Stay in Florida

Stay in Florida

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Here is the view from the far end of vehicle entrance at Granada Ranch, Abel Grove where we have been picking juicing oranges. There are a very few cows left at Granada ranch, but loads and loads of groves. Both sets of sprayers get your vehicle on the way in (see the tail end of our van), but only the far one sprays your vehicle on the way out. As I was the last person picked up (I am the only person picked up at Carter's) I was the first person out for the required individual spraying they do (which was why I had the opportunity to take these two pictures).
Here is the individual sprayer. Only the bottom three sprayers were active and you wore you picking bag in front of you and opened (not folded up for carrying and storage)and your boots, pants and picking bag got sprayed, not your face. I have heard that the spray is carbolic acid which is pretty harmless to humans. I also heard that they had found citrus canker in a grove in Martin County, the county due south of here.
Here is Francisco picking oranges. He drew the number one greater than mine. We started in the middle of the these rows each working our way out. I watched him briefly as I picked to learn new techniques. In general, you want the fruit about one foot directly above your fruit bag (with your fruit bag at your hip) so that the fruit falls easily into your bag after you pick it (and with no wasted motion). You climb the ladder with an empty bag (for obvious reasons) and climb to the top and work down. His ladder is 18 feet and the trees in this grove are mostly 10 to 12 feet tall. Some are as tall as 14 feet with a few replacement trees that are shorter. I got one of the four 'chiquita' or smaller 16 foot ladders as I was new.
As you pick a tree the limbs turn upward. Here is my picker's bag hanging on a tree that I will pick next (just for this picture) with a picked tree on the right and a partially filled tub on the left. The picker's bag has a metal semi-circle to hold it open with a fabric belt held taught between the ends of the metal piece. The fabric belt should rest against your body at about hip height.... Of course it is much easier to pick fruit standing on the ground where you can easily position your bag and not worry about your balance. So, even then you try to get the top fruit first as all the fruit on the limb move up a little when you pick each fruit (so taking lower fruit can also put the higher fruit out of reach).
Even if you are reaching up and you still just toss the fruit down toward your bag (I like to feel the fruit bounce against my stomach so I know it is going in), but as these are juice oranges, even if a few miss you just pick them up when you are on your knees getting the lowest fruit. Also, as the upper limbs lift up out of the way, it makes it easier to see and reach for the lower fruit, and, of course, if the fruit which is so low it is resting on the ground only gets easier to reach if it lifts up a little (closer to the opening of your bag, now resting on the ground while you are on your knees).... In many groves they have alternating 'roads' (with space for the loader) like this one shown and then a drainage ditch like that in the next picture.
For packing grapefruit which we spot picked (picking only the larger) we got $6.50 per thousand pounds or about a half cent per grapefruit. There the challenge is quickly deciding which fruit to pick. For juice oranges which we are picking in this grove (and where the oranges are a little small, about tangerine size on average) we are clean picking or picking all the fruit on the tree; we got $8.00 per thousand pounds which is about one fifth cent per orange. Clearly you need to move quickly with no wasted motion if you are going to even make minimum wage of $5.15 an hour (which I usually didn't), and most of the others didn't do much better.
Here is a 5 second video of Anno, the fastest picker, picking oranges. It is 122K and will take about 40 seconds to download. There is also a rotated and enlarged version of this video that takes about a minute to download. Picking fruit is really skilled labor. Notice that his hands never go near his bag, the fruit just seems to magically fly into his bag. He is really amazing. Even so, with juice oranges at these small sizes he only makes about $8.00 an hour (he fills about a tub an hour). My best is a tub in an hour and half.	If your browser is not set up to show movies you will get an error dialog box instead of a player and can just press cancel. On some systems you may need to press the pause button (left bottom) before the movie finishes so you can watch the movie again without downloading it again.