After the men urinate in the overheated radiator, the peasants plow the land with the tractor and harvest the grain, in the process destroying the kulaks' fences.

The film ends with a montage showing a downpour of rain over fruit and vegetables, after which Natalya finds herself embraced in the arms of a new lover.

Dovzhenko wrote, produced, and filmed Earth in 1929, during the process of collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which he described as "a period … of economic [and] mental transformation of the whole people.

[3] This meant the collectivization of privately-owned farms, which peasants resisted by killing their draft animals, sabotaging agricultural machinery, and assassinating Soviet agents.

Much of Earth's script was inspired by Dovzhenko's experience of this process; Vasyl's death was based on the assassination of a Soviet agent in his home district.

Film scholar Gilberto Perez likened Earth's cinematography to Homer's Odyssey, as "all that counts, in a given moment, is what is … clearly displayed on the screen".

[12] Vasyl's dance celebrating the success of the harvest was originally scripted as a Cossack-style hopak but Svashenko altered it after consulting local Ukrainian farmers.

[7][14] Before Earth was approved for general distribution, certain scenes criticized as giving the film a "biological" focus, such as the peasants urinating into the tractor's radiator, were removed.

[18][19][20] Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, praised the film's visual style but called its political content "false".

[21][22] Ippolit Sokolov, a Soviet film critic, described Dovzhenko as a "great director" but also "a petty-bourgeois artist" in his review of Earth.

"[25] Dovzhenko's biographer Marco Carynnyk lauded the film's "passionate simplicity … which has made it a masterpiece of world cinema" and praised its "powerful lyric affirmation of life.

[27] The British Film Institute said of Earth that its plot "is secondary to the extraordinarily potent images of wheatfields, ripe fruit and weatherbeaten faces".