UNDER her wide-brimmed hat, crowning a buttoned-up two-piece suit she might be the world's smartest potato picker.

Sam spends his spare time in his "inventing shed", in which he makes devices ranging from a potato picker made from old bicycle parts to a machine capable of replacing the town band.

I'm the child of potato pickers.

The term "Irish acre" can also mean a roughly measured area of 70 paces square, (approx.4900 square yards) sometimes used by potato pickers.

It took two bushel baskets to fill a bag, so if I made $1 a day, I was a heck of a potato picker.

Next, he drove to northern Maine, when he spent the night in a field alongside a group of French-speaking migrant potato pickers from Canada, with whom he shared some French vintage.

Now the discovery of a written record of degradation and servitude among sweet potato pickers at a farm near here has demonstrated anew how little the lives of migrant workers have changed.

That makes them the only sizable adult occupational group living on the minimum wage except for restaurant waiters and waitresses, and potato pickers do not get tips.

"Academically it's not sound to start school and then go out for three weeks," said Tom Jandreau, the principal of Easton Elementary School and a former potato picker.

Examining her portfolio, Robert Capa pinpointed the twin strands of her work as being "Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers".