My Take on the Illegal Alien Issue

A long time ago when I was but a lad, the only sources of employment for young people were grocery stores as baggers and stock clerks and fast food. We only had 2 fast food restaurants until my junior year in high school, a Sonic and a Hardees, and only 2 grocery stores a Kroger and an IGA. This made teenage employment iffy and they wouldn't even think of hiring anyone until they were 16, so what did an unemployed teenager do for cash? Well, if you were like me and lived out in the boonies, you hired out to local farmers as a slave. I mowed yards and cleaned ditches and fence lines, all for well under minimum wage, but mainly I worked in the two money making mediums of the South, I "hauled hay" and worked in tobacco. These were the two most labor-intensive parts of the private farm in the day. The large round bales popular now were unheard of in the 1980's. Everyone used the much smaller square bales and while the actual cutting and bailing was done by machine, it required manual labor to get the bastards into a storage area, commonly called a hay loft and usually located in a dilapidated wooden structure called a "barn".

The first stage of this process took place in the field and required 3 major pieces of equipment. First you needed a trailer. This was generally a flat wooden-bedded trailer with open back and sides, but a tall front wall. It was usually in one of three conditions: OSHA's worst nightmare, unbelievably, mind numbingly, freaking dangerous, and containing blackholes large enough to suck in small to medium size galaxies. If you were one of the people riding on the trailer, you usually spent much of your time watching for holes, gaps, nails sticking up, weak spots, and miscellaneous things to cause you to break, cut, puncture, or otherwise damage your anatomy. The second piece of equipment was something to pull the trailer. Usually this was a farm truck that was held together by bailing wire and duct tape or a tractor that was kept together and running by a mixture of rust, dirt, and shear will-power. The farmer paying the cash drove this item. The last piece of equipment was the manual labor. This generally consisted of teenage boys who couldn't find any other work, alcoholics who couldn't find any other work and usually took part of their pay in beer, potheads who couldn't get any other work, and any other farmers that owed the farmer a favor or wanted him to owe them one.

How this worked, first you started the tractor or truck. This involved at the minimum another vehicle and set of jumper cables. The tractors were usually worse, because the tractor was usually one that had been in the family for generations. This valuable heirloom had invariably been stored under the drip of the equipment shed roof for years. Quite often the rust was the most attractive feature of the machine. Most of these things were so old they didn't have electric start, so you had to manually crank them. This involved a metal rod that looked a lot like a tire iron, which had usually been lost or broken 57 years ago, but something had been found that worked just as well and only made the process about 29 percent more dangerous. Turning an internal combustion engine over enough to start by hand might only be a light workout for The Rock, but when you have a group of 15 year old boys, 60 year old men, and 90 pound alcoholics, it generally involved five or six people jumping up and down on the crank, while the farmer adjusted chokes and throttles, pushed in clutches, and flipped switches all while squinting his left eye, holding his breath, and hoping he'd sacrificed the right animals to the right pagan gods the night before. The rest of the crowd would be chanting every curse word and bit of profanity known to them, and probably learning some new ones, then the motor would catch. The trick to crank starting a tractor is knowing when to let go of the crank. If you don't let go exactly right, the metal bar is going to jerk and whack you in some part of the anatomy you might need later. Then you are going to have to lie in the barn until the hay is in before they take you home or to the hospital.

Now farmers can be divided into categories based on three criteria. How they pay, how they bale, and how they drive in the field.

Basically the first stage of hay hauling involves driving the rig around the field while one group of people place the bales of hay on the trailer and another group stack the hay neatly on the trailer. You want the more experienced people stacking, because there is a trick to it and if it is done badly, you either don't get the maximum amount of hay per load, or it falls off. Both waste time. Also, the higher they can stack the hay the better, to a point. Anyone can set the hay up on the trailer, so the less experienced people do that.

Now, some farmers paid by the hour, which was cool for the worker. Most farmers wanted to pay per bale. If they figured the total bales and divided by total workers, this was okay, unless you have a lot of time wasting problems like badly stacked hay or a barn from hell. Most farmers though, felt the best thing was for the individual to track the number of bales they handled and paid that way. This would seem fair, because the harder workers would make more, and everyone would be encouraged to work more. Except for a few things.

Hay bales come in many forms. Bales of hay are held together by two or three cheap strings. They can be baled tight or loose. You want tight, but not too tight. Tight is good. Loose bales weigh less, but if too loose can fall apart before you get them loaded. They also don't stack very well. If the bale comes apart on you, you loose time trying to put it back together, or grabbing another bale. Not good if you are on the per bale pay system. If the bales are too tight, then the strings can break which is just as bad or worse than falling apart. You also hope the farmer didn't bale them too heavy. Some farmers like to pack them heavy. This makes fewer bales so he has less to pay if on the per bale system. It also tires the workers out quicker though. These idiots were usually the ones that wanted the stuff stacked really high too.

Then you have driving. Some farmers drop it into extra low granny gear and creep through the field making it easy to get the bales to the trailer. Then you have the guys that bounce through the field at 30 miles per hour making you chase the trailer. These are usually the same guys that have the 150 pound, tight baled, exploding hay bales they want stacked 8 runs high.

Once loaded the hay is hauled to the barn. If you are lucky, the barn is in decent shape. If not everything you had to watch for on the trailer goes triple in the barn, plus add spiders, snakes, hornets, wasps, angry rats, dogs, cats, barn swallows, pigs, etc. Some farmers had these conveyors belt set ups they could hook to the trailer. A couple of guys would stay on the trailer and drop bales on the conveyor and it would carry the bales up in the loft. Other people would carry these over to where the rest would stack it. The number stacking versus carrying increased the higher you went. If there was no conveyor belt, the poor suckers on the trailer had to "throw" the bales up, which increased the stain on bale and string. It also wore out the guys on the trailer and increase injury risk for the targets, I mean bale catchers.

Now a quick description of hay for those that have never encountered it. It is basically dried out weeds. It is scratchy and makes you itch. It usually has a dry, dusty smell that makes you sneeze. It is almost always 90+ degrees when you haul the crap in. It is a miserable job, hot and boring. Hay lofts are always shadowy, this is to hide the holes you can fall through. The top of a barn in summer is hot, usually about 110 degrees and dusty. Once you half fill it with hay, then the air is 90 parts dust to every 10 parts air. The temperature goes up to about 630 degrees and the dust coats your sweaty skin. Did I mention hay scratches the heck out of you?

Tobacco is different. Tobacco is an interesting plant. There is absolutely nothing pleasant about it. It is ugly and disgusting in every way, yet people pay money for it. This is how it works.

One or two people can handle a lot of tobacco until it needs to be harvested. You plant it, you how it, spray it with insecticide, keep it cleaned out, top and sucker it (don't ask, you basically break of the bloom on top and pull off little leaves called suckers, that are bad, I don't really know why, but it has to be done by hand.) When it is time, you cut it, spike it. Let it sit a couple of days, then haul it and hang it.

One man can cut and spike, but it is faster to have a cutter and a spiker. One man takes a small hatchet and bends the tobacco stalk enough to expose the upper part of the root, then he whacks to the base of the stalk with the hatchet. The stalk is tough here so it takes some force. This man is bent over a little, so he stands, twists around and hands the plant to the guy behind him. This man has a square wooden stick with a sharp steel cone, called a spike, over one end. He pulls the tobacco stalk down hard, driving the spike through the stalk a little above the base of the root. You want some of the tough root, to hold the stalk together on the pole. If the cutter, cuts too high on the stalk, the stalk splits when spiked, creating extra work later. The spiker puts 5 to 6 stalks per stick. He fans the stalks out, so the pole hold them up like a tepee. This is left out in the field about 3 days to dry, then they are picked up and hauled in similar to hay. The sticks are threaded over poles in the barn called tobacco tiers. This lets the stalks hang straight down. They dry for several months in the barn. When ready, the sticks are taken down, the stalks removed, the leaves removed from the stalks and sorted and baled.

Now tobacco is not nice, the sap is black and sticky, you get it on you and dust and dirt stick to you like crazy. If you get it in your eyes or an open wound, it burns worse than alcohol. It tastes like I imagine horse urine and dirt would taste mixed together. Normal soap won't take it off, you need to sandblast it off. You smell the stuff for a week afterward. It is just nasty. I still liked it better than hay. It has worms that like to eat it and they are icky feeling. It also attracts stinging bugs like crazy. Cutting tobacco works the arms and back out, and I sliced up a few pairs of jeans and my leg once. I know a few people who spiked their hands. Then you have to watch for splinters from the sticks. You also usually end up hanging by your toes on tobacco tier poles 30 feet off the ground in a barn hanging the stuff up.

Neither job was fun, but I did have some fun doing it. Sometimes I miss it while sitting at a desk. I don't miss blowing dirt out my nose for three days though. Now most people use round bales and hay is strictly done from the back of a tractor. We still use square bales for the goats and have trouble finding them to buy. My father raised tobacco until last year. I helped with it some, but come September and cutting, he hired people to cut and haul it. My father has nothing against the Hispanics and respects them as workers, but he doesn't like using illegals, so he tries to hire locally. He could only find two non-Hispanics willing to do the work, despite an unbelievable unemployment rate. I find this true of most of the local farmers. They don't want to employ illegals, but our locally grown unemployed don't want to do the hard labor. In my main job, I can't find anyone under 35 who has any idea what farm labor is. I think this might be part of our problems. A few summers of farm work, and most any other type of job seems sweet.