Except for a few plots of private land, all the land was collective, and everyone was assigned different types of grains to plant and turn over to the commune. Everyone worked together, many slackening their efforts and not working as hard as they could.
Later, the leaders of several production teams learned to be cunning and simply divided everyone into groups, letting the group leaders manage people underneath them. Each person was allocated tasks and could leave once they finished early and the group leader had checked and recorded their work points.
The leaders conducted spot checks, which indeed sped up progress significantly, and the grain yield grew considerably, but it still couldn't match the yield of the privately-owned land.
