The Taklamakan Desert was a vast floor of threshing dust.

It takes a village, not a threshing machine, to complete the harvest of pounds of watermelon seeds that will fill the simple, white packets sold by Turtle Tree Seed.

She downloaded the book’s audio version and listened to it as she drove her 25-ton John Deere combine through her fields, reaping, threshing and winnowing hundreds of bushels.

Adelaide connects socially with men who work the land as cowboys or on threshing crews.

The country’s military is rejiggering some of its munitions factories to produce tractors and threshing machines, while also converting some airfields into greenhouses.