Crew Work

It's Labor Day week! As we're celebrating the contributions of organized labor, I'm thinking about organized labor of a different sort: the task of picking up the winter squash. Although the plants were set in neat rows, the vines spread far and wide in a green canopy and now, as the leaves are dying back to shriveled brown paper, they uncover the tan butternut squash dropped every which way across the entire field. The puzzle is what method to use to clip and gather them all up. 

It's a job for many people—but not simply a number of people working individually with their own set of clippers and crates (many, many crates). This is a job for pallet bins—the sort that hold pumpkins in front of the supermarket at Halloween—and four people working together as a unit: one person to toss squash that's been clipped and gathered from the rows, one person on the corner of the pallet to catch the squash, one person in the bin to pack it, and one to drive the tractor, pallet, bin, and people along the edge of the field. Each person's work is connected to the others', interrelated with the whole. The tractor driver watches the others and moves the rig at the proper pace; the tosser throws squash one after the next but only when the catcher will be ready, handing off the previous squash to the packer. When it's well coordinated, there's a squash in the air while the last one is still being handed off to the packer.

This is the sort of crew work I enjoy most, where my work relies on the work of others and where others are waiting on me to complete my element of the task. On a small farm, here, we rarely have large enough jobs that we can access this sort of crew work. Two people often work individually in parallel, each doing the same task in their own row, and several people might work simultaneously on different single-person tasks. This is efficient, productive, and appropriate for the scale of farm I have here. But occasionally there is call for three people to work on a transplanting rig, each person's work reliant on attention to the others, the entire project accomplished as a group with no single person feeling ownership of any particular part. It's not relevant which particular plants any one person planted, or the fact that the person driving the tractor (me) didn't plant any plants at all. We all together completed the same project, and much more pleasantly than if we'd each done a third of the field all by ourselves. I miss the crew work of my time years ago working on larger farms—when the projects were large enough that most of the work was in some way a group effort, with five or ten people accomplishing a large task acting as one unit—and I appreciate the rare opportunities for that sort of work when they come up here on my own farm.

When I worked here a long time ago as a nineteen-year-old, it was for a farm that planted 20 acres of vegetables, employed a dozen workers, and went to 14 farmers markets each week. At my three-acre farm now we plant, at most, four rows of a crop in any given planting, and with only two or three people in the patch, it's easy to keep track of what areas have been done or not done. With so many people in a large field that wasn't the case, and that farm crew had developed its own culture of crew work, a culture passed on to new folks each year by the returning, experienced folks who appreciated the system. It worked like this: when a whole group of people enters the patch, each person takes the row closest to the top of the patch that doesn't have anyone in it. Whenever anybody finishes a row, they move down to the start of the unoccupied row just below the person in the lowest row. Once the last row is occupied, anyone finishing their row now goes to the far side of the first still-occupied row and works towards the person languishing in the middle—who now knows that help is on the way, the work of their row just cut in half! Once those people come closer and closer and eventually meet, completing their row, they go together to the center of an incomplete section between two other people, and go back to back, working towards those other two—who were previously working with their partner, but who now have a total of FOUR people in the row! Done in no time.

It’s clear where anyone should go next, without anyone having to be in charge, or answer any questions: people start from the top of the patch and complete rows working down to the bottom, and work down each row always moving towards another person or towards an end of a row; the undone section is clear, and so, it's clear where to join to help—without confusing anyone. This understanding was common to the crew; each person knew it enough to execute it or to direct an unsure person how to participate in the group project. Nobody who followed the system could get lost, and everyone could trust that no sections were missed, even though no one person paid any attention to the others' individual work.

There was no need to talk about the work, no need for judgment calls, or for any direction from one person over another—we simply executed the work together. We talked about other things, that's for sure, and stayed within talking range as much as we could. And we were glad to confirm that we'll split someone's remaining section, or to say “Let’s go help them with that row” and then, to the two people being joined, “Hey, we’ll split you!” If our own spot turned out to be a hard, slow-going row, we knew others would arrive to help, and we wouldn't be left to complete it alone. We were always working towards somebody, and when we met, a milestone, minor victory—the end of a row, the end of a section, and a chance to walk down and brighten somebody's day with the knowledge that the end of the task was now close at hand—the very arrangement of people letting everyone in the field know that the long task is coming to a close. That feeling, of one's own effort as part of the whole, is the crew work—so different from just working alone for a while, and then stopping, even if others are also working alone nearby, also doing their task on their own, in parallel.

At last, after finishing our row, after joining our neighbors, and then all four moving on to the next section, finally everybody accumulating to join together in the last, worst, slowest area, all so ready to stop and be done with the giant project, we're all getting closer and closer to each other splitting and finishing sections until everyone is shoulder-to-shoulder in the last part, all having accomplished the thing together, having reached the largest milestone and climbing into the pickup truck bed to return home for lunch.