- [Narrator] Harevesting provides humans
with over 2 billion tons of fruit and vegetables every year.
It's one of the most crucial industries on the planet.
- [Dennis] It's dangerous work up there,
one slip and they could end up in a world of hurt.
- [Narrator] These high tech wonders have transformed
America's 2 million farms into a $140 billion industry.
- [Mitch] You're talking about the ability to harvest
4,000 or so bushels an hour.
- [Narrator] From optical fruit sizers
to computer controlled corn picking combines.
You'll never shop for produce the same way again,
on "Modern Marvels."
(electronic music)
(upbeat music)
- [Narator] Every year, from spring until fall,
California's fruit harvest is in high gear.
At Reimer Farms in California's San Joaquin valley
they're picking nectarines.
For all growers, stretching the harvest season
means raising different varieties of the same fruit.
- We have varieties planted specifically
throughout the different times of the season
to fulfill those different time slots
for providing fruit to the marketplace.
So a typical variety of nectarines
may harvest for two to three weeks.
- [Narrator] A good harvest depends on fruit
that looks and tastes its best.
To add maximum appeal to a nectarine,
most growers line the orchard rows with strips of Mylar.
The reflective surface concentrates the sun's rays
into the tree canopy, promoting photosynthesis
and increasing the sugar content
and color quality of the fruit.
- And then that's when the fruit's
actually going through its sizing process.
It's when it's developing its sugar,
developing its color.
And so we're trying to maximize its environment
during that particular critical time point before harvest.
- [Narrator] As the workers begin picking,
growers will spot check the fruit
to verify their decision to start harvesting.
- So what we'll do when we're trying to decide
whether we're harvesting properly is
we'll sample them with a penetrometer
to see what the flesh firmness is
to determine whether we are picking the level we want.
So we just quickly just shave a piece of the skin off.
And then we use this plunger to push in there.
And the force that it takes to push that in
will then determine the flesh firmness.
This one rated at 11.
- [Narrator] Picking is no longer the last step
in the harvest.
In many cases, it's just the beginning.
This 10 acre packing facility
operates three state of the art packing lines
for boxing peaches, plums, blueberries,
apples, and many other fruits.
Today, it's nectarines and pomegranates.
In one shift, the workers can back up to 120,000 boxes
of fruit on two lines.
All of it sorted, according to size, color,
and degree of ripeness.
- We become almost the warehouse for the grocery store.
So they'll give us an order and give us
only like a one or two day lead time to pack it,
put it on a truck and get it over to anywhere
in the United States.
- [Narrator] Once a piece of fruit is picked,
its limited lifespan
sparks the race to preserve freshness.
Here, sophisticated post-harvest handling
is a way to stall for time, starting with a cold shower.
The hydro-cooler pours frigid 32 degree water
over the fruit to reduce its internal temperature
and slow down decay.
- This is absolutely crucial in maintaining good quality.
In the harvest season in California in the summertime,
our temperatures can be well over 90 degrees Fahrenheit,
even a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
And the fruit will lose quality quite quickly.
It will dry and lose sugars.
- [Narrator] The cooled fruit quickly makes its way
onto the sorting line for a quick wash and wax.
After it's rinsed,
it's sprayed with a vegetable oil product
to help prevent moisture loss
during the long journey to the supermarket.
Before sizing begins,
inspectors use their highly trained senses
to remove the subpar fruit.
- As they touch it, they're looking for a soft shoulder
or soft tip on the fruit
that would bruise or damage easily
and could later decay in transit.
So that piece of fruit that's a little bit too soft
is then removed.
- [Narrator] The rejects are diverted
and will later produce juices, jams,
and other processed products.
The fruit that passes inspection
continues its journey to the high speed sorting line.
For centuries, farmers have sorted fruit
to achieve uniform shipping weights
and to satisfy consumer preference.
The first packing houses used crude sizers,
with wooden slats or holes
through which the smaller sized fruits would drop.
Today, the optical fruit sizer is a faster,
more accurate method.
The fruit is first diverted onto a single file cup conveyor,
moving at about 10 pieces per second.
As it passes into the sorter,
each piece is rotated and photographed by two lenses.
An infrared lens gathers shape and dimensional data
and a color lens collects the color qualities of the fruit.
The camera quickly snaps 25 photos
to create a two dimensional projection of the entire fruit.
From this picture, the computer interprets its exact size,
shape, and color.
- Now we've got a full look at it
and then we can determine if the amount of color
that we see, red versus yellow,
is the appropriate color that's desirable for packing.
And that's helpful in markets where we want to send fruit
of a uniform size, color and shape.
- [Narrator] Once the computer obtains the mugshots
of a certain piece of fruit,
a timing device triggers a lifting finger
that deposits the fruit into a specific lane
according to size and color.
This high tech sorter delivers nearly identical fruit
to each of many packing lines.
After a final human inspection,
the fruit is hand packed in a variety of boxes.
- [Kelvin] Then it's conveyed by forklift
into a cold storage room where it's stored
at an ideal or optimum temperature
that actually puts the fruit to sleep.
Once the fruit is in that condition or in that state,
it's in the best environment to be transported
from California to the various markets in the Midwest
or the east coast.
- [Narrator] The packing house can even hold boxed fruit
at a higher temperature to force ripening.
Sophisticated post-harvest handling of fruit
is a progression and a ritual
that has remained otherwise unchanged
over thousands of years.
This Egyptian tomb drawing dated at 1900 BCE
depicts two workers harvesting a fig tree.
- The key components of harvest are the same.
One's picking the fruit and then putting it into a basket.
The other is sorting the fruit
and putting it into a consumer package.
The practices involved in picking and packing
are basically still the same and haven't changed.
(gentle music)
- [Narrator] Ancient Egypt is one of the birthplaces
of horticulture.
The first growers learned to irrigate their fields
by tapping the Nile River's seasonal floods.
But without modern technologies,
these growers were faced with the problem of spoilage.
- They didn't have refrigeration,
and they didn't have canning.
They didn't have these other processes
to preserve the harvested crop.
So the crop had to either be consumed fresh
soon after harvest or dried and stored dry.
- [Narrator] China was the birthplace of temperate fruits,
such as peaches and pears more than 4,000 years ago.
The Greeks and Romans oversaw thriving fruit trade
throughout the Mediterranean.
When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE,
the Romans were cultivating extensive orchards
including peaches, citrus trees, and grapes
on the volcano's slopes.
During the middle ages,
monks were the most sophisticated growers.
They practiced the skills of tree grafting
and cross breeding to produce new varieties of fruit trees.
The colonists brought Europe's fruit tree saplings
to the new world,
but the true American orchard revolution
was again fueled by monks.
As the Spanish moved north into California
and established missions in the 1600s,
the monks took advantage of the dry climate
and raised large orchards of grapes, figs,
peaches, pears, and apricots.
As settlers moved to California in the 1800s,
the orchards fanned out to supply the new urban centers
of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Growers also planted in the Sierra Foothills
to feed the influx of gold miners.
California fruit production exploded in the 1890s
when refrigerated railroad cars
allowed growers to ship fresh fruit
to the huge east coast markets.
But in the coming decades,
the small family operated farm would nearly vanish.
- Farms began to get bigger
primarily because of competition.
There's a continuing pressure to reduce the price of fruits
and vegetables at retail market.
And that means the farms generally have to get larger
in size to take advantage of economies of scale.
- [Narrator] Large vertically integrated growing
and packing operations are now the standard
in US fruit production.
But labor remains the most unpredictable
and expensive cost for growers,
especially when balancing a need to pay a decent wage
while providing affordable produce for consumers.
Beginning in the 1960s,
engineers from the University of California at Davis
began testing a multitude of mechanical fruit harvesters.
Various tree shakers and shake-and-catch machines
were very effective at harvesting fruit quickly.
But the percentage of damaged fruit was unacceptable.
Half a century later,
there are still no commercially viable mechanical harvesters
for picking many types of fresh fruit.
One solution may be a man machine interface
that allows laborers to more efficiently access
the tree canopy.
Here, a pear grower and engineers from UC Davis
are testing a modified European built platform
in Northern California.
The machine offers six moveable picking platforms
at three different heights
allowing the harvesters to move laterally
or up and down inside the tree canopy.
- So the workers, instead of placing fruit into bags
and delivering it to bins,
would place fruit two or three at a time
into little feeder conveyors
that fed into a main elevator.
At the top of the main elevator,
the fruit would go into what's called a bin filler
where the fruit is lowered and placed into a rotating bin,
which ensures even distribution of the fruit in the bin.
- [Narrator] By eliminating the need to carry heavy ladders
and picking bags, the platform might expand
the potential workforce.
It could also improve employee safety
by reducing hazardous working conditions
and injuries from ladder falls,
a major problem for many growers.
The harvesting platform has already gained a firm footing
in Europe where hand labor has been in short supply
for decades.
- [Narrator] In the Midwest, America's biggest harvest
has eliminated handpicking
and put the farmer at the wheel
of a computer controlled maximum efficiency machine.
Nebraskan John Sandahl is harvesting corn
in a John Deere 12 row combine.
The air conditioned cab may seem cushy
and combining corn may look a bit like mowing the lawn
but this harvest demands a sharp eye
and fast decision making.
- While harvesting corn, I'm scanning the corn head
all the time, watching for objects in the field,
make sure that all the row units are functioning properly.
Pulling the corn stocks down through.
And this corner post monitors all the functions
of the machine.
The first one down here has the engine RPM,
the speed that I'm traveling,
the middle one is the grain loss monitor.
That's very important.
It keeps track, monitors how much grain
the combine is losing off the bat.
- [Narrator] A small percentage of the harvested corn
drops back in the field
and the operator minimizes these losses
by slowing down when necessary.
The modern combine is a factory on wheels.
As corn stalks enter the corn head,
a series of rollers pulled down on the stalks
and snap off the ears.
An auger moves the ears into the combine
where they're conveyed into the threshing mechanism.
Here, a spinning rotor threshes the kernels,
removing them from the cob
while a strong fan blows out the leaves and chattel.
The kernels are then conveyed to the
combine's holding tank.
On Sandahl's farm, the corn is offloaded onto trailers.
The kernels are loaded into bins
that will store the grain and complete the drying process.
Corn is a crop with many uses,
everything from tortillas to corn syrup, animal feed,
and ethanol, a corn based alternative fuel
that is boosting demand across the corn valley.
More than 7,000 years ago,
it was a decidedly simpler crop.
In the region that is now Mexico,
natives began harvesting a wild grass called teosinte.
Over thousands of years,
the meso Americans domesticated teosinte
by sewing and reaping only the best kernels.
It evolved into a hardier,
more productive plant known as maize or corn.
After its first migration north at about 1200 BCE,
it would become the most important crop
in American agriculture.
- When the pilgrims first arrived,
they planted in small hills,
several seeds in a hill.
They grew the corn,
they harvested the ears and they ground it into flour.
(gentle guitar music)
- [Narrator] In the colonies,
and for centuries that followed,
corn was harvested by hand.
The corn knife with an 18 inch blade
was one of the original methods of the stalks.
When farmers were picking only the ears,
handheld hooks or pegs made of iron and bone
were the standard tools.
- This is a bone peg, probably used in 1890.
They used anything that was sharp
to open up the shuck at that time.
- [Narrator] Gloves with embedded hooks
later replaced the peg.
- People in rural communities are very innovative.
And so they were always looking for some way
to do it better, to do it faster.
The hooks and pegs allowed for faster harvesting
because they could rip the shuck away from the ear,
snap it and harvest it much quicker than just by hand.
- [Narrator] Even today, many rural communities
still celebrate the days of hand harvesting
with husking bee competitions.
Ted Martin is a former Nebraska state champion.
- You grab the ear towards the end like this
and come in with the hook crossways, open up the shucks.
Then you peel 'em back and you snap the ear out
and throw it.
And it's all one motion, really.
- [Narrator] A fast Husker could generally harvest
about a 100 bushels or one acre of corn per day.
But enormous advancements in agricultural technology
allows modern farmers to dwarf this number.
- [Narrator] Now we return to the fields
here on Modern Marvels, Harvesting Plus.
Tillers, combines, cultivators are just some
of the innovative pieces of farming gear
that have revolutionized harvesting in the modern era.
But long before machines like tractors
and harvesters took over,
farming meant putting your shoulder to the wheel.
For decades, nearly every farm was equipped
with a hand operated corn sheller.
- Okay, we've got a couple cobs of corn
and we're looking at a hand powered corn sheller.
That's about a hundred years old
and we're gonna run a couple cobs through it.
First, I'm gonna crank it up.
Couple plates inside the machine
going in opposite directions
are gonna shear the kernels off.
The corn kernels go down the bottom,
the corn cobs come out the other end.
And there's a fan at the bottom
that blows some of the chaff away as well.
- [Narrator] Many farmers harvested corn
for silage or animal feed.
This included the stalk as well as the ear.
Silage was the first corn harvest to see mechanization
in the form of the corn binder in the late 1800s.
On one Nebraska farm,
Ron Lange operates an antique corn binder
to harvest feed for his horses.
- It's an international corn binder.
Just press it and ties it.
This mainly would used to be used more for green corns
and fill silos with it.
They would cut the corn green
and haul it in and fill your silos.
- [Narrator] The binder both cuts
and then automatically ties the stalks into bundles
with twine.
The operator uses a foot clutch
to engage a conveyor that drops the bundles in the field.
Corn binders were usually followed by a crew of laborers
who stood the bundles into larger upright stacks,
known as shocks.
According to Ron,
this traditional shock building technique
prevents mold from growing in the bundles,
which helps keep the feed from rotting.
- Shocking is for your winter feed
and it would mold and stuff on the ground.
And the shocking is for curing, you gotta shock it
so the wind goes through it.
- [Narrator] Up through the Great Depression,
the meticulous hand harvest was still the only way
to pick the ears directly.
The first mechanized corn pickers,
powered by internal combustion engines,
debuted in the late 1930s
and would soon double productivity
to 15 acres in one day.
The pickers selectively harvest only the corn ears,
depositing the stalks back in the field.
Farmer Randy Jensen uses a two row 1960s model,
237 John Deere Picker to harvest
600 acres of corn each year.
The picker uses rollers to snap the ears off the stalks.
The ears travel to a husking vat
where rubber rollers remove the husks.
The clean ears then drop in a wagon.
- When you come to the end,
you'll have a full wagon most of the time,
and you'll have a guy at the other end
and he'll switch wagons with you.
And he'll take it home and run it to an elevator
which elevates it up into an ear corn crib.
And basically, that's all you do.
- [Narrator] While the mechanical picker
has endured for decades,
they couldn't shell, clean, and dry corn
immediately in the field.
By the mid 1950s, there was an answer.
The combine, which had long before mechanized
the harvesting of other grain crops
was now advanced enough to produce clean corn kernels
at a staggering pace.
What began with two row designs
grew to the 12 and even 16 row corn head combines
of the 21st century.
- You're talking about the ability to harvest 4,000
or so bushels an hour, which translates to, you know,
maybe 60 to 70 pounds of grain, clean grain
every second that this machine can harvest.
- We go back to working with a corn binder.
We're talking about working maybe eight acres a day.
And now we're talking about hand picking,
we're talking an acre or so day, 100 bushels.
Today's big farmers with large combines
can do 40,000 bushels in a day with one combine.
- [Narrator] The American corn harvest relies on the size,
speed, and sophistication of one machine.
- [Narrator] Every year in October, there is a fruit
that must first go for a swim before it can be picked.
(upbeat music)
Just days before harvesting, farmers in central Wisconsin
divert water from nearby reservoirs
in order to flood thousands of acres of cranberries
in up to two feet of water.
This is called a wet harvest.
The berries grow on short vines.
When they mature,
the fields are flooded to make harvesting easier.
These water reel harvesters, also called beaters,
will transform the marsh into a sea of red.
- And the first guy that goes in the water
is opening the bed
and then the rest of the guys behind him
just keep following along behind him.
What they're looking for in the water
is what we call a berry line,
where you can see where the fruit's been picked clean
and where the remaining fruit is.
So you try to line up on that.
And the idea is to not miss any fruit
and beat it clean or pick it clean.
- [Narrator] As the beaters move through the vine,
they strip off the berries.
Cranberries contain four air chambers.
When freed from the vines,
their natural buoyancy causes them to float.
- Cranberries are trained,
meaning the vines lay a certain direction.
Good analogy would be like petting a cat the right way
and the wrong way.
You pet it the right way, everything's nice.
You go against the vines or against that cat
and his fur gets all ruffled up
and it's not a very nice thing.
Same thing can happen with cranberries.
If we go against the vines,
we'd rip them outta the ground and it would be a mess.
- [Narrator] Once the three acre bed is beaten,
the workers deploy a cran boom to slowly coax
the flotilla to one end of the marsh.
Here, more than 80,000 pounds of berries
are loaded by elevator and trucked out.
At the Ocean Spray receiving station,
the berries are offloaded into holding tanks.
(upbeat guitar music)
And then conveyed into the packing houses
where they're cleaned and then sized.
These cranberries are destined for processing,
meaning they will end up as juice, sauce,
or even Craisins, the cranberry equivalent of raisins.
But long before cranberry juice and Craisins
dominated the market,
Native Americans understood the power of the fresh berries
using them in medicines, poultices, and dyes.
Dried berries were even pressed together with venison
and fat to produce pemmican, a survival cake
that kept for long periods of time.
The first commercial growers in the 19th century
recruited cheap field laborers, often women and children,
to meticulously hand harvest the wild growing vines.
- When the men, women, and children would show up
on the cranberry marsh, they were given a measure.
Once they had a full measure,
they would go over to the edge of the bed,
dump the measure into the receptacle.
And that picker was given a picking chip.
That picking chip would be used for either cash
or merchandise at the company store.
- [Narrator] In the 1890s, the first cranberry hand rake
replaced the picker's calloused fingers
and quickly became the harvesting method of choice.
Growers eventually discovered that flooding
the cranberry beds made hand ranking much easier.
- This is the hand rake, it's got metal teeth
with slots in it.
As you rake, you go through the vines like that.
The berries are floating on top of the water.
They're attached to the vines,
but you still gotta take 'em off.
And it's a back wrecking job
if you have to do it all day long,
especially if the vines aren't trained.
- [Narrator] In the 1950s, Wisconsinite Leonard Getsinger
designed one of the first
successful mechanical harvesters.
The hand pushed Getsinger picker
uses retractable metal teeth to comb through the vines
and pick berries.
Up until the 1970s,
the majority of all cranberries were sold as fresh fruit
for traditional cooking.
- During the 1970s and 1980s, the juice market exploded
and the demand for cranberry juice far exceeded the demand
for fresh cranberries.
The whole industry shifted from fresh fruit
to processed fruit.
- [Narrator] Starting in the 70s and 80s,
most farmers began wet harvesting with beaters
to bring in a larger, yet less carefully handled crop.
But today, one man feels there is still a better mouse trap
for farmers who raise cranberries for processing.
It's called, The Ruby Slipper.
- It's a machine I invented trying to find a simpler,
faster method to harvest cranberries
that was easier on the fruit, easier on the vines.
This is a lot gentler.
The bar itself is traveling at a slower speed
when it contacts the vine,
but the ground speed of the machine is a lot faster.
- [Narrator] The Ruby Slipper is pulled through the marsh
and requires no moving parts to remove the cranberries.
Regardless of the machine, harvesting cranberries for juice
or Craisins is not a gentle affair.
But there's another harvest more steeped in tradition
that demands a more delicate touch.
Habelman Brothers in Tomah, Wisconsin
is one of the world's largest producers
of fresh cranberries.
This harvester is all about delivering the perfect berry.
Habelman's harvesters utilize stainless steel teeth
to comb the vines, much like the original Getsinger pickers.
But these gentler modern harvesters
use a series of paddles to free the berries from the vines.
- The berries never end up back in the water.
They go right into the boats and then into the trucks.
We can do about 10 acres a day
with the two machines that we're using right now.
- [Narrator] When it's time for packing,
the berries go through a separator line
to remove discolored and poor quality berries.
At the front end is an antique device
that has never been upgraded or redesigned,
the Bailey Separator.
Invented by the H.R. Bailey Company in 1917,
it was conceived with the idea
that only fresh cranberries will bounce.
- So they pass through a series of boards,
good ones jump and land on a finish belt.
The bad ones just kind of filter down the machine.
And a lot of companies have tried to come up
with a better design, but there isn't any out there yet.
- [Narrator] The cranberries that pass Bailey's tests
are then double checked by more modern equipment.
Two different electronic separators use ultraviolet
and fluorescent light to detect inferior color and rot.
After the antique and high tech separators have their go,
the final quality check is human.
Any bad berries that have survived the gauntlet
are weeded out before packaging.
As the demand for healthier food and drink continues to spiral,
a wild assortment of cranberry harvesting machines
will continue to prowl the marshes of central Wisconsin.
But picking cranberries from shallow marshes is a picnic
(western guitar music)
- [Narrator] In the low desert
of Southern California's Coachella Valley,
there's an annual ritual that is perhaps the most dangerous
harvest in America.
This man is a palmero.
His job is to harvest dates from trees
that can grow to heights of more than 80 feet.
Date grower Dennis Jensen speaks to the industry's anxiety
over the ladder harvest.
- It's dangerous work up there.
One slip, and they could end up in a world of hurt.
As much as we try safety wise,
it seems that every other year,
we lose someone to this terrible tragedy.
Some of the other items that are very dangerous
are the spines,
the palm fronds themselves that can pierce your hand
or an eye, or an arm, or a leg, or foot.
And they're located throughout the crown of that tree.
So there's a lot of different dangers
that they have to work with.
- [Narrator] The palmeros in this field
are hand harvesting a premium date, known as the Medjool,
one of several date varieties that have been cultivated
since before recorded time.
Dates are likely the oldest of all harvested fruits.
Nearly 6,000 years ago,
they were cultivated in the region of Mesopotamia
or what is now modern Iraq.
Some traditions trace the fruit to the garden of Eden.
- Even the Bible refers to the land of milk and honey,
and we've been old by Jewish scholars
that the honey it was referring to
was the honey of the date palms.
- [Narrator] Its ability to grow and produce fruit
in such an arid environment
made the date palm a sacred tree.
- Dates keep very well.
And in that hot desert area where they had no refrigeration,
they could keep them for a long time
and early on they'd discovered the ways
to press them together to get rid of air and so forth
so that they would keep.
- [Narrator] After many failed attempts,
date palm offshoots were successfully imported
and planted in the Arizona desert in the year 1900.
The coveted Medjool offshoots came from Morocco in 1927
and were later planted in the Coachella Valley.
Today, California growers of Medjools
and the other major variety, the Deglet Noor,
oversee a thriving industry that annually harvests a crop
worth around $50 million.
And it's not just the fruit that is valuable.
The date palm is considered so beautiful
that as many as 15,000 trees are harvested
and sold each year to real estate developers.
The times are changing for the skilled palmeros.
Most date growers are relying less on the ladder harvest
and more on a mechanical harvesting aid.
The Canasta.
Mounted on a nine ton lift, the platform opens and closes
around the date palm's trunk.
Even as mechanization makes the work safer and easier,
the job still requires a trained palmero
to distinguish dates that are ripe for picking.
- Normally, what they're gonna do
is they'll be looking for the ripest ones
and they're pretty easy to pull off.
And sometimes you can just shake them
and they'll actually fall off of the bunches,
but they'll be pulling off the ripe ones,
which are the darker color ones.
There's yellow ones on here, which are not ripe yet.
It'll take another,
probably two to three weeks before they will ripen up.
- [Narrator] Prior to harvesting,
the palmeros wrap each and every growing date bunch
in a nylon bag.
- Our date bags are used to keep moisture away
from the dates should we have a sudden thunderstorm.
And the rain,
the moisture causes a lot of decay for the dates.
Additional purposes of these bags are to keep insects away
and to keep birds from eating the dates.
(upbeat rock music)
- [Narrator] To prevent damage to the delicate fruit,
harvesters lower small baskets to the ground
where they're hand sorted for ripeness.
After a short journey to Dennis Jensen's
Seaview packing house, the dates are cooled.
Then they're carefully washed and dried
before they're hand sorted for packing.
One of five quality categories are assigned
before the dates are shipped to points around the world.
- [Narrator] Welcome back to Harvesting Plus.
Today, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania
is known as the mushroom capital of the world
and not long ago,
the world's largest mushroom grower was Creekside Mushrooms
located near Pittsburgh.
Creekside owners have since moved on to other ventures,
but for many years, its 800 acres of limestone tunnels,
burrowed beneath trees and pasture lands
was a fungus farmer's fantasy.
- The neat thing about growing mushrooms
at this particular facility is that the temperature
is pretty much consistent all year round.
And we maintain about a 62 degree temperature
all year round and about a 95% humidity,
which allows mushrooms to just recycle themselves
pretty much every 24 hours.
- [Narrator] Here, the fungus of choice
is the Sylvan White Agaricus,
the ever popular white button mushroom.
A small army of harvesters
speeds from one cave to the next.
Each worker aiming to pick up a minimum
of 55 pounds an hour.
Mushrooms are grown in
and harvested from large wooden trays.
Each tray is harvested in passes or breaks.
The first break yields the large and medium mushrooms.
Removing the larger fungi allows more room
for the smaller mushrooms to grow and develop.
- I'm picking the mushrooms that are ready,
at the prime time for harvest.
And that depends upon the stem length,
the shape of the cap, whether it's domed or oval.
If you notice the only smalls that I take
are the ones that come off basically by accident,
they're left on there for tomorrow.
They'll be mushrooms that will be harvested again tomorrow.
- [Narrator] Each tray ultimately yields
approximately 250 pounds of organic mushrooms,
but not every mushroom is perfect.
- [George] This mushroom in particular
has a blemish on it.
That is what we consider a number two.
It would not look as nice when it hits the supermarket.
- [Narrator] The popular White Agaricus mushroom
was first domesticated in the cellars and sewers
of 19th century France.
The process of producing the spawn
or seed was the key to growing the fungus commercially.
After the French perfected a strain of spawn,
it was soon exported to England
and ultimately to the United States.
The mushroom business took off in 1904
when the United States Department of Agriculture
perfected a domestically bred spawn.
One of the very same strains that are used today.
Even with the healthy spawn,
profitability growing mushrooms in vast numbers
is a very demanding craft.
The process begins with piles of hay, straw, and manure.
This compost is turned, adding water and fresh air
to speed up decomposition.
The compost is then pasteurized
in a fresh air tunnel system.
- It kills all the other microorganisms
that are in the compost so that when we do plant the spawn
or the mushroom seeds into the tray, it gives a nice,
clean medium for the spawn to take hold inside the compost.
- [Narrator] Each tray is filled with compost
and the spawn is then added.
The trays are transported deep within the pitch dark
limestone caves to begin coaxing the root structure,
or mycelia, to the surface.
This tray of organic White Agaricus
will begin harvesting around day 15.
Its many mushrooms then travel to a packing facility
where they're weighed, packaged,
or sometimes sliced, before they're cooled
and quickly shipped to market.
- We don't get a whole lot of lead time
nor do we want a whole lot of lead time
because what we produce today,
we wanna make sure we ship within the next 24 hours.
- [Narrator] While the mushroom harvest may seem stable,
its future is not.
- People that get outta high school today,
look for other opportunities.
So it gets harder and harder to find labor.
- [Narrator] Today, mushroom growers have only 75%
of the workforce needed to harvest at full capacity.
Mushrooms are not the only crop impacted by a lack of labor.
The trend is affecting harvests across the nation.
- There's certainly less labor available.
It began several years ago,
but the increased pressure to reduce illegal immigration
across the Southern United States border
has influenced the amount of laborers
that are available for harvest.
- [Narrator] As workers become scarcer,
mechanization will play a larger,
but probably still restricted role, in the harvest.
- Labor is the most important factor in this business.
When you look at the fragility or the nature of the fruit,
this is not something that is conducive
to mechanical harvesting.
We rely very heavily on a labor force
that's skilled to discern fruit quality on the tree.
And there's really no other way to go about doing that.
- [Narrator] Truly our machines will become
more sophisticated and sensitive
and a declining labor force
will spur that mechanical innovation.
But only time will tell if the machine
will ever match the human hand's ability
to delicately pluck an unblemished piece of fruit.