§ 780.117 “Production, cultivation, growing.”

(a) The words “production, cultivation, growing” describe actual raising operations which are normally intended or expected to produce specific agricultural or horticultural commodities. The raising of such commodities is included even though done for purely experimental purposes. The “growing” may take place in growing media other than soil as in the case of hydroponics. The words do not include operations undertaken or conducted for purposes not concerned with obtaining any specific agricultural or horticultural commodity. Thus operations which are merely preliminary, preparatory or incidental to the operations whereby such commodities are actually produced are not within the terms “production, cultivation, growing”. For example, employees of a processor of vegetables who are engaged in buying vegetable plants and distributing them to farmers with whom their employer has acreage contracts are not engaged in the “production, cultivation, growing” of agricultural or horticultural commodities. The furnishing of mushroom spawn by a canner of mushrooms to growers who supply the canner with mushrooms grown from such spawn does not constitute the “growing” of mushrooms. Similarly, employees of the employer who is engaged in servicing insecticide sprayers in the farmer's orchard and employees engaged in such operations as the testing of soil or genetics research are not included within the terms. (However, see §§ 780.128, et seq., for possible exemption on other grounds.) The word “production,” used in conjunction with “cultivation, growing, and harvesting,” refers, in its natural and unstrained meaning, to what is derived and produced from the soil, such as any farm produce. Thus, “production” as used in section 3(f) does not refer to such operations as the grinding and processing of sugarcane, the milling of wheat into flour, or the making of cider from apples. These operations are clearly the processing of the agricultural commodities and not the production of them (Bowie v. Gonzalez, 117 F. 2d 11).