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When you think of Canada’s seasonal farm worker program, you might be surprised to see that most are actually mechanically driven, given the image of farmers bent over their knees tending their crops by hand.
Most of the Jamaican workers at the farms JIS News has visited so far have been found accompanying local fact-finding missions and operating harvesters, tractors, tractors and other equipment. They noted that this was a big and welcome change from previous years.
St. Anne Michael His Jones* was seen driving an apple picker when he visited a 2,500-acre apple farm in Simcoe, Ontario, he said. “He picks up apples from the ground, the bad ones that fall under the trees. We take them to the storage room and wash them there,” he explained. One of his colleagues pointed out that these apples are sometimes used to make juice.
Jones noted that the machine “makes the job much easier because it’s not easy to bend over to pick up fruit.” He told his JIS News that he has been in the program for 18 years and was just introduced to the machine three years ago.
He said that to cultivate suckers, workers first use planters and then return to the fields to fill in the missing gaps.
Before meeting Jones, the fact-finding team spent time on tobacco and Swedish farms, where the majority of the work is fully mechanized, a root crop, a hybrid of turnips and cabbages. At a family tobacco farm outside London, I met with Ken Henry* of St.
“There is a person inside the harvester who spreads and flattens the leaves. Plants are moved out of the harvester for processing and hardening, and in the sorting room the tobacco is pressed, weighed and ready for shipment. I’ll be ready,” he outlined. Worker safety was also a focus, with one worker at Suede Farms noting that the machines in use at the site automatically shut down when they let go.