Como Salsa para los Tacos: Rosella
Admiral Biscuit

Rosella had worked in tomato fields before. Plenty of them, starting when she was a filly, in fact. Tomkin was known for its tomatoes. Her family was known for their tomatoes. Her cousins were known for their tomatoes.

Rosella generally wanted little to do with tomatoes, but it seemed that fate conspired in mysterious ways, and like it or not, no matter where she went, tomatoes.

She liked the taste of tomatoes, she liked the shape and smell of tomatoes, but she didn’t like weeding tomatoes or picking tomatoes or de-bugging tomatoes. Tomatoes at the market were tasty, tomatoes at the market came with a story and no effort on her part. Tomatoes on the vine needed coddling and an Earth pony’s care, and she wanted little to do with tomatoes but in Tomkin there weren’t many other ways for a young Earth pony to earn bits.

Besides tomatoes and the cinema, there wasn’t much for a young mare to spend her bits on, so she saved them in a pass-me-down purse, until one day she had enough to go exploring.

The Wide Wide World of Equestria might have been enough for most ponies, but it wasn’t far enough removed from tomatoes for her liking, so she instead embarked on a sightseeing trip to Earth.

Earth also had tomatoes; in fact, humans liked tomatoes a lot. They sliced them and diced them and made them into soups and sauces and sold them in cans or jars or squeeze-bottles or even little packets that you could get for free at some restaurants.

They even had tomato-based juice and tomato-based cocktails and it was all wonderful because she didn’t have to do anything on the production end. She could go into a grocery store or a restaurant and get as many tomatoes as she wanted, ready to eat.

Or drink, if that was her fancy.

She’d saved a lot of bits, but they had a way of evaporating in a big city and Rosella knew it would be time to go home soon, maybe sooner than she’d expected since she was pretty good at saving bits when there wasn’t anything to spend them on, but not so good at budgeting when there were things to spend her money on.

In fact, if she didn’t leave her hotel room for the rest of her stay on Earth, and only ate canned food—she still wouldn’t have quite enough to make it.

A wise pony knew when she was beaten, so she trudged to the embassy and laid out her tale. She’d tried to get jobs here and there, but most of them weren’t hiring ponies or if they were she needed to have the right kinds of documents, and she didn’t.

At the Equestrian consulate, they were sympathetic to her situation and offered her the choice of early return, or a visa to earn bits in a field that suited her.

She wasn’t ready to give up on her vacation just yet, even if she had to work for some of it, and so she agreed to the second option and several days later she had a shiny new H-2A Visa and a new job as well.

Picking tomatoes.

Admittedly, it was far different than in Tomkin. Here the rows were close and it was bare between them. The fields were bigger than she could have ever imagined, stretching out almost as far as the eye could see with nothing but tomatoes.

She didn’t have to walk the fields and pick them; she got to ride on a fancy cart towed by a fancy tractor. A clever mechanism picked the tomatoes off the vine—it also picked the vine, too, but she tried not to think about that too much—and sorted it onto a short conveyor where her job was to inspect the tomatoes as they rolled past and reject the inferior ones. Then they’d go up another conveyor and be dropped into a second wagon, towed by an even bigger tractor than the one which was towing hers.

She wasn’t alone on the wagon; there was a supervisor and three other tomato-sorters who spoke thickly-accented English and made fun of her the first few hours and then grudgingly accepted her tomato-sorting prowess. By the end of the first day, they were a cohesive herd; mid-week, she’d learned some useful phrases in Spanish and they’d learned some useful phrases in Ponish. By the end of the week, they’d started to teach each other curses in their respective languages, and if that wasn’t bonding, she didn’t know what was.

Rosella had to report to both her direct supervisors and her pony superiors and that was slightly annoying, but that was the deal she’d made. And it really wasn't all that much, mostly questions about tomatoes and how they were sorted and where they went.

She was a curious pony, and most of the farm staff warmed up to her after a week on the job, so it wasn’t all that difficult to find out how the tomatoes got unloaded from the field carts and put in either crates for shipping to grocery stores or if they didn’t look the right way got shipped off instead to make salsa. Bryan, the general foreman, had plenty to teach her about tomato distribution on Earth and some of it was interesting and some of it wasn’t but it all got dutifully reported in her daily and weekly work logs, and once those were sent off she could spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing, or the weekend off seeing what she wanted to see.

Most of the rest of the workers only got one paycheck at the end of the week, but she got two. One from the farm and one from the Embassy and she wasn’t sure why that was. Surely they weren’t paying her for her reports on tomato farming. Lots of ponies knew how to do that.

She wasn’t going to refuse the extra bits, though. She used some of them to buy food and drinks for her co-workers, and saved up the rest for one last trip in her time on Earth.

Author's Notes:

Rosella and Tomkin are (of course) varieties of tomatoes.

To quote MSPiper: “Don't you just hate it when not just one but two different universes typecast you?”
When you’ve got a tomato on your butt, that just happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YeGOv87JE4