Harvesting sweet potatoes is exhausting. It's pure manual labor, and you really need two or three people to keep up.
Sweet potatoes grow underground, so first, you have to cut away the lush vines. These vines are much more troublesome than wheat stalks. Once cut, you can't just throw them away; you have to haul them back home.
After being air-dried, they can be used as winter fodder for pigs, horses, cattle, and sheep. They can also be used directly to feed grass carp, as their nutritional value is several, or even more than ten, times that of other weeds.
At worst, they can be burned as firewood. So, no matter how much trouble they are, farming families treasure them.
Once the vines are cleared, an ox-drawn plow is used to unearth the sweet potatoes. A single pass of the plow turns them all up from the soil. Since they are planted in rows, this has to be done pass after pass.
