Home Economics

At 1 a.m., after many rural Texas towns have turned in for the night, a light but steady stream of traffic rolls through the main drag of Dalhart, a Panhandle town of 8,300. There’s a line for coffee at the Toot’n Totum downtown.

Idling pickups and rattling trailers punctuate what would otherwise be a quiet country night. It’s now that a small army of Mexican and Guatemalan laborers load into trailers, driving on gravel roads until they reach the potato furrows of Larsen Farms, a 3,700-acre operation just west of Dalhart. On one blustery October night, a bracing wind laced with the stench of cow manure whips through the treeless expanse. The only light comes from the high beams of the tractors plowing up the tubers and the encumbered trailers hauling them from the fields to giant warehouses closer to town. Because the fragile-skinned potatoes can’t be harvested in the daytime heat, the workers toil when temperatures allow.

As tractors outfitted with conveyor belts churn the potatoes from the earth and shoot them into open tractor-trailers, Luis Ramos tails the machines in a pickup. The 44-year-old from Durango, Mexico, monitors the harvesting teams and fixes mechanical problems with the machinery. Other workers operate the harvesting equipment, while still others sort bad potatoes from good. The hours