OK SO

if a farm's harvesting sweet potatoes at night in North Carolina, there's decent odds it's for fraud purposes

Root crops in general are easier to fudge yield numbers on because they're underground. Can't really do even a basic visual guesstimate like with wheat or corn. https://twitter.com/lawnerdbarak/status/1278847289923076096

Some root crops like solanum potatoes or sugar beets are harvested 100% by machine. It's not that unusual to harvest them at night. You just ... turn on the headlights.

But sweet potatoes, at least around here, are harvested by hand.

Doing it at night slows the crew way down cause they can't see shit.

Sweet potatoes fields also have DEEP (2-3' deep) furrows, so pickers can easily biff it & bust a leg in the daytime. Nevermind in the darkness.

The furrows are tall & deep enough that you basically have to jump from peak to peak, especially if you're carrying heavy buckets of potatoes, bc if you try to walk across the grain of the furrows alternating up-down you'll wear yourself tf out

So you've got big crews of folks basically running with heavy buckets and frequently crossing paths & having to dodge each other, doing some Super Mario shit jumping from ridge to ridge the whole time

the ridges are far enough apart that it's a little bit of a push for me to single-step from one to the other without carrying a heavy bucket, and I'm a few inches taller than the median crew picker : /

pick crews do not get enough credit for being professional athletes

ok further explanation may be called for

SOME places do mechanical sweet potato harvest. Just not the Carolinas. We've got the #1 sweet potato growing county right next door, it's big business here, & the only way to handle that much SP is store them for use all winter long.

SP's naturally store really well. They're evolved to live in difficult environments, & a lot of that is being able to hibernate for long periods until it's a good time to grow again.

But to get them to do that, you have to suberize them- stimulate them go into hibernation mode.

This is mostly about growing a slightly thicker, waxier peel. This protects their insides, so they can stay nice & moist without rotting.

Suberizing only works if the skin is completely intact. If there are gouges, scuffs, dents, etc, they'll mostly heal. The SP is still good for a couple of weeks. But they won't make it through months of storage- they'll mold, liquefy, mummify depending on the environment lol

We still don't have a equipment that leaves SP's intact enough for multimonth suberized storge.

So that's why NC SP's are dependent on hand harvest. AKA giant crews of pickers. AKA can't really do it so well in the dark. If the farm's tryin, they're probably up to something.

I mean it's bad enough trying to Assassin's Creed your way, fully loaded, through a sweet potato field when you can see where you're going

if a farm's trying to pull it off in the dark you KNOW they're probably running a con

Here's how that works.

Day 1, you run the rig through the field to turn up all the potatoes. Could be under daylight or darkness I think.

Then, when it's dark, you send the crew out to pick up a bunch of the crop.

Then- and this is important- you haul it to a 2nd location!

Then on day 2, you send the crew to re-pick the field they picked last night. (Don't worry there WILL be leftovers. That's what happens when you make people pick in the dark.)

Then you weigh the day 2 harvest & go "OH NOOOOO MY YIELD WAS SO BAD pay me"

If you really really love insurance fraud, you may be delighted to learn that the entire existence of crop insurance in the first place is kind of a scam. Nobody buys it at market rates bc there's not really a great business case for using crop insurance. https://www.heritage.org/agriculture/report/addressing-risk-agriculture

BUT super-subsidized crop insurance is

1) super popular with farms

2) a clever way to "cancel crop subsidies" while still paying out massive crop subsidies

3) super popular with insurance agents, of which there are WAY more than actual farmers -> way more votes/$ spent : )

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:

Crop insurance doesn't just cover "the harvest was bad."

It also covers "the price was bad" and "demand was low so I couldn't sell my whole crop."

That's why anytime you see a piece of media- and you will see this frequently- that talks about the plight of farmers and poor prices

but never one time mentions "there's heavily subsidized insurance for this exact problem, they just didn't buy it"

That's a scam in progress.

Anyway apropos of nothing here's a fun video about COVID-related potato supply chain problems from a real live business journalism outlet that never once mentions crop price insurance exists : ) https://twitter.com/businessinsider/status/1277768999812636677