Handpicking rare among potato farms Maine fields mostly harvested by machine

WOODLAND – D.J. Theriault took a break from putting potatoes into his basket Wednesday morning to talk about the work he was doing in a northern Maine potato field.

“I am going to use my money to help pay for driver’s education course,” the 14-year-old Stockholm boy said. “I’m picking 30 to 40 barrels a day.” Theriault is among a small group of people who still pick potatoes by hand in an industry that modernized to mechanical harvesters decades ago. There were only 13 people picking potatoes Wednesday in the same field he was in.

Picking potatoes by hand is backbreaking work that at times lasts from sunrise to near sunset. It involves digging up the potatoes, placing them in a basket and emptying the full basket into large barrels that hold about 165 pounds of potatoes. Pickers each have their own designated sections in the fields.

It was a bright sunny day Wednesday, although the temperature hovered in the mid-50s, and the field was dusty, a legacy left by the extremely dry summer.

“It’s my first time that I work at this all week,” Theriault said. “This is my first year of getting a harvest vacation.”

Theriault is a freshman at Caribou High School. Most elementary and middle schools don’t have harvest breaks. Theriault picked potatoes the last couple of years, but only on Saturday when he was out of school.

The teen-ager is picking potatoes on a farm owned by Clayton and Irene Patrick on Route 161, north of Caribou. The Patricks have been farming for 48 years, and this year they have 24 acres of potatoes.

“We started yesterday,” Irene Patrick said Wednesday. “It’s real dusty and very dry.

“It’s hard to get pickers now,” she said. “Kids just don’t want to work, or don’t have to work for what they need.”

Pickers on their farm get 55 cents for each barrel of potatoes they pick, she said. That price is up a nickel from last year’s pay of 50 cents a barrel.

Irene Patrick was the field boss Wednesday. Her husband drove one of the trucks that go up and down the rows picking up the filled barrels of potatoes and taking them to the storage shed.

The Patricks had 13 high school kids in the field, and one mother who was helping out her youngsters. The crew was harvesting shepordy potatoes, a good baking potato, Patrick said.

Maine has 62,000 acres of potatoes planted this year, 1,000 acres less than last year. The dry weather of the summer has affected yields, Don Flannery, assistant director of the Maine Potato Board, said Wednesday.

“I wouldn’t dare say what the percentage of potatoes picked by hand-pickers is,” Flannery said while driving Wednesday afternoon to the Big E exposition in Springfield, Mass. “There may be five Aroostook County growers using hand crews, and two of those also have harvesters.

“It’s a very small percentage, a small number of growers,” he said.

Many Aroostook County schools started their harvest break this week. Some high schools are still in session until Friday.

Some growers have been harvesting a week or more, specifically those with early varieties destined for processing plants.

Flannery said growers who store potatoes for sale during the winter months started this week.

Early indications are that while the yield is smaller, because of the dry weather, the quality is excellent, he said.

At the Patrick farm, some people stopped Wednesday to see the hand pickers. Some people even picked potatoes for personal use, and Patrick invited several to do so.

“Look at his small basket,” she said, looking at a man who had a basket about a quarter of the size her pickers were using. “He won’t get much in that.”

The field boss recalled “years ago when whole families moved here in the fall to pick potatoes.”

“We had a family from St. Francis who lived in old house we had over there,” she said, unable to remember their name.

“The entire family worked in the fields back then,” Patrick said. “Now, its harder to get pickers.”