Festivals and ceremonies, including ritual dancing, may then have invoked supernatural powers to ensure a successful harvest if everyone pulled together.
It means pupils are never away from school for too long and it is much easier to plan work evenly without the traditional end-of-term wind down which bedevils the three term pattern, with its roots in the hunting and racing seasons for the upper classes and the harvest for everyone else.
Corn ran Mario 64 brilliantly, Nemu64 did Harvest Moon, and everyone stood in awe of UltraHLE, which ran Ocarina of Time from its first release and was subsequently abandoned.
Rather than selling at harvest time, when everyone else is doing the same and prices are low, Tchima, a 52-year old mother of seven, uses her crop as collateral for a bank loan.
"In my grandparents' time everyone harvested by hand," Mr. Pico said.
He discovers that the naughty corp is harvesting information from everyone in the city, which DedSec (think Anonymous but with sex appeal) naturally dislikes.
When whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed in the Guardian the scale of GCHQ bulk harvesting programmes of everyone's confidential digital data, she responded by accusing him of damaging national security.
This year's competition, "Everyone Harvests," zeroes in on the urban-agricultural tensions specifically facing Hanoi, a city of 6.5 million people and growing, as well as other developing regions worldwide.
'Hey, it's time to plant the wheat or harvest it.' So everyone would gather and dance, and the next day they would go to work".
