Menachot 71: Halacha and Time-Dependent Harvesting/Pollination

After discussing rice yesterday, we are given a new Mishna that describes how the new crop was reaped at Pesach.  It says that reaping wall allowed even before the omer offering that permitted the new harvest.  Irrigated fields ripened early so perhaps this was to ensure the crop was not wasted.  Alternatively, the crop was of too poor quality to be part of the omer offering and so the farmers assumed that the law did not apply to them.  The city of Jericho is used as an example of farmers who harvested early with Rabbinical approval.  The Sages disagreed, but did not stop them.

The Gemara goes on to describe the activities of the people of Jericho.  Some of those were approved of by the Sages.  Others were objected to by the Sages, including the process of grafting palm trees on the 14th of Nissan, when we are commanded to not work.  Grafting continues to be required because of the nature of date plants, which requires pollination of the female plant by the male plant to produce dates.  Grafting is still done at very particular times to ensure pollination.

When living in Israel, I worked on Kibbutz with date pollination.  The job now includes tall cherry-pickers and machines that carefully collect the date pollen so that it can be manually sprayed on the female date pods at the appropriate times.  Our technology makes the job easier, but the job is the same now as it was thousands of years ago.