There were chilies to pick, rows of crops to clean and soil to turn over.
Each woman has 11 rows of crops that need daily watering.
Where possible, natural processes, are being used – instead of chemical fertilisers, nitrogen-fixing plants are being planted among rows of crops, acting as a form of natural fertiliser.
As the flower and vegetable farms have expanded, lining enormous tracts of land with plastic greenhouses and dense, neat rows of crops, the population living within three miles of the lake shore has quintupled from 50,000 to 250,000.
Farmers are taking down the old barn or the grove of trees that shaded a corner of the family farm to squeeze in a few more rows of crops.
Monarchs lay their eggs exclusively on milkweed, which used to thrive in between rows of crops in farmers' fields.
Cue Prof Sukkarieh's giant robotic weed-remover Ladybird, the farmer's new best friend, which wheels itself up and down rows of crops, analysing the vegetation, and pulling out anything that should not be there.
Here in California's thirsty farm belt, where pumpjacks nod amid neat rows of crops, it's a proposition that seems to make sense: using treated oil field wastewater to irrigate crops.
Neatly-planted rows of crops are irrigated with fresh water pumped from wells – a stark contrast to the situation in other parts of the country.
When people see neat rows of a crop in a field, they correctly assume that a farmer planted the crop and the neat rows allow for ease of harvesting.
