rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Why high schools still shut down during harvest in Maine" (Reply)

David Sharp's Associated Press article describing how upstate Maine's potato harvest, traditionally relying on the work of students given weeks off of school, is changing with the time evoked Atlantic Canada for me. Potato culture is common to people on both sides of the border.

In the gentle hills of northern Maine, far from the rocky coastline and lighthouses, teenagers trade warm classrooms for cold potato fields every fall, just as they have for generations.

Schools shut down — sometimes for weeks at a time — while their students haul in the harvest or monitor conveyor belts for potatoes that don’t measure up as farmers rush to fill their stores before the ground freezes.

But as farm operations consolidate and heavy machinery make them more efficient, farmers wonder how much longer there will be a place for the harvest breaks that as little as 20 years ago saw kids hand-picking potatoes for 50 cents a barrel.

“Eventually it’ll probably fade away,” said Wayne Garrison, the 72-year-old co-owner of Garrison Farms, which hired eight high school students to help harvest its 280 hectares of potatoes. “I’d hate to see it go, I really would.”

Up until the 1940s, Maine was the United States’s potato capital and Aroostook County — a place so vast that it’s more than double the size of Greater Toronto — is still home to roughly 20,000 hectares of potato farms. Nearly a dozen high schools here emptied for this year’s harvest — fewer than the old days, when virtually all schools shut down.

This year, only a handful of high schools have closed for the entire three-week harvest. And school boards are continually grappling with whether or not to continue the tradition as modern farming reduces the need for large numbers of labourers.