Sowing by hand near Fulda, 1937
Beside a tree-lined road an ox draws a harrow while a lean farmer in a waistcoat strides across the field, casting seed from his hand.
On a broad field bordered by a straight avenue of trees a single pale ox draws a harrow across the ploughed ground, led by a farmer. A lean, weathered man in a dark waistcoat and white shirt walks the furrows with his seed in a cloth at his waist and casts it with a wide sweep of his arm; seen from below against the clouds he strides on, and two men work the open field with the ox behind him.
Broadcast sowing by hand was already old-fashioned in 1937, but on the small farms of the hill country around Fulda the seed drill had not yet arrived everywhere. The regime's Battle for Production demanded more grain from every acre; its propaganda preferred the timeless sower to the tractor.
