Day 8 -by Anna Zakelj

Ted Winsburg took us to the Bedner’s you-pick farm where we got a tour of the fields. They grow peppers, tomatoes, squash, corn and strawberries. Then we went to a nature center where we took a virtual air boat ride and listened to the nighttime sounds of the everglades narrated by a grandfather that sounded like a vampire.

After lunch we went to the Bedner’s giant non-you-pick pepper farm. The farm mainly employed Guatemalans. We watched them picking and packing peppers into boxes so that they were ready to be sold. They did all of that on one big truck thing that Ted invented. Each worker had a bucket that they picked the peppers into. Then they ran with the full bucket to the truck where they dumped the peppers on a conveyer belt. The peppers rode around the truck where women sorted out the blemished peppers and threw them on the ground and then put them in boxes which were then put on a truck to be driven somewhere to get sold. Later we looked up how much a box would get sold for and it was around $24. Lauren asked one of the workers how much they got paid per bucket which is more than a box worth of peppers and it was $0.50. It was by far the fastest I’ve ever seen anyone pick peppers. Ted really stressed how efficient it was. He also said that the Bedner’s worked their workers much harder than he ever had.

Then we watched The King’s Speech and found a large pile of assorted kinds of bread in the theater parking lot. Once we got home, Michelle practiced her first aid skills on me.

The End

Anna