I'll never forget my couple of weeks work on a hop farm in Kent as a student - 8 hours a day stood right next to the very noisy main bine thresher feeding all the stray pieces into a mini-thresher. Hard work, with only short breaks between each tractor load, and of course for lunch. The hops were hosts to huge numbers of hop aphids, so we all had green hair, green clothes, green everything at the end of each day,
I cheered myself up with the thought that my labours would help keep the nation's beer supply flowing until I was told that on this particular farm the hops all went to the dye-making industry.
The farm also had pear and apple orchards, so we spent a week or so before returning to uni making a few bob as pickers, although having established that you got paid nearly as much for 'drops' as 'picks' we decided it was easier to charge at the trees with your ladder and just pick them up from the ground, so needed to be constantly aware of the whereabouts of the foreman who didn't seem to appreciate our enterprising approach!