Farmers love to have a large turn out of fruit or whatever crop they plant because the more crop the more food to eat or more money to be made. Unfortunately especially in the case of fruit, it is not always picked at the right time. Even experienced farmers may have problems with crop. An early winter or a hard freeze or a drought. Even besides those there is the problem of early pickers.

There are many early pickers including rodents, insects, birds. A farmer can spray pesticides which might be unhealthy and may not work completely from these pickers. There are less dangerous pesticides today but a farmer wants to spend as little as needed on their fruit to minimize expense. They may use a scare crow or shiny pans but this may not scare away all critters so a farmer can still lose a good percentage of their fruit to these fruit pickers. A farmer just has to accept some loss and use whatever preventative means they have at their disposal that would not incur too much expense. The fewer critter pickings obviously the better the yield. One other picker the farmer may have to watch our for is the family or kids. If you will eat the fruit this is fine but as long as the fruit is ready to be picked or at an edible stage of growth. If all is well then the farmer themselves will have the pleasure of picking their own fruit.

Here are simple instructions a farmer can follow to save from excessive pickings.
Build a scare crow using cheap material that you already have. You can use some old clothes, hay, and string. Start with a pair of pants and long sleeve shirt. You will tie the bottom of each pants leg where it would normally meet shoes. You tie it closed and then you fill from where your waste would fit in start to fill the pants up with hay. You could use old newspaper or even stuff more old clothes, or even old soda cans. The point here is to fill it up with something, and something.

You will need to fasten the bottom of the long sleeve shirt to the pants. One way to do this is to make some holes in the shirt and tie strings from it around the belt loop. Now you fill button up the shirt and start to fill with more hey or whatever material from the neck of where the shirt. Your scare crow should really start to be filling in now.

Now for the head. You can take an old pan with the handle and stick the handle down the neck and tie it down however you can. Then you place a post on the ground where yo want the scarecrow and tie it to the post. The post will help hold up the scarecrow. One other thing you may want to do is add some sort of chimes to it so it makes noise in the wind. You could tie a broom to the scarecrow at an angle or however you can and hang a small set of chimes. The noise of the chimes in the wind and the shinny pan with the sun reflection will help scare some of these pickers and help preserve more of your fruit.