Each household held its arable land as a number of strips scattered throughout the fields. The strips were periodically redistributed by the mir (plural "miry") so as to maintain equality among the households (see Repartition). The strips were supposed to be the length a horse-and-plough team could travel without `pausing for breath'. They were also narrow. In the Central Agricultural Region they were normally 80 "sazhen" (560 ft) long and 3-4 "sazhen" (21–28 feet) wide; in the Central Industrial Region strips 70–100 feet long and 7–14 feet wide were common. The number of strips for each household varied from region to region. In the centre and north there could be as many as 40 or 50. Large numbers of narrow strips were the consequence of a strict egalitarianism in sharing out land of differing qualities. Sometimes strips were too narrow for a harrow to travel along. In the large southern communities the problem was rather the distance of the strips from the household; in the Lower Volga it could be 15 kilometres or more. To farm such strips, temporary `camping out' was employed.