The threshing technique Vavilov described is still in use today, especially after the breakdown of Soviet-era machinery. In their book Social and Economic Change in the Pamirs (from which the photograph is taken) Frank Bliss, Nicola Pacult and Sonia Guss, describe the situation today:
Processing of the harvested ears and straw was formerly, and is again since the collapse of mechanised agriculture, strictly manual work. The ears are nowadays, as in the Middle Ages, set out on the floor and threshed with a team of oxen. This is achieved by prodding four to six oxen round in a circle. Ears are added continually with pitchforks. According to our estimates, it takes about eight hours for enough ears to be threshed to fill a 100 kg sack with wheat grain. If 2 hectares of wheat were sown, then after the 34 days needed for one person to cut it, assuming 15 quintals yield per hectare, another 30 days are needed for threshing alone. The work lasts so long, the farmers in the Shakdara valley explained, that it starts freezing again at night before all the grain is in the barn. That means that six weeks after the harvest the people are still occupied with the follow-up work. Using a similar technique, the legumes such as beans, peas or lentils are threshed. … As a curiosity, it should be mentioned that in 2003, during a visit to the Tajik Gharm valley, we often found ears spread out on the main road. There, the cars driving through took over the threshing.
Nobody ever said agriculture was easy!
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