Dirty Jobs Recap: Alpaca Shearer
Shellfish Farmer. Back to Puget Sound for some more farming of shellfish. This one is a bit easier than the last time (Geoduck Farmer from Geoduck Farmer). In that one, you have to get in the mud and dig down to retrieve the 2-pound beasts. When growing mussels, they hang from "socks", and you simply lower a platform, then move the growing platform over it, cut them, move the platform out of the way, and raise the catch platform.
The difficulty is that you have six thousand pounds of mussels to move. So it's a lot of work. Thankfully, you don't have to get them all at once. You can unload what you need, and just leave the rest on the platform until you have orders for the rest. They aren't going anywhere. Plus, you have this crane to help you move the bin once it's full, and that helps. But the water is still really cold.
Taro Farmer. Another repeat visit, this time to Hawaii, where Mike has been several times (or perhaps just once, but he's filmed several jobs there). This time, however, he's going to be a Taro farmer. Taro is a root that is used to make the dish Poi. You can see that Mike wants to taste it, but luckily his host tells him that it's not a good idea. It won't kill him, but he really should cook it prior to doing so or he won't enjoy the process of eating it. It's like glass.
The roots grow in a shallow pond of water, and a stalk sticks out of the water. So they pull the plants out and prepare to relocate them. But first, they have to trim them. The leaves are cut off, as they are used somewhat like tortillas are used, to wrap up meats for certain sorts of meals. The ball of the root is cut off, and that is what is used for the Poi. Finally, what is left is re-planted in the new location, and it will start growing again. A very messy job.
Alpaca Shearer. The last stop on this episode is to shear some Alpaca fiber. These creatures look a little like a llama, and they come from the camel family - which Mike finds out quickly, as their defense is to spit. Fortunately, that's about all they can do, and they aren't very big. So they lead them up to a table that flips them on their side, and they are then shorn of their fur, which then gets weaved into usable fiber. Just hope you never get the batch that Mike cut.

















