Before dawn on a cool July morning, the rumble of cars breaks the silence on a farm on Colorado’s Western Slope. Agricultural workers, prepared for the sunrise with long-sleeved shirts and baseball caps, gather on the road to await the start of the first day of sweet corn harvest.

John Harold, founder of Tuxedo Corn Company in Olathe, has run this farm for decades and always feels a little nervous during the season kickoff. After many months of fighting the elements, he’ll soon get a first look at this year’s crop.

As daylight crests on the horizon, a refurbished five-ton U.S. Army truck takes its position on the north side of one plot. The machine has been custom-tailored to meet the needs of the corn harvesting process, but as it spreads two metal wings to reveal platforms where workers will stand, the odd-looking vehicle looks as suitable for Burning Man as it does the cornfields.

What’s more impressive, however, are the dozens of agricultural workers it transports, those who are responsible for bringing this coveted crop to the hungry Colorado masses.

Harvesting sweet corn is primarily a manual operation. While workers are often aided by machines, most of the process — from picking to packaging — is done by hand.

That’s true of many Colorado-grown fruits and veggies, including peaches and cherries, as well as products that you don’t find in grocery stores, like hops.

At Tuxedo Corn, workers follow the retrofitted military vehicle through the cornfields and pick ears that they deposit in collection trays on each wing. Individuals standing on the truck then gather the ears and stack them into crates of 48 each. Those standing on the second level build and distribute the crates that eventually get filled. And once they are, workers slide the crates down a ramp and stack them onto a flatbed truck that’s being towed behind the picking vehicle.

The operation is a well-oiled machine. One pass through the cornfield produces exactly enough crates to fill the truck bed. Harold, dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt, follows closely behind the crews, shucking and analyzing random ears.

“That looks like something the birds got after, and the bugs came behind them. So we haven’t really solved our problem, we’re still working on it,” Harold said, referring to an ear worm infestation that plagued the farm in 2023.

There’s not much time to dwell — the good ears will be in grocery stores the following day.

A few weeks later, as July fades to August, peaches begin to ripen about 30 miles away from Olathe at Ela Family Farms in Hotchkiss. Proprietors Steve Ela and Regan Choi plant several varieties of the stone fruit at varying times so that they can be picked sequentially, helping ensure the farm’s small crew of agricultural workers don’t get overwhelmed, and limiting potential waste.

Harvesters walk the orchards with white totes strapped to their chests and climb three-legged ladders to collect the delicate fruit. They look for distinct coloring — orange on the areas that haven’t been exposed to the sun indicates ripeness, Ela said — and texture. Each peach must maintain a little firmness so the fruit ripens just as it reaches buyers on the Front Range without going past its prime.

“It’s definitely an art,” said Choi.

While tools like tree shakers are available on the market, Ela said harvesting requires the subjective instincts of a real person to meet the expectations of local customers. Fruit shaken from a tree may not get damaged if you have something soft for it to land on, but bruising is most commonly caused by fruit colliding mid-air on the way down. Frankly, bruised fruit doesn’t sell well.

That’s not to say every peach is perfect. Ela Family Farms is a zero-waste operation, so any fruit unfit to be sold as-is gets sliced and dried or turned into sauces and jams. Staff produces those in-house, too, with the help of two dehydrators and a steam kettle.

Late August is crunch time at Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose — especially this year thanks to an uncharacteristically wet summer. Unlike other crops, most of Billy Goat’s hops won’t reach the public for months — not until after they’ve been dried, pelletized and then used by breweries to make beer.

But today’s harvest is different. Owners Audrey Gehlhausen and Chris Della Bianca are collecting and bagging wet hops. These hops, fresh off the bine, will soon be sent to breweries raw and used immediately in brewing.

“It’s the most exciting and exhausting time,” Gehlhausen said.

Fresh hops are extremely perishable, so the owners store them at 34 degrees until they are loaded onto a U-Haul headed to their final destination. Today’s batch is going to Texas — well, hopefully. The scheduled driver just bailed. But there’s no time to waste.

Armed with a machete, Della Bianca heads down a row of comet hops, chopping the strings used as hop trellises where they meet the ground. He and another worker then drive a vehicle called a harvest wagon down the row. Della Bianca stands on a platform about 18 feet in the air hacking the strings at the top and carefully laying the bines into the wagon.

Once driven back to the production shed, workers feed the lanky bines into a massive machine called a wolf picker, which separates the hop cones from the rest of the plant. Green hop fragments shower everyone in the vicinity like a light snowfall.

The hop harvest leverages more machinery than corn or peaches, mostly because the cones have to be processed using specialized equipment before they’re sold. Still, tools like the pelletizer rely on humans to make them work. It’s tough to find people for a job that only offers work for a couple of months per year, Della Bianca said, so he’s always looking for ways to automate.

In fact, the harvest wagon has an extension — a picker arm, if you will — that can snap the plant and the string at both ends, automating this particular task. Della Bianca says hasn’t set it up yet because it’s a complex process. But there might also be another reason.

“I actually like being out here, like this job right now,” he said when asked about his favorite part of the harvest season. “It is nice up here.”

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