The summer before my first year of college, I found new summer employment at Seaside Farms, a local tomato farm. I started as a factory floor checker, but by the end I was responsible for the fulfillment of ~3500 tons of tomatoes in 5 weeks, worth roughly $7,000,000 at $1 per lb. 

Tomato farming is unique in Beaufort and the Sea Islands due to the climate. A normal tomato season elsewhere in the country can last anywhere from 4-5 months. Here, it runs 2.5 months. And yet, Seaside Farms produces close to the same number of tomatoes as any other farm its size; 15-20 million pounds. 

I initially worked in the packing plant as a checker - I marked what pallets needed to go into what tractor trailers and made sure the forklift drivers followed through. If there was a mistake, I crawled in between the top of the pallets and the roof of the trailer and found the wrongly allocated pallet. I communicated constantly with the drivers and the shipping and logistics manager to make sure that all of the orders were fulfilled properly. Efficiency was key and remaining vigilant through the 12 hour days was of the utmost priority. 

Due to personal issues, the shipping and logistics manager left in the third of 7 weeks, and I was promoted to her role. In that role, I was responsible for receiving the sold orders from the sales team (done in real time - no truckload of tomatoes is pre-sold) and ensuring that the fulfilled orders made it to the shipping warehouse by the end of the day, sans mistake. I had three checkers under my purview and continued to serve in the "checking" capacity since a checker was not brought on to replace me. I created serial codes, mapped how many trailers were available, which ones were full/half-full/empty and assigned orders according to the rate at which the various types of tomatoes were coming off of the line. Continuing as before, I marked pallets, corrected pallets in the wrong trailer and in the event that the line workers were late to work, helped stack boxes on pallets. At the end of the 7 weeks, all the tomatoes were picked, sorted and shipped without an erroneous order.