We raised tobacco. Stoop labor at its finest.
I am amazed how many other crops have some machine that will do the work of a small army...
Back in the very early 60s my Dad raised tomatoes one year. It was all hand picked, with a swarm of pickers going through the field every couple of days for a couple of weeks. Fast-forward to 1970, and tomatoes were machine harvested. To do this, UC Davis:
* Developed a harvester that uprooted or clipped of every plant, separated the berries from the plants, and had a conveyor belt where several people hand sorted the tossers from the keepers;
* Developed a tomato variety whose skin was thick enough to withstand the harvesting process
and whose berries ripened more or less at the same time.
But a lot of vegetable and fruit crops are not suitable for machine harvesting. I realize that a lot of city people have few clues about how food arrives on their tables, but I would have thought a writer for National Review would be informed enough and smart enough not to come up with such a stupid article title.