<Begin Segment 3>

MA: So, I'm curious about your farm and can you describe a typical day for you on the farm?

GF: Oh, get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, milk the cows and do the chores and go out to work. And my mother fixed breakfast and off we go to the field for whatever we had to do.

MA: And what types of things did you grow on the farm?

GF: We raised sugar beets, cabbage, onion, peas, carrots, all kind of... our biggest crop, the main crop, was sugar beets, yeah.

MA: That was a pretty popular thing to grow in Colorado.

GF: That was a, a best, well not the best, but most secure crop to raise, 'cause actually, sugar beets was a contract, you know, and you're more sure of what you're gonna get from that, then you would the other. The rest of the stuff is a gamble, hit and miss.

MA: So the sugar beet, who would contract that?

GF: We had a place, a factory, call the Great Western Sugar Company, and that was pretty large area. That covered a big area. And they contracted sugar beets from all, most of the farmers from all over.

MA: And then the other, the vegetables that you would grow, what would --

GF: We would just have to go to market with it. Find a place for it. And we'd travel... some of the produce we'd travel from place like Ault, we drove and drove to get to Denver, Colorado, which is about 70 miles and, then some cabbage, onions, celery we delivered to, to Denver. But the sugar beets we had a, kind of a storage place so we took it there, we dumped it there and we kept it there until wintertime and then in wintertime they reloaded it and sent it to a processing factory.

MA: So it sounds like the sugar beets was a pretty --

GF: That was the most, yeah --

MA: Good, profitable thing.

GF: That's the most secure crop for most of the farmers, you know, whether it was Japanese American or whoever it is, that was the main crop.

MA: And who, so, I assume you and your siblings all worked on the farm?

GF: Not mine. [Laughs] I wanted really to get off the farm after a while so I moved to south Texas and I'd done a little work for somebody else and, and I opened up the bowling center.

MA: Oh, but this is later, later on?

GF: Yes, yes.

MA: But when you were younger, like before the war --

GF: Oh, yeah.

MA: You and your whole family worked on the farms?

GF: Oh, we all worked on farm, yes.

MA: Would you have other help? Would you hire other people to come help you work on the farm?

GF: Especially sugar beets. The other crops we, we tried to harvest it by ourselves. With sugar beets it was a pretty big crop so we hired foreign labor. They'd come from Mexico, and that's who we, we hired.

MA: And they would come up just for the sugar beet harvest?

GF: Yeah, uh-huh.

MA: And then go back --

GF: Go back, yeah.

MA: -- to Mexico? So how did it... can you explain the process for harvesting the sugar beets and what you'd have to do and...

GF: Well, back then we had a, like horses was our horsepower. So we had a, an equipment was drawn by the horses and that lifted the beets out of the ground. It loosened it up. So then we'd have to get up there and pick the dirt off of there and pile it up in a pile and then we'd go with a knife and we'd cut the tops off and then load it up in the truck and we sent it to the, the factory, sugar factory, or the dump, storage place where...

MA: And then for the other stuff, for the vegetables, it would just be...

GF: We just harvested that and went to the market. Some of 'em we put in storage in the wintertime. We had to go work that over and sell it again.

MA: And would you go with your father around with the produce to sell?

GF: Not very much.

MA: So he would kind of do that part?

GF: Yeah, small yet, yeah.

MA: Okay.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.