Most Hani people live in mountainous areas with an altitude of 800-2,500m, with agriculture as the mainstay, and terraced rice cultivation culture is particularly developed.

For thousands of years, facing the living space of high mountains and canyons, the Hani people have created and summarized a set of rich terraced farming experience. They built dikes according to different topography and soil quality, and used the natural conditions of "how high the mountain is, how high the water is" to introduce a steady stream of mountain springs and streams into terraces through ditches all year round.

Terraces are an important source of food and clothing for the Hani people, so they especially cherish water. In order not to miss the farming season, there has been an agreement of "carving wood to fix water" since ancient times: according to the irrigated area of a mountain spring, people calculate the amount of water due to each field through friendly consultation, and set crossbars at the entrances of ditches and fields according to the order of water flowing through the fields, and carve the position of the amount of water due to that field on the crossbars to let the water flow into the fields by itself.

Basically, it is a primitive labor mode of slash and burn, and soil erosion occasionally occurs, but compared with the ecological damage caused by our large-scale industrial development, it is insignificant.