Harvesting Labor Requirements
 

Hi all, I am planning on growing a lot of tomatoes this year.
I will be doing 4 plantings, 900 plants per planting.
All determinates for fresh market wholesale and retail. The 4 planting dates are somewhat spread out, so its not like we will have 3,600 plants coming on all at once.

Trying to figure out how many people and how long it will take to harvest each 900 plant block over the course of a week while they are producing.

Or more simply, how long does it take you to harvest a 100' row with plants 2ft apart in the row?

Just trying to figure out how much help to plan for besides me, my wife, and 2 kids.

Thanks!

I think your labor problems are going to be more with keeping the weeds down, Tying to stakes, Florida weave or whatever.

As to how much help it's going to depend on if it's your kids friends who will move at a teenager's pace or experienced migrant workers getting paid by the bushel.

With good supervision and a supply of switches, the 2 kids should be able to do all the work by themselves and still have time to take care of the other vegetables and pull and wash 50 dozen bunches of greens each week. At least that was my experience growing up on a truck farm. After a year or two you should be able to double the tomato production without any additional labor. You should be fair with your children though, treat them like tenant labor and pay them at least 50 cents an hour.

[QUOTE=saltmarsh;397224]With good supervision and a supply of switches, the 2 kids should be able to do all the work by themselves and still have time to take care of the other vegetables and pull and wash 50 dozen bunches of greens each week. At least that was my experience growing up on a truck farm. After a year or two you should be able to double the tomato production without any additional labor. You should be fair with your children though, treat them like tenant labor and pay them at least 50 cents an hour.[/QUOTE]

Another suggestion is to find an outlet for them maters. If you don't already know where help is coming from then I sure hope you have an outlet for them. In my area there are a LOT of sellers. You can get killed on price if you don't have reliable customers.

It takes about 1.5 minutes for me to pick a 1/2 bushel basket of 8 ounce sized tomatoes. In my garden that is about the output of a single determinate tomato plant. So picking the fruits from 900 tomato plants would take me about 22 hours. (I work fast and steady, so results may vary depending on who the help is.) It takes me about 40 seconds to walk each basket of tomatoes to the truck, so 10 hours for that task. I sort tomatoes at the truck. That would take somewhere around 15 hours. I can't trust/train the transitory helpers to sort the tomatoes the way I like them sorted, otherwise I would sort while picking. If I was growing 900 plants I'd make sure to have roads in the field so that I could reduce the time needed to load them onto the truck, or plan on driving over already harvested plants...

The picking would go faster with larger 12 ounce or 16 ounce fruits. It would go tremendously slower (like 10 to 20 times) if picking something tiny like cherry tomatoes.

This year my main tomato crop has about 2.5 ounce fruits. They are more work to pick, but they produce a quick and abundant harvest. I grow all of my tomatoes sprawling, and I plant on a grid so that I can run the tiller both ways through the patch.

[QUOTE=PureHarvest;396364]Hi all, I am planning on growing a lot of tomatoes this year.
I will be doing 4 plantings, 900 plants per planting.
All determinates for fresh market wholesale and retail. The 4 planting dates are somewhat spread out, so its not like we will have 3,600 plants coming on all at once.

Trying to figure out how many people and how long it will take to harvest each 900 plant block over the course of a week while they are producing.

Or more simply, how long does it take you to harvest a 100' row with plants 2ft apart in the row?

Just trying to figure out how much help to plan for besides me, my wife, and 2 kids.

Thanks![/QUOTE] Depends on the age and work ethic of the kids. If they are old enough, between the 4 of you harvest should be no problem unless a lot of those tomatoes are cherries.

You have to stay on top of it though. Fall behind and you'll have a mess fast.

I believe that it helps to reduce waste, and leads to higher quality fruit, if I pick at the first sign that the tomatoes are changing color. They ripen better for me in a basket in a shed than they do in the field.

Grid?
 

[QUOTE=joseph;411122]

and I plant on a grid so that I can run the tiller both ways through the patch.[/QUOTE]

What does this mean?

By "planting on a grid" I mean that I measure where to put each plant, and I plant perpendicular rows of plants. So when cultivating, I run the cultivator through the patch in the East/West direction, then I run it through the patch in the North/South direction. I typically space rows in one direction just wider than my cultivator at 30" to 36", and I space the rows in the perpendicular direction at 6 feet so that I can walk through easily when the plants are mature.

This is what it looks like in the field:

[IMG]http://i1074.photobucket.com/albums/w406/JosephsGarden/Photos_Of_The_Farm/tomatoe-grid2.jpg[/IMG]