Father can be an enemy country

Chapter 1067 Core technology, far ahead

In any case, the soldiers of the Dashio Baihu Station finally have a garrison point.

Once you have a place to live, you have to start farming.

But first you have to have land...

In the past, the people's sentiments in Songmeng Prefecture were complicated, and the Mongols' farming here was not successful. Over the years, a total of tens of thousands of acres of military land were reclaimed.

However, these mature fields had already been occupied by thousands of Songmeng households stationed in the city. Yang Lin came a step too late and did not catch any wool.

Although they have the ticket to open the Dusi Yamen in their hands, people with a little social experience know that rules are rules and practice is practice. It is simply impossible to make everyone behave and act according to the rules.

Coupled with the widespread corruption in the Yuan Dynasty, records of less than 20% of the 10,000 acres of land can be found, and the rest were embezzled by officials at the time and turned into private fields. Therefore, the land parcel of Dusi Yamen did not clearly stipulate which plots of land were allocated to Yang Linsuo. He only said that 10,000 acres of official land in Songmeng Prefecture would be allocated to them...

The Song Meng League certainly did not recognize this general rule, so they insisted that those mature fields were planted by them last autumn and winter...

Although everyone knows that they are telling lies with open eyes... If the raw fields can be turned into mature fields in one winter, then they should not be cultivated here. Instead, they should be regarded by the prince as the gods in charge of reclamation, made into sculptures, and offered to Kunming City. go.

How to divide the boundaries of these 20,000 acres of land is a matter of great learning. Everyone wants their land to be flatter and closer to water sources... Everyone just wants to take advantage and not suffer losses, so there are bound to be conflicts between hundreds of adjacent households.

Who would have thought that this one would be even more worried. Because of the rush of time, it was impossible for the Thousand Household Offices to measure all the land and then distribute it fairly among the ten Hundred Household Offices. They could only be assigned a rough settlement area, and it was also stipulated that each hundred households should not occupy more than 20,000 acres of land.

This time the wrangling is going to be even more protracted...

But there was no way to prove that those mature fields were official fields left by the Mongols, so the Qianhu Offices on both sides began to argue. What's even more troublesome is that the superiors on both sides are different. Songmeng Qianhu Office is affiliated with Kunming Vanguard, while Yang Lin Guards Qianhu Office is directly affiliated with Dusi Yamen.

Comrades who usually fought side by side began to quarrel with each other because of the dispute over land. They began to abuse each other and even got into fights. Zhang Qianhu was forced to have no choice but to work with two deputy Qianhu to conduct on-the-spot inspections, hold hundreds of households for heart-to-heart talks, and even use military law to frighten them. Finally, it was easy to make a determination for each family. The land boundary has been hammered with boundary stakes.

When Zhang Qianhu saw this, he thought that he couldn't delay both ends. He ordered the hundreds of households to ignore the two acres of mature land per person for the time being, and to first enclose the land they planned to cultivate.

With this lesson, Niu Baihu learned to be smart when it came to dividing the land within the Baihu Office and not let the people below him choose it. Instead, he first divided all the plots into one hundred and ten equal parts, numbered them, and then drew lots, so that no further trouble occurred.

~~
By the time all the land was divided it was already March. Some people say that this is not delaying the farming season?
But in fact, it didn't, because as soon as it came, thousands of households were wrangling, and the people below were not idle for a while. From the second day after they settled down, the soldiers began to clean up the wasteland from morning to night, even on rainy days.

Secondly, anyone with a little common sense knows that serious crops cannot be grown in this wasteland in the first year. Because the ground is full of tree roots and rocks, the soil is so hard and barren that even if you sow seeds, they will not grow even if you remove the hair. Therefore, there is no problem of missing the farming season. In May, when the Dusi Yamen sent people down to measure the land and register it, the officers and soldiers were still clearing the wasteland. They have been doing this for a hundred days from the end of the first year to now, but they haven't even cleared one third of the wasteland.

This is not because the soldiers are lazy, nor that they cannot do farm work. In fact, twenty-six years ago, since Zhu Sheng proposed to Boss Zhu the strategy of "building walls high, accumulating grain, and becoming king slowly", the soldiers of the Ming Dynasty have been plowing and fighting. Not only were they the best soldiers, they were also the most skilled farmers. In addition, the army is accustomed to reward first and then punish, and you compete with me to catch up, so there is no possibility of sabotage at all.

The soldiers worked hard regardless of the wind or rain. It’s really because the most difficult part of land reclamation is land preparation!

Burning wasteland, weeding, and leveling the land are just superficial tasks. The most difficult thing is to dig the ground deeply and dig out all the large and small rocks and tree roots and other debris. If these things are not cleaned up, how can the crops grow well?

Sometimes, although the surface of the ground is soil, when you dig down you will find it is full of rocks. If you can't dig it out with a hoe and crowbar, you can only burn it with fire and then pour cold water on it several times to break the stone before you can dig it out.

So in this whole year, it is already a great achievement to be able to get all the land in order.

This was still the case when the Ming army officers and soldiers concentrated their efforts to overcome difficulties, had sufficient food security, and had enough animal power to support them. If it were an ordinary person, he would have to work for two or three years.

Why can't the local people open up wasteland? To put it bluntly, he has neither the ability nor the strength. Let them do nothing like the Ming army and concentrate on clearing land. I'm afraid the people will starve to death before the land is cleared.

They would just cut down the forest and then scatter the seeds directly. They don’t plow the land or fertilize it, so they harvest whatever crops grow. As a result, the land loses its fertility within a few years and yields drop sharply. So they would abandon this land and go to other woods to burn wasteland.

This method causes serious damage to the land. After hundreds of thousands of years of continuous burning, basically the land on the Bazi has been destroyed.

This is why when Yu Min and others arrived, everything they saw was desolate. This is also the reason why there are so many tree roots in the ground, because this is a dense forest...

But in the eyes of the Han people, this is nothing. Compared with the old land in the mainland that has been cultivated repeatedly for thousands of years, these are new lands that have only been cultivated for a few years. They are simply virgin lands full of hope, okay? It only takes a few years of careful care to restore fertility and turn it into fertile soil!
The key is whether you can do it or not.

For example, the soldiers have planted leguminous crops such as soybeans, mung beans, and peas on the land that was leveled first. Although they don't know the principle, they know that this can increase the fertility of the land and make crops grow better next year.

Moreover, the Han people do not depend on the weather for food, they will take the initiative to irrigate their farmland. Fortunately, the Guoma River, which has abundant water and numerous tributaries, flows through the dam, so there is no need to worry about irrigation problems. Of course, building aqueducts is a big project...and it also requires professional skills, especially for high-altitude land, and a water tanker must be built to lift water, which is beyond the capabilities of ordinary people.

However, with the support of the province and the prince, the soldiers do not have to worry about these problems. It is said that by then, there will be college students specially coming from Beijing to guide them in water conservancy work. They just need to contribute, which is the strength of soldiers.

Therefore, in this era, land reclamation is also a core technology, and the Han people are far ahead.

(End of this chapter)