By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia
Visit a farm in the UK and you might get a cup of tea. Visit a farm in The Gambia and you'll often be entertained by a riot of drumming and dancing dervishes.
Sometimes the hypnotic beats are just for fun, but often they are performed to get across a particular message, like public health or a new irrigation technique.
I like the idea of using dance and music to convey important farming information. Just imagine a DEFRA song-and-dance routine about filling in you SFP form on time!
I'm sure it could catch on. Just the cool and trendy sort of thing David Miliband might appreciate.
In just a few days here I've spoken to lots of farmers and many of them are women.
Traditionally, they run the village vegetable "gardens" and Concern Universal is trying to help by providing boreholes and simple pumping technology for irrigation.
These village "gardens" give Gambian women some independence, but, more importantly, it allows them to gossip en-masse.
Men don't get involved - in The Gambia growing veg is seemingly for girls. Blokes look after the real crops like ground nuts.
Luckily for them once they've been sown there's not a whole lot to do to ground nuts except take it easy, often very easy.
Trouble is though, the men are so busy taking it easy they haven't noticed the ground nut market has crashed and their wives are now making more money than them.
Aid projects in Africa often target women, I wonder why?
Next comes another crazy African conundrum.
Take one Kuwaiti zillionaire, add one South African farm manager, who can no longer make his farm pay at home because small, charity-funded farmers are undercutting him, mix in a massive centre-pivot irrigation system and what do you get?
What you get is farming on a scale that, without sensitive management, has the potential to completely destroy the work done by farming projects in The Gambia and take away the livelihoods of small-scale farmers.
They get a rough deal the world over.