Farmers usually are willing to participate in collective labor in the winter months when there is little farm work to do, even without immediate compensation for their work. Normally their contributions, measured in numbers of day-shifts, are recorded by the sponsors of the project, like a rural collective or township or county, with promise of payment at a later time. Responding to the nation's call to plant trees, many villagers are mobilized to come out to dig ditches and to plant trees. The pictures below are taken at Yongshou, Shaanxi, also belonging to the Jingchuan River watershed.

Picture source: George Leung (1999)