Dirty Jobs

This week on Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe explored the world of wine making. He began his day in the vineyard picking the grapes to make the wine. Despite all of the technology we possess, wine grapes are still picked by hand. There are many workers in the vineyard and they are paid based on how many tons of grapes they are able to pick in one day. This is a very obscure job because it is still done the same way it was many years ago. The grapes then undergo a squashing process in a very large and dangerous looking machine. The skins from the grapes are then used as fertilizer for all of the grape trees in the vineyard. The grape juice is put into 50 gallon wooden barrels and placed in a cellar to ferment. There is actually a lot of work in making a bottle of wine and it takes a very long time for the fermentation process to complete. After the wine is aged, samples are taken from each barrel and are tested for acidity and quality. After the wine is given a seal of approval from the chemists, it is bottled and sold. Most people do not realize the amount of work put into the making of a single bottle of wine.
Mike also explored the world of cattle ranching. He went to a farm in Kansas and was shown the ropes of raising cattle. Before he was able to feed the cattle, he first had to help clean out the grain and corn silos, which was very messy. After cleaning out all of the leftover corn in the silo, he had to crawl in a pit underneath the silo and clean out the corn and grain that had fallen through the floor. This was done by removing the bottom tray of a very large excavating machine and scooping all of the corn out through a small hole. He then had to drive a large truck full of a mixture of corn, grain, alfalfa grass, and some special ingredients, to the cow troughs. Each cow on the ranch eats roughly 30 pounds of feed a day and there were about 200 cows on the ranch. After feeding the cows he had to round them up using a cattle prod and separate the males and females. There is a lot of work involved in raising live stock that will eventually be turned into hamburger for human consumption.