【Video】How we pick & Technology of Weigh-Station

The way we weigh strawberries is one important factor to decide a good farm.

When we work at a farm, how the farm weighs and calculates strawberries picked is a really important factor to consider.

In many farms, they first weigh strawberries on a weighing machine, look at the memory with naked eyes and then, write the amount with the picker’s name or the ID number on a paper.

However, this method has several problems down below.

Because they look at the memory with their eyes, they sometimes fail to read the correct amount.
They sometimes write down the wrong amount. Or, write down on another person’s space.
Because it’s written with a pen, it is possible for not-good supervisors and bosses to tamper it.
Weighing is done so many times in a day, so, they sometimes fail to calculate when they sum the amount picked.
The process is done manually as seen above, when we weight strawberries, there would be a long line and then waste the time.

What is a Weigh-Station?

On the other hand on a previous Sunray farm (now the QFMT) that I worked for, they used a car called Weigh-Station, on which they used a bar code to scan the workers’ IDs and each tray IDs. Then, the data scanned is sent to the data-base of the company online immediately, which is one state-of-the-art technology.

Because of this, the problem mentioned above rarely happened in the farm, then workers could focus on picking strawberries.

The video filming how we weighed and picked in the previous Sunray farm on the Weigh-Station.

I filmed a video of the work from picking to weighing at a weight-station in the previous Sunray farm, so, I’m revealing it here.

These two people down below appeared on the video.

Yuta

First, he is Yuta who picks strawberries and brings them to the weight-station in the video.

He was wild enough to made a hand-crafted volleyball coat, fireworks made of iron, and a tent in which nobody else ever used in the previous Sunray farm.

Also, he got terrible cavities in his mouth, so he tried to cure of them with heated needles, but that just made them worse for sure. So, he went to see the dentist, but the dentist offered $8,000 to cure him of the cavities, so he couldn’t help but going back to Japan to get dental treatment. The LEGEND!

This interesting man is still working in the QFMT, so, why don’t you ask him about the farm?

TAKUMA

Another person is Takuma who was elected as the first Japanese supervisor in the Sunray history.

Working as a supervisor is an hourly job and the working hour gets longer, which means you can make more money. Also, you can drive cars for work, so, that looks easier job, which makes many general workers want to be a supervisor.

However, he was really fast in picking strawberries, meaning he could make much more money than working as a supervisor at the ratio of $23/h. For this reason, he was not hoping to be a supervisor in the first, which made me surprised.

But he was so hard-working that he served out his time as a supervisor with fair judgement.

Video

Okey then, this is the video!

The details about the Weigh-Station

If you pick too many bad green strawberries, or if you pick good strawberries as rubbish, then you will get warned. If you get too many warnings, then you will get suspended for the job or, in the worst case, you will get fired.

When supervisors warn pickers, some pickers resist aggressively. So, some supervisors warn lesser and lesser to the pickers as time passes because they don’t want troubles.

However, this Japanese supervisor Takuma was not afraid of those pickers at all, and kept checking the strawberries fairly. (In the first place, there was not so many brave pickers that could threaten Takuma though.)