About This Career
Manually plants, cultivates, and harvests vegetables, fruits, nuts, horticultural specialties, and field crops. Uses hand tools, such as shovels, trowels, hoes, tampers, pruning hooks, shears, and knives. Duties may include tilling soil and applying fertilizers; transplanting, weeding, thinning, or pruning crops; applying pesticides; or cleaning, grading, sorting, packing, and loading harvested products. May construct trellises, repair fences and farm buildings, or participate in irrigation activities.
This career is part of the Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources cluster Plant Systems pathway.
A person in this career:
- Harvests plants, and transplants or pots and labels them.
- Operates tractors, tractor-drawn machinery, and self-propelled machinery to plow, harrow and fertilize soil, or to plant, cultivate, spray and harvest crops.
- Sets up and operates irrigation equipment.
- Repairs and maintains farm vehicles, implements, and mechanical equipment.
- Harvest fruits and vegetables by hand.
- Cleans work areas, and maintains grounds and landscaping.
- Sells and delivers plants and flowers to customers.
- Sows grass seed, or plants plugs of grass.
- Informs farmers or farm managers of crop progress.
- Directs and monitors the work of casual and seasonal help during planting and harvesting.