A Harvest to Remember With Shiv and My Dad – Badbar, 1976

This is how wheat was crushed and blown by God’s winds to separate grain from stalks.

Wheat harvesting has come a long way—from the sweat and skill of manual labor to the speed and precision of mechanized tools. Back then, threshers were a significant innovation, easing the burden of separating grain from stalks. 

Present days Harvesting Combines.

Now of course the whole produce in the farm of ready grains is done through Harvesting Combines. The job which used to take 2/3 months has been reduced to 2/3 days for a 50 Acre farm land.

Wheat being stalked manually for thrashing.

Golden fields ready for harvesting.

It was the year 1976 when we visited Badbar during the harvest season. The fields were alive with joy and motion. The workers were cheerful, moving rhythmically and proudly with the work of their hands. They had begun on Vaisakhi, April 13th—a day already steeped in significance—and that year, it carried the energy of abundance and celebration.

Shiv in the Lap of my Dad Sardar Vasdev Singh in Apr 1976 standing near a tractor thrasher in our fields in Badbar, Punjab.

I vividly recall my father, then about 57 years old, standing tall and content near his workers, cradling little Shiv—still a toddler—in his lap. There was something timeless about that moment: a father, a child, the land, and its people bound together in tradition and toil.

Harvinder proudly in the midst of golden ripe wheat produce.

The grains ripe into golden yellow.

Finally the produce reaches the Grain Market Badbar, making me the happiest person in the world.

I captured that precious scene in a photograph—a historic picture etched not just in an album, but in memory. That frame holds more than just faces; it holds a feeling, a legacy. It deserves to be recorded and remembered.