In late September or October the rains usually end and the rice crop in Palokhi swiddens begins to mature. Because there are several varieties of rice, the crop ripens at different stages. The early ripening varieties of rice, for instance, are ready for harvesting in late September or early October; the later ripening varieties are only ready for harvest in November. Harvesting of the rice crop, therefore, is spread out over several weeks in Palokhi. The harvesting of rice entails three different tasks — reaping, threshing and transporting the crop for storing in household granaries in the village. Like planting, harvesting is marked by co-operative labour exchange because all three tasks require a considerable amount of labour inputs within relatively short spaces of time (though to a lesser degree than that in planting) which individual households, with their limited internal supplies of labour, cannot provide.

As with planting, the first day of reaping is marked by the attendance of a large number of workers drawn from other households to assist in the work in the swidden of one household. The first day of reaping is one which is ritually significant for the household and it begins with a ritual wrist-tying ceremony in the house before the household members set out to their swidden accompanied by the helpers from other households. Reaping is done with sickles, and these are either made in Palokhi or purchased in Ban Mae Lao or Ban Pa Pae. The rice is reaped close to the ground, a handful at a time (that is, as they have grown from the dibble holes) and each bunch is tied up or bound with some straw into a sheaf which is then placed on the stubble. The rationale for this practice is that it prevents the accumulation of moisture on the sheaves or rice which would otherwise cause it to deteriorate, as the rice is often left in the fields for a few days before being collected and made into stooks. There is also a good reason for reaping the rice close to the ground: when the rice is stooked, the sheaves are placed on the ground in a circle with the uppermost part of the stalks (that is, which bear the grains) lying towards the centre of the circle, and the stook is built up in this manner by laying down more and more stalks of rice onto the first lot on the ground. The lower half of the rice stalks are, thus, on the outside and they form a thatch-like structure over one another and over the rice grains. Keeping the stalks long at reaping is, therefore, essential for well-constructed stooks in order to prevent moisture from reaching the rice grains. The purpose of binding the stalks of rice into sheaves is to make the task of collecting the harvest easier.

It is worth noting here that as with planting, a mid-day meal is prepared for the helpers who come to assist a household in the reaping of its swidden. However, unlike planting, no rituals are performed to propitiate the “Lord of the Water, Lord of the Land”. The only ritual that is performed is a household ritual which is addressed to the souls of members of the household and to the rice soul (see Chapter VI).

After the swidden of a particular household has been reaped on the first day, the work teams dissolve and are reconstituted to work in the swiddens of other households — regardless of whether the first swidden was completely reaped or not. The work teams move on in this way until debts in labour services are more or less discharged. Smaller groups then get together to carry out the remaining work of reaping the rice left in swiddens. This method of co-operative labour exchange fits in well with the fact that the rice crop ripens at different stages. These smaller teams also perform other tasks besides reaping the rice that remains on the stalk in Palokhi swiddens, namely, carrying the sheaves of rice for stooking, clearing an area of ground on which to build the rice stooks, and constructing the stooks.

It should be noted that by this time, towards the end of reaping swidden rice, the competing demands for labour that each household faces intensifies. In this period, the rice in wet-rice fields are ready to be harvested as well and, thus, the households which are engaged in agricultural production have to allocate their labour among several different tasks and to meeting their various obligations arising from receiving the labour services of others. The smaller teams which are found working at this stage of the agricultural cycle are thus the outcome of decisions made which attempt to balance the commitments of households to ensuring that their own harvests are managed and brought in, the need to obtain assistance to do this, and the countervailing obligation to repay the labour debts thus incurred which reduces the labour time put into attending to their own needs.