Put yourselves in their shoes

Sep 18, 2023

For Cactus Family Farms, today’s farm employee stems from one of two main groups. The first being the local employees near their headquarters in Osceola, Iowa. According to HR Specialist Heather Vaughn, 80% of those local applicants are Hispanic. They often have little formal education or prior experience with pigs and sometimes speak traditional indigenous languages as well as Spanish.

The other side of that coin is a completely different pool of applicants. Through the North American Free Trade Agreement, they also have the option to hire employees with a TN visa. For this specific visa, applicants must either be from Canada or Mexico, however Vaughn says that the agriculture industry primarily relies on Mexican candidates.

Another specification to the TN visa is that they have to have some level of an advanced degree.

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Video: Learning to Wrench From Dad the Hard Way

Harvest is a week out and the farm picked this week to fall apart. The truck needs a battery, the barn curtain's got a problem, and the corn and beans are telling us we're out of time to get it all fixed.

So it's a full day of wrenching. Tork supervises while I get the truck back running, then we're out at the hog barn where one rusted up part has the whole curtain system hung up. Ladder work, cable work, and a little dad-and-son disagreement about the right way to do it. We close it out walking the fields, shelling beans and checking corn, because whether everything's fixed or not, harvest starts when harvest starts.

Chapters: 00:00 Everything breaks the week before harvest 01:00 Tork supervises while I fix the truck 12:30 Out to the barn to find the curtain problem 14:30 One rusty part hung up the whole curtain 20:00 Running the curtain cable from the ladder 24:00 Walking the beans and corn before harvest 26:30 Wrapping up

We're a 6th generation family farm in southeast Iowa showing the real ups and downs of pig farming and row crop farming. No script, just the work. Subscribe and follow along.

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