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As the Berry Industry grew so did the need for pickers. These are some of the pickers at the "Shook" Berry farm.

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Shook berry pickers.
1931
Hatzic Prairie, Mission, BC

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As a possible solution to the shortage of pickers, Frank Shook began to look outside the district. It became common to bring in girls from the Kootenays or even from Ontario. In 1912, however, Mr. Shook brought in some pickers from even farther away. The year before, his wife's cousin had been visiting from England. During her visit, she remarked that it would be nice to send over some English girls to pick for the summer as a way of giving them a start in Canada. She suggested that upon her return home she could organize some girls to come over the following year.

After a long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and a train journey across Canada, the girls finally arrived at the Shook farm. The night of their arrival, two of them disappeared some time after dinner. They were not seen at the farm again, apparently deciding to try and support themselves by some other means. Frank Shook was not upset, however, as he reasoned that losing only two out of twenty-five was not so bad. The rest of the girls stayed for the summer, and three of them got married at the end of the season. Most of the others married soon after, and only one of them returned to work on the farm the following year.

Although the experiment went reasonably well, 1912 was the only time that Frank Shook brought over girls from England to pick berries. Most of the time, his pickers came from BC or other places in Canada. During a busy berry season the Shook farm would employ up to 200 women in the fields. Accommodations were provided on the farm, and there were a variety of leisure activities available to them. The proximity of the lake provided opportunities for swimming and boating. As an added bonus, a cinema had been set up on the farm for viewing movies.

Food was another consideration. As Frank Shook said, "you take 200 healthy girls, practically living out of doors and working in the open, with bathing, boating, long walks out of working hours and believe me they make food disappear." A cafeteria was set up on the farm to feed pickers. Although they had to pay for food, Shook was careful not to make a profit.

There were so many pickers in the Hatzic area that they seemed to form a temporary city of their own. While many of the pickers were accommodated on the farms, entire bands of First Nations would camp in the area as well. Ice cream stands and markets opened up during the summer months, and the Canadian Bank of Commerce even had a seasonal branch close to the Hatzic Community Hall. The Agassiz Local, which came through with the mail on Saturday nights, "had to slow down to a bare crawl as it ploughed through the huge crowds, trying to avoid running anyone down."

Courting was another situation that farmers had to deal with when employing berry pickers. Because many of the workers were single young women, local boys would be attracted to the farms in great numbers. As Andreas Schroeder said in his book, "Carved From Wood", the boys would be such a distraction for the girls that "Frank Shook spent his evenings rowing patrols around Hatzic Lake, armed with a rocksalt-charged shotgun".
-Schroeder, Andreas. "Carved From Wood', 1991, The Mission Foundation, Mission BC.

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1930,s
By the 1930s, there were two different types of rhubarb being grown in the Mission area: field rhubarb and hothouse rhubarb. Field rhubarb, which had been the standard up to that time, was harvested in April and May. A local farmer named Bunjiro Sakon, who was looking for a crop to grow during the winter months, developed the second type, hothouse rhubarb.

In 1933, with the pressures of the poor Depression market and unsold berries rotting in the fields, farmers needed little convincing to join a co-operative. The existing United Farmers Co-Op and the Associated Growers of B.C. were amalgamated, and this emergent co-operative became the PCU.
In the first year of operations, $73,000 worth of fruit passed through PCU management. By 1936, the PCU handled $500,000 in produce.

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1940,s
December 1941, the prevalent sentiment became remarkably anti - Japanese. There had been this air of caution surrounding the Germans as well, but the Japanese, being a visible minority, received the most attention. Although this sentiment cannot be generalized to an entire country's people, it took less than a month for the Canadian government to declare that all persons of Japanese origin should be moved out of coastal areas "for their own safety" and relocated to internment camps. Most of Mission's Japanese were sent to the Prairies, where many settled into sugar beet farming.
In 1944, the PCU paid out $894,000 to its growers. War was definitely good for business.

The Great Flood of 1948 interrupted the post-war excitement over berries. Dykes collapsed on May 27. At the end of June, some farms started to re-appear from the murky water, though tidal effects caused the waters to periodically rise and fall for the next few weeks. When the water finally receded, a landscape of thick black mud and rotting plant life stretched out in the hot summer sun.

In May 1949, Mr. Lucas said of the dying berry market: "One thing is certain now. We must convert to other products. The problem now is to find an agricultural activity for a small operator on high-priced land… We must develop diversification."

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1950,s
1955 crop - 54 berry pickers arrived in the valley from the Prairies, but only 15 were sent to Mission City. This in itself was a significant mark of change, as it was a far cry from the busy 1920s when local berry farms hired thousands of berry pickers each year.