For degraded soil productivity, restoration, and green cover rehabilitation, it is essential to study and improve traditional farming systems, especially in the Sudano - Sahelian areas, where technical possibilities are limited. One example is the Zai practice, a very complex soil restoration system using organic matter localization, termites to bore channels in the crusted soils, runoff capture in microwatersheds, and seed hole cropping of sorghum or millet on sandy soils. Investigation on many fields of the Mossi Plateau (northern part of Burkina Faso) has shown a range of variations of the Zai system in relation to soil texture, availability of labor and organic matter, and relevance for rehabilitation of these degraded crusted soils. We describe a complex soil restoration system revealed during our 2 years of inquiries and experiments testing this system in two types of soil (a shallow, poor alfisol and a deep, brown tropical inceptisol). Biomass production of sorghum is reported in relation to various potential improvements of the Zai systems and also the wild grass and shrub species that appeared after 2-7 years of a Zai cropping system on a bare, crusted, degraded soil surface. Experimental improvements of this Za system on two soils confirm the possibility not only to increase the production of cereal grains (from 150 to 1700 kg ha-1) and straw (from 500 to 5300 kg ha-1) on deep, brown soils (eutropept), but also to reintroduce a large diversity of useful plants that may help during the fallow period and the process of degraded soil restoration. The concentration of runoff water, organic manure, and a complement of mineral nutrients in microwatersheds increased biomass production without significant change in soil properties after 2 years. This system may be useful not only to restore soil productivity but also for revegetation, e.g., 22 species of weeds and 13 species of forage shrubs included in dry dung manure (3 Mg ha-1 yr-1).