Huh. They're in my town, but I've never heard of them. I'll see what I can come up with.

Also, I know a little bit about these types of summer jobs, and I think that either the ad has suckered you in, or your idea of fun may be different than mine.

Am a bit busy at work right now, but will pop back in in an hour or so to unleash my thoughts.

Oh hey, you're here in town too. I never knew that. Cool!

If you have to harvest tomatoes it will be brutal. It is monotonous work, outside under the sun. Fun is the last word I would use for the tedium of farm work - you have to have a certain mindset for it. Spoken as someone who spent their youth picking up rocks in fields, watering trees, and driving tractors with no AC in the southeastern summer heat.

Not to say that you won't enjoy something like that - there are a lot of things about farming that I used to love, but when it comes to the tedium, some people can't handle the repetition. It just depends on your mindset in regards to manual labor.

This seems informative. I'm always suspicious of big companies myself.

Here's my take, which is colored by the fact that a) I'm a tomato snob, and b) a couple summers ago I went through the interview process for a summer job with a local corn seed company.

1) "Farmer-owned cooperative" sounds better than "international conglomerate," but it doesn't necessarily mean that this group is the anti-Monsanto. You know all those huge tomato fields around here? The ones that grow those awful processing tomatoes? Those ones that they pile into haulers 15 feet deep but which remarkably never get crushed, even down at the bottom? Those tomatoes that fall off the truck on the interstate on ramps and, instead of going splat, bounce? Those are most likely the growers that own the cooperative. And they're probably researching ways to continue to evolve determinate processing tomatoes so that more gross tomatoes can be grown in a smaller space and with less loss of product after harvesting. Which is all a fine goal for those of us who purchase canned tomatoes or Campbell's soup, but it's not like you'd be working for the Slow Food movement or benefiting small family farms or reducing food miles. That's my sense. I could be wrong. But those are the kinds of tomatoes that are grown around here, and I can't imagine why they'd locate their research lab here if that weren't the product they were working on.

Also, it's nice that the farmers have a hand in the decision-making of the company. That's the way that it should be. But, their overall goal isn't to reduce any real-world problem (like, say, using less pesticides or preventing run-off into local waterways). Their goal, as a seed research firm, is to develop varieties that will increase those farmers' profits. So, you take the good with the capitalist.

2) The job title is "plant breeding summer aide." I think the job title for the corn job I applied for a couple years ago was "research assistant." At the time, I was trying to figure out how to get a job in that realm -- agriculture, or food growing, or a small farm, etc. -- and applied for it thinking it would be a good experience to have.

The research assisting consisted of helping the researchers harvest corn at their many farm sites around Woodland and throughout the Delta. And then, after the corn was harvested, the research assisting consisted of taking photographs of said ears of corn, then cataloging them. All of the fun stuff was done by the actual researchers with advanced degrees. Because it was a research company, not a company sending produce to market, they very tightly controlled who had access to the plants during every stage of the growing process. So it's tempting to read "plant breeding summer aide" and think, "oh cool, I'd get to help breed and germinate new tomato varieties!" But more likely, because of the strict controls on the environment, you'd have no contact with the plants at all. The job could be harvesting, or cataloging, or sterilizing growing medium -- but probably has nothing to do with tomato plants. And it probably pays about $10/hour to be outdoors in 105+-degree heat.

So! From my experience, from what I know of the local tomato crop, and because they aren't specifically looking for plant science majors or grads, that's where I'd put my money. And I hope very sincerely that this sort of thing thrills you, because I now feel like I've gone all poopy and what might have been an exciting opportunity.

I absolutely would have taken the corn photography job if they'd offered it to me, even though it would have put me in financial straits and I would have hated the weather after three days of it. But I know now, looking back, that if I'd done it, it would have been fodder for good stories about hardship -- but it would have been an awful few months.

Please excuse all grammatical gaffes and punctuation mishaps. I typed that hastily while my boss was down the hall and I could take a breath.

I know I wrote out a comment, but it looks like it didn't save. Short version: Thanks for the advice and links, y'all!

also: mudpuppie, I wonder if our social groups overlap at all. Have you heard about davisdollars.org? It just got started in earnest this month, and looks very promising.