Sergio Soto-Martinez

Most of my 5 year work experience in agriculture was working in the grape fields on and off at different companies, I will summarize how the grape season goes to not duplicate jobs.

• Individually clean grape bunches with scissors rapidly and fill the deep trays until loading the cart and push it back to the table. Check grape for cleanness and size and pack them accordingly into foam, plastic or cardboard boxes. -July
• Pruning, use pruning shears to trim all grape vines to certain sizes while separating vines, chop dried parts of plants and pull all vines to the middle of the row. A days work is a whole row around 88-100 plants with roughly 48 vines each plant. -December
• Tying extensions left from pruning, here we tie loose parts of the plant and vines with rope or plastic. -February
• Season then ends until grape vines start to sprout around April where we then remove sprouts to ensure growth accordingly.
• Grape ripens and is full of leafs we then de-leaf plants to free up the grape fruit and the cycle starts. -June

• Walked around groups of workers picking up boxes of grapes cleaned and carried one or two back to a pallet.
• Stacking boxes until pallet is full where I would then cover edges with cardboard and tie around the pallet.
• Collecting trays of unwanted grapes and carrying them out to a trailer.

• Stood next to conveyor belt and would make sure bars would be straight and up to standard.
• Sorted packaged bars ensuring were well packaged and put them into slots.

• Operated a machine that would dump the pistachios into a trailer.

• As a reject collector I would collect trays of blueberries and carry them to a pallet where I would stack them.

• Cleaned grapes with scissors, sorted them by size and repacked them into bags then boxes.

• Drove tractor through rows of grape while a machine dumped grape into the trailer.