Bhutan - Agrarian Society

In the field described below, I encountered a father and his grown daughter harvesting and threshing barley. The harvest would be their family's supply of barely grain for the winter.
I had never seen threshing before or, if I have, it was certainly not by hand.
As the woman collected the barley and placed it on a woven mat, the man threshed the barley with the stick that you see, separating the grain from the shaft. I was stunned by the amount of effort he had to put into this process in order to gain a handful of seeds.
The connection to the earth and it's bounty is something that few of us westerners know so intimately as these people do. The truth is, I wasn't all that certain at the time just what barley is used for. ( Ah! "John Barley Corn" but also breakfast food and stock feed ) Most likely few of us would want to change places with farmers as these - till the soil, harvest and thresh, pound into grain. Still I couldn't help wondering what unimagined benefits lay hidden in such a process.