The peasants spent a lot of time and effort on harvesting hay. The mowing areas were located in the valleys of large rivers and in spring they were flooded with water or on the "manes" between the swamps. It was necessary to wait for the meadow to dry out and then get to work. They mowed it down with their hands. Out of the blue, a Lithuanian scythe was used, and where there were pits and hummocks, a pink salmon scythe. Hay was put in piles, the piles were taken to stacks (a large high stack will not rain). There were also stacks.
With a shortage of mowing, peasants rented land from neighboring communities and Siberian Tatars. The usual price was 3 rubles for a place where about 100−125 kopecks were placed. The weight of a pile of hay or straw was five pounds. Sometimes hay and straw were measured in carts: 1 cart — 4 piles.
When creating collective farms, the task was set to replace manual labor with the labor of pets and tractors. In the early years, there was a terrible shortage of harvesting machines on collective farms. For example, in the Tobolsk district of the Tyumen region in 1930, there were 40 mowers and 9 horse rowing for all farms, in five years this figure increased: there were 162 mowers and 113 horse rowing. However, most of the harvesting equipment was not in the collective farms themselves, but in machine and tractor stations (MTS). In addition to hay, collective farms harvested silage based on sunflower and oats.
In the post-war period, all the best haymaking lands belonged to collective farms, and small plots remained for peasants. According to the memoirs of the older generation, they "fought" for land plots.
By the middle of the twentieth century, there were about 10 million hectares of hayfields, 10 million hectares of pastures and about 20 million hectares of deer pastures in Western Siberia. During the development of virgin lands, many lands that were used for pastures and haymaking were plowed. In 1959, the persecution of subsidiary farms resumed. It was forbidden to keep cattle in small towns, and urban private owners were forbidden to use mowing for hay harvesting. Livestock was also restricted in rural areas. As a result, many mowing areas were overgrown with forest and shrubs, and already in the 1960s and 1970s efforts had to be made to develop them. The hayfields were affected by floods in 1970, 1979 and 1986. High levels of spring flood waters were in 1971−1973 and 1987. In the 1980s and early 1990s, farms in Western Siberia harvested feed in the form of silage and hay.
Currently, farmers do not have such an urgent problem with foraging. Established farms, with a shortage of feed, can purchase them in other areas.