A few years ago I got a text from one of my childhood friends saying that they heard of a farm who needed hands, the only catch was that it was an entire two hours away. However, with his roommate willing to drive me I naturally called my boss to inform her that I all the sudden had covid and couldn’t work over the weekend…. With only coordinates to follow, we woke up at grueling 5:30 to hop in a beat-up toyota camry and make the trek to the middle of nowhere.
Pulling up to what can only be described as a compound, passing by a massive 10 foot chain link fence blocked by a black tarp to enter a rut filled dirt parking lot. Now nervous, I followed my friends past hundreds of rows of cannabis plants past several people running product through machines. We went into a large room where people were sat over buckets, I signed my name and wrote down the time I got there under close watch and was given gloves and a 5 gallon home depot bucket with a special lid to rip through cannabis stalks removing the flowers.
People would come in from the field with wheelbarrows and dump large amounts of plant matter on the floor. Listening to 90s rap, with 30 strangers we sat on our buckets and stripped the stalks throwing them to the side to be picked up later. After a couple narrow misses with black widows I was informed to “watch out for those because they’re all over and the nearest hospital is 45 minutes away”… Once our buckets were filled we would take them to the lady who supervised our check in and there it would be weighed to 20 pound sections and vacuum sealed. Eventually after chatting with each other for awhile and working I was pulled aside by one of the staff of the farm. They lead me to the front and had me help them load the vacuum sealed bags into wheelbarrows where we would take them next door to what looked exactly like a nuclear bunker from the outside. Inside however, it was below zero… We wheeled the bags deep into the freezer stacking hundreds on shelves to be flash frozen. After several trips filling up the first building, my two partners had to leave so I was tasked with getting new people to help me stock the other building. Luckily my two friends were eager to see what I had been doing for the past hour, and the three of us continued into the second freezer.
After several hours of this we decided it was time for us to head back home, we revisited the check in station where we signed our names and the time we left. We were then lead to a mobile home and after waiting on the patio with several mean looking dogs a man emerged carrying a paper sack containing some samples of from their brand and an envelope with our pay. It took me the whole ride home to process what happened it was hard to believe I got a goodie bag and what I considered a lot of money for a single days work, all for something that I would have absolutely done for free.