In the pine nut industry, every third year was considered the most productive. The Shors started collecting pine nuts from mid-August, when the cones were so ripe that they fell to the ground. Harvesting lasted until late autumn, usually until the first snow.

Each large family (“seok”, “seyok”) harvested nuts in its own area, which was called “pagla” (literally “place for climbing”).

After there was no resin left in the cones, they were peeled on ushpe rollers to extract the nuts. The Siberian researcher Sergey Porfiryevich Shvetsov described this process as follows:

The exhibition features a pair of wooden grater rollers with transverse, triangular ribs. The longer lower one with 15 ribs was the base; a whole cone was placed on it. The upper roller was used for grinding.

An ushpe should not be confused with another type of grater called paspak.

The textbook of the Shor language, edited by the linguist Elektron Fyodorovich Chispiyakov, offers the following definitions:

Using a paspak began after the cones had been peeled off. In addition, the paspak was used to grind grain into flour. According to ethnographers, three ancient Shor devices with the same purpose have survived to this day: a paspak (also suitable for grinding salt), a manual stone mill called “terben” with two millstones, and a “sak” — a wooden mortar with a pestle, carved from cedar, less often birch or aspen. Flour-milling work was done by women, while peeling cedar cones was, as a rule, the responsibility of men.

Pine nuts, like furs, were the only way (besides labor) for hunters to pay for purchased goods, and according to historians, local creditors took advantage of it.