One of the skills I picked up as a budding pre-teen was the use of a hoe, mainly working in cotton fields
Sea of Cotton by subarcticmike (cc by)
mule98J shares his stories of working in cotton fields as a pre-teen.My big thrill, enacted every time I brought my sack to the trailer, was to climb the ladder and dump my cotton, just like the grownups did. The field boss always seemed to take me seriously, and logged my meager tonnage in his book as if I were an adult. But he looked the other way when I climbed the ladder; sometimes I would "accidentally" fall off the plank onto the soft cotton.
