get squished.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

There was one time I came much closer to really getting squished -- well, two times, actually. I'll tell about those someday soon, I expect.

I'm glad I didn't too.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Amen to all this. Truth is stranger than fiction, and no less fascinating!

[janeehawkins.livejournal.com]

The timing and location is wrong for me to have picked any of those beans you were canning, but omg did I hate that job. When I was 12 I found out that if you showed up at a certain parking lot by 6am, the farmers would be loading up people to pick whatever. I did field work in the summers until I was legal to get a work permit. Strawberries were easy, detassling corn was hot, green beans were horrible. They made my hands crack, peel, and sometimes bleed. Still don't much care for beans. :-S

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Did you ever walk beans, as well as pick 'em?

Here's a Greg Brown song about that: Walking the Beans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx7JKkTBiKw&feature=kp)

(For those of you who haven't had the happiness, walking the beans is going down the rows weeding. Miserable job.)

[janeehawkins.livejournal.com]

My first image from that question was amusing. Can't recall that I did any weeding, which seems odd now that I think of it.

Thanks for the Greg Brown link. I'd forgotten that song.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Holy moly, I've never worked that hard doing manual labor in my life. One summer picking blueberries, a stint as a janitor, lots of service jobs that involved thoroughly cleaning the entire store before I could go home, but never for twelve hours at a time. I've had it easy.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I should tell about loading railcars and trucks. Though I had the easy parts there; the forklifts did all the hard work.

Unloading sixty pound sacks of salt was tough, though. I only weighed a hundred and ten or so myself.

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

Thank you for telling your stories. Am appreciative.

[kakiphony.livejournal.com]

In my neck of the woods, kids started working summers in cornfields at age 13. They "detasseled" the corn -- pull the pollen producing parts off the top of the plant so that it can't pollinate. It's long days in the heat of summer walking up and down and up and down uneven field rows. It mostly paid minimum wage, but a lot of the jobs also paid bonuses -- sometimes cash, sometimes trips to Cedar Point, etc. And it was one of the few jobs you could get at 13 -- so the kids who needed money did it, and kids who just wanted money for things like mopeds or cassette tapes did it too.

I did not do it because I had (and still have) a major corn allergy. Walking down rows in a cornfield made my eyes swell shut. But my mom was a contractor for years, and I did all her books and paperwork from the time I turned 13. (That included keeping track of who was how old and how many hours they'd worked so we could accurately comply with overtime and child labor hour laws.) Basically, the big seed corn companies don't hire the kids themselves -- they hire an independent contractor to whom they pay a contract price for every acre detasseled. Those contractors recruit crews of kids (or, sometimes, migrant workers) and then pay them (and pay for all other costs, like the buses, water, bandaids, gloves, water, and occasional treats like afternoon popsicles or pizza delivered to the field) out of the contract money. (Sometimes the company supplies a "rider" --a vehicle the workers ride on to detassel tall corn-- and then the cost of that comes off the contract price. Most contractors prefer walking fields -- and many of the kids did too as the riders were super hot to ride on.) It's why so many contractors only pay minimum wage -- they want to minimize their costs and keep as much of that contract money as possible.

My mom and her business partner were unique among contractors. They paid $6.00/hr for a first year detasseler (back then minimum wage was $4.25), gave kids a raise each summer they worked (usually a quarter, but sometimes 50 cents or even a dollar if they made them a supervisor). They did NOT offer the "show up every day and we'll take you to Cedar Point" style bonuses. They believed in giving the kids the money up front rather than dangling potential bonuses that could be hard to collect in front of them.

They also worked in the fields right alongside the kids. Their theory was that by paying more they could recruit the harder working kids, which generally meant they could make one or two trips to a field to get it to pass inspection, rather than 3 or 4. They also thought working alongside the kids allowed them to set the bar for pace and accuracy, and to see any problem right away. It generally worked, and they were known for running a good crew -- most of the kids who grew up on farms or in the country or were poor chose to work for them rather than for the sports coaches and teachers who were the other common contractors. However, their crew also tended to be smaller. They had a harder time recruiting than contractors who worked in the schools and had established relationships with kids, and a lot of 13-15 year olds can't actually do the math to see that making $1.75 more an hour is a better value than a potential trip to an amusement park or a cash bonus for always showing up. They also shed kids more quickly than other contractors because they expected them to really work hard -- they didn't put up with laziness or bad behavior in the fields. The other contractors were known as more laid back and "fun." But the kids who worked for my mom for multiple years were loyal -- especially the ones who'd worked for other contractors first. Apparently, the amount of money they made was well worth it. (Twenty years later, she'll occasionally run into someone in Wal-Mart who tells her, "You taught me what it meant to have a work ethic. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't worked for you.")

[kakiphony.livejournal.com]

Part II (who knew there was a character limit on comments?!)

My brother and sister both worked in the fields, and then continued in agriculture for their college summer jobs. Both of them were "bug scouts" -- employees of the seed corn company who get trained to recognize pest bugs and then walk the fields to identify their presence. My brother also worked for a year in the seed company plant. (I worked at the library, at a grocery store -- doing everything from stocking shelves to making doughnuts and salads in the deli, and then as a bank teller. I made less money, but could breathe, which was a plus.)

I am in total agreement that there's not enough of this in fantasy or in literature in general. Too often books are lazy about representing agriculture. It's all "hoeing weeds in the garden" or "watching the flock of sheep" without any insight into the actual methods of labor, complications, or systems. I've often wished someone would write a rural fantasy along the lines of Charles deLint's Newford, but set in the midwest with true agriculture as the backdrop. I've tried, but I can't seem to ever finish anything...

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I don't have a coherent comment, but I am SO GLAD you told these stories.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Excellent info. And excellent point.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I know when I saw Minas Tirith in the LotR movies, the first thing I wondered was- where are they getting their FOOD? because IIRC, it was surrounded by meadow. Very pretty, and totally impractical.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Indeed!