402
Opinion of the Court
1
The Board underscores the statutory words "such farming operations." It does not suffice that the alleged secondary agriculture consists of "preparation for market," or "delivery to storage or to market," the Board maintains; to qualify for the statutory exemption, the Board urges, the work must be incidental to, or conjoined with, primary farming operations.8 As just explained, see supra, at 400-401, at the growing stage in the short life of a broiler, Holly Farms is not involved in primary farming, but the contract growers are. The essential question, then, is whether the live-haul employees' activities are inevitably "incident to or in conjunction with" the farming operations of the independent growers.9 The Board answers this question in the negative.
8 As we noted in Farmers Reservoir & Irrigation Co. v. McComb, 337 U. S. 755 (1949), Congress specifically added the words "or on a farm" to FLSA § 3(f) to address some Senators' objections that the exemption otherwise would not cover "the threshing of wheat or other functions necessary to the farmer if those functions were not performed by the farmer and his hands, but by separate companies organized for and devoted solely to that particular job." See id., at 767 (citing 81 Cong. Rec. 7653 (1937)). Nothing in the Board's decision detracts from the application of § 3(f), based on the "on a farm" language, to employees of "separate companies organized for and devoted solely to" auxiliary work in aid of a farming enterprise. Hence, the words "on a farm" do the work intended, and are not redundant. But see post, at 412-413.
Holly Farms presses the argument that its live-haul employees are analogous to the wheat threshers who figured in FLSA § 3(f)'s legislative history. The Board reasonably responds, however, that any worker— whether a wheat thresher, a feed-haul driver, or a chicken catcher—must perform his or her work "as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations" in order to fall under the agricultural exemption. If the chicken catching crews were employed by the independent growers, rather than by Holly Farms' processing operation, those crews would more closely resemble the wheat threshers contemplated by the framers of §3(f).
9 To this question, the dissent asserts "there can be only one answer." Post, at 415. In the dissent's view, activities "directly related to the farming operations that occurred on that very farm"—in this case, removing chickens from the independent growers' farms to make room for more—
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