SOILED NOT SPOILED

A farmers field, taken from the golf course. See the irrigation pipes laid out to cover the whole field, and the rows of plants? Those plants are bush beans. When mature the whole plant will be cut off, chopped up, and the beans extracted and sorted by a machine in one swoop.
It so happens that I helped reclaim this field from swamp land. During the summers while I was in High School, and maybe before. I worked here. At first drainage had been put in. I had already worked for the owner for several years at another location. Rudy was the boss. He told me to get on this Oliver Crawler(tractor with metal tracks instead of wheels and two brake handles instead of a steering wheel) with a huge set of disks behind, and drive around. The ground had big mounds on it, and was covered with canary grass three feet tall. I drove for weeks, and eventually broke that ground down to dirt.
We raised pole beans. Posts on each ends of the rows, six feet tall. Stakes, six feet tall every ten feet between. Wire on top and bottom, and then string round and round the top to bottom wire every six inches. A lot of work! But I got paid seventy-five cents and hour.
On top of and perpendicular to the top wire, we placed two rows of irrigation pipe. Twenty foot sections of pipe, hooked together, to span the entire field. These two lines of pipe were twenty feet apart. We ran the water for four hours, then we moved all of the pipe forty feet to the next section, and turned the water on again. The first set was at five in the morning. The last set nine at night. To move the pipe you placed yourself in the center of the twenty foot pipe, and while standing in six inches of clay mud, you picked it up, pushed toward the pipe it as attached to, to unhook it, the pull it apart. Then standing on tip toes, you held it as high as possible to clear the top wires, you carried it forty feet to it's next place. Then you repeated this until both lines were moved. You did other jobs between moves.
The picking was done mostly by kids hauled out there in old school buses. Then there were a few migrant workers. Poor folks from Oklahoma and Arkansas, and later Texas and Mexico. They got paid three cents a pound. Pickers had to selectively pick only the right size beans, because they were picked at least four times.
Like all of the other kids around here, from age seven on, I picked strawberries, pole beans, and cane berries all summer, every summer. You couldn't wait to get a job that paid by the hour.
Methods change, times change, people change. Things cost more now, but maybe they aren't worth as much. But when you ask how old people got the way they are maybe this will help explain it to you.