There are three central interlinked areas of economic and social life of significance for Bambara farming households in Kala: annual millet production, returns from various investments – wells, plough-teams, breeding cattle - and longer term returns from child-rearing, marriage and household management. Success in each field reinforces success in the other two fields as, for example, when a good millet harvest can fund another marriage which will generate a replenishment of labour in the longer term. People face highly variable returns to farming and investment, and must continually react to changing climatic and economic circumstances, by altering patterns of crop production and investment. Some households do better than others, since their scale and strategy enable them to deal with uncertainty, and risks. Equally, mastery of a successful investment portfolio enables a household to re-invest surplus in marriage and expansion of the domestic group, ensuring greater resilience to future shocks, especially demographic. Nevertheless, there are certain forces operating at higher level - environmental trends, weak institutions, poor governance of land – which are difficult for Kala’s farmers to address.