Today we visited Kyle Mathison's cherry harvest to get ideas on how to manage a picking crew of 60 pickers. This is their staging area where fruit is sampled for culls.
Here is a bin trailer delivering bins from one specific crew out in the orchard. The samples taken will be a check for the percentage of culls and the types of culls. A grower wants to have no more than 20% culls. The packing shed will charge the grower for pulling out culls. This amounts to about $1.00 per pound of cherries.
This clipboard shows the feedback that the samples provide. Types of culls caused by nature include: rain splits, bird pecks, and mildew. Types of culls caused by poor picking include: stemless, punctures, and bruises. If samples from a specific crew show poor picking, there will be communication to the crew boss to improve his/her crew.
This shows highlighted percentages reflecting different crews needing improvement. The categories on this Excel sheet include: Time, Block, Variety, Grower #, C.Boss, # of bins, Weight, Damage, Under size, Stem pulls, Total cull %. If the percentage is 25 or more it was highlighted.
Here we are watching a crew in operation. Each crew had 20 pickers, 1 person to drive the tractor with the bin trailer, weigh and dump the buckets and punch tickets, 1 quality control person who sorts, and checks for spurs on the ground and 1 crew boss. Our tour guide is in charge of all of the crew bosses. The crew bosses change crews periodically to maintain firm leadership. A picker cannot move to a new tree without the crew boss to approve that the tree is completely picked. In the above picture you can see the scale that is attached to the trailer. A full bucket should weigh 25 lbs (3 lbs for the bucket and 22 lbs for the cherries). After weighing and dumping the tractor driver punches the picker's ticket. Mathison's use craft store punches that are changed daily to a different punch shape. Picker's keep their tickets until the end of the day. They give the grower their original copy of the ticket and the picker keeps the carbon copy. If a picker has had a warning it is recorded on the ticket. Three warnings mean a day to stay home. Four warnings mean find another job. 10 bins with a good crop can be picked in 40 minutes. A picker needs to pick at least 3 buckets per hour. A good picker can pick 35 - 60 buckets a day. They pay $3.30 per bucket with no sorting while picking expectation. The quality control person has a sheet on a clipboard to keep track of pickers performance.
Here is an example of the sheet carried by the quality control person in this crew. Each picker has a section to be graded by harvest performance and fruit quality for each 30 minute block during the work day. Harvest performance includes: full bucket, stem pulls, spurs, clean tree, total fruit picked.
Fruit quality includes: under color, under size, splits, over ripe, wind/frost, bird/insect, total % damage. When the crew fills the trailer an empty trailer on standby replaces the full one and the crew continues picking. At the end of the day, the crew boss collects the tickets. Before the work day begins in the morning the support people of each of the crews meet to review the problems from the day before.
Overall, we were impressed and felt optomistic about our potential capacity to manage a crew of 60 pickers.
Duncan and Felicity were so glad when we got home! Tomorrow we have our last pick of Liberty Blueberries. Stephanie is coming out to pick on Thursday. I'm hoping she'll have time to go 4-wheeling, and see the sights of the farm.
No comments:
Post a Comment