Employees engaged in building terraces or threshing wheat and other
grain, employees engaged in the erection of silos and granaries,
employees engaged in digging wells or building dams for farm ponds,
employees engaged in inspecting and culling flocks of poultry, and
pilots and flagmen engaged in the aerial dusting and spraying of crops
are examples of the types of employees of independent contractors who
may be considered employed in practices performed ``on a farm.'' Whether
such employees are engaged in ``agriculture'' depends, of course, on
whether the practices are performed as an incident to or in conjunction
with the farming operations on the particular farm, as discussed in
Secs. 780.141 through 780.147; that is, whether they are carried on as a
part of the agricultural function or as a separately organized
productive activity (Secs. 780.104 through 780.144). Even though an
employee may work on several farms during a workweek, he is regarded as
employed ``on a farm'' for the entire workweek if his work on each farm
pertains solely to farming operations on that farm. The fact that a
minor and incidental part of the work of such an employee occurs off the
farm will not affect this conclusion. Thus, an employee may spend a
small amount of time within the workweek in transporting necessary
equipment for work to be done on farms. Field employees of a canner or
processor of farm products who work on farms during the planting and
growing season where they supervise the planting operations and consult
with the grower on problems of cultivation are employed in practices
performed ``on a farm'' so long as such work is done entirely on farms
save for an incidental amount of reporting to their employer's plant.
Other employees of the above employers employed away from the farm would
not come within section 3(f). For example, airport employees such as
mechanics, loaders, and office workers employed by a crop dusting firm
would not be agriculture employees (Wirtz v. Boyls dba Boyls Dusting and
Spraying Service 230 F. Supp. 246, aff'd per curiam 352 F. 2d 63; Tobin
v. Wenatchee Air Service, 10 WH Cases 680, 21 CCH Lab Cas. Paragraph
67,019 (E.D. Wash.)).
