Here's a sentence from an IELTS preparation book:
View attachment 5359
The point of the exercise is to correct the sentence, and the issue is with the verbs. What confuses me is 'all year round' - doesn't it imply regular action, which means Present Simple should be used here? Thanksgiving is celebrated every year, so the farmers get their crops every autumn for people to buy - or is there some other logic that I fail to see?
No, it's not a regular action. It's a period of separate actions from a point in the past until the relative moment (Thanksgiving), which has lasted all year (thus far). It's a process, not just a repeated action. It also may not specifically mean a calendar year, but rather a 365 day period.
I think you may be overlooking the logic of the planting cycle. There's a lengthy process of preparation, planting and harvesting that happens over an extended period of time, not just spur of the moment. In order to harvest that produce by Thanksgiving, it would have had to have been planted many months ahead.
You have to prepare the soil, sow the seeds, then the seeds have to sprout, the seedlings have to mature into full plants, the plants have to put on blossoms or seed heads, and then it has to ripen and mature so it can be harvested. Even that explanation is over-simplifying things a bit, and that's just for one crop. A big feast is going to have a lot of different types of food, not all of which will be ready at the same time. Some of it will have been harvested earlier and put into storage, while other items would be ready for consumption just in time for the Thanksgiving meal.
For example, farmers in my region planted their wheat crops back in mid-September to late October of 2022. That wheat won't be harvested until early July of 2023 at best. (It's considered a big accomplishment locally if you can wrap up wheat harvest by the 4th of July holiday). Weather and growing conditions can sometimes push that harvest to the latter part of July, though.
I'd favor the present perfect continuous (
have been getting) the way the sentence reads, but as 5jj mentions, you can't completely rule out other tenses.
