In Manni's flooded paddies, a dozen pairs of hands finish a day's work in two hours

Before dawn in Manni, eastern Burkina Faso, rice farmer Mano Teni Gabdaa opened his flooded field to family and neighbours. In roughly two hours, more than a dozen people transplanted nearly 0.20 hectares of rice seedlings — work that would have taken one man days. The arrangement has no contract and no payment: today at yours, tomorrow at mine.

There was mud, and there was laughter, and there was conversation carried between the rows. Transplanting is the most labour-hungry step in growing rice — agronomists count 25 to 40 person-days per hectare for hand transplanting, about a quarter of everything a rice crop demands from ploughing to harvest. A single farmer facing that alone watches the season pass him by while the seedlings outgrow their nursery.

So the field fills with people instead. The system moves from household to household through the rainy season, each field taking its turn, and it works because everyone who comes today knows the same crowd will come for them next week. Gori Tindano, a young farmer from nearby Siedougou who has worked a plot of 0.18 hectares for about a year and a half, said plainly that without the collective he could not farm rice at all. On another day the same season, about 40 young volunteers turned out for the field of Guibougou Dingaba.

When we are many, work advances quickly. What would be difficult for one person becomes much easier when each brings strength.

That was Gabdaa, standing in his own field. Desire Lankoande put the agronomy of it more drily: the practice shortens delays and promotes regular plant growth — meaning the whole field goes in at once, and the whole field ripens together. Albert Bourgou called it an honour to work his in-laws' land. Jean Bourgou needed only the phrase everyone already knew: today at yours, tomorrow at mine.

The country needs every one of those rows. Burkina Faso does not grow enough rice to feed itself; milled imports climbed from roughly 350,000 tonnes a decade ago to around 600,000, covering close to 60 percent of what the country eats. Most of the 324,045 registered rice producers work exactly this kind of ground — bas-fond, the seasonally flooded lowland depressions that fill with rainy-season runoff and are farmed with little or no water control.

The arrangement has older names elsewhere in the country. In Moore-speaking areas it is sosoaga, under the wider idea of songtaaba; among the Bwa in the west, koosin. In 1967 a teacher named Bernard Ledea Ouedraogo took these village work parties and built a federation on them; within a decade there were more than 2,500 Naam groups in Yatenga alone.

In Manni nobody federated anything. The workday ended the way it always does, with a shared meal, and the water in Gabdaa's field held its new green lines. Tomorrow the crowd would be somewhere else.