The tobacco harvest: picking, drying and carting, 1937
Women and girls strip tobacco leaves in the field, an old woman sorts them before a timber-framed barn, and oxen bring a wagonload through the village.
In a wide field of tall plants, women and girls in headscarves and spotted aprons bend among the huge leaves, break them off from the bottom of the stalk and gather them under their arms; in the morning mist a smiling young woman and an older man work the rows. Before a weathered timber-framed house an old woman in a headscarf sorts a heap of leaves on a bench while strings of leaves hang drying from the eaves, and a pair of yoked oxen hauls a loaded wagon past whitewashed houses and a maypole.
Tobacco was a crop of small family farms in the south and south-west, picked leaf by leaf and dried for weeks in airy barns. The Four-Year Plan pressed for more home-grown leaf to save foreign currency.
