Hay and grain harvest by hand, 1937
A farm woman carries hay on her head to a cow-drawn ladder cart in a valley meadow, and an old woman gathers sheaves from the stooks.
In a mown meadow below a wooded hillside, two women and a child rest by a basket while a cart waits in the distance; a woman in a long apron walks to a wooden ladder cart with a great bundle of hay balanced on her head, men fork hay beside two spotted cows in harness, and a woman on top of the load takes what is handed up to her. On a flat field under a heavy sky an old woman in a headscarf gathers the sheaves from the stooks.
Nothing here is mechanised. Most German farms were still small family holdings worked with cows and hand tools, and the Reich Food Estate under Walther Darré, which celebrated the peasant as the source of the nation's blood, pressed them in its Battle of Production to make Germany independent of imported food.
