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Chapter 130 Positioning

Wang Sanyi was quite moved, and he also knew that Min Yuanqi would not make jokes about such things.

When talking and chatting, Min Yuanqi called Wang Sanyi and Li Guoding the uncle, but if you have a good job, you should be called an official position. Private relationships are private relationships, and official affairs are official affairs. Now even Wang Sanyi and others have completely adapted to Min Yuanqi's style. The original discomfort and disgust in their hearts have long disappeared.

What really makes Wang Sanyi and others worry and discomfort is their own positioning.

With Min Yuanqi reporting his military achievements, the people under him must also find a suitable seat.

At least half of the ten hundred households will be replaced, and the remaining half will not be retained by Min Yuanqi, but most of these people have some friendships. In order to stabilize people's hearts and take into account the old friendship, they will most likely keep a few and replace them after a while.

Wang Sanyi and Li Guoding were considering their own position and handed over the position of officials of a hundred households. This was a vocation, so of course they were reluctant to do so.

If I don’t give in, I’m afraid that Min Yuanqi will have prejudices and will become more marginalized in this group in the future...

There is a serious job, and Wang Sanyi feels that his location in a hundred households can be considered as a guaranteed residence.

As for the next generation, it depends on Wang Mingyuan.

Wang Sanyi took a deep breath and clasped his fists and said, "Since Deputy Qianhuxin has done this job, I will take it and do my best to do my best to do the security department's affairs."

"I believe Wang Baihu."

Min Yuanqi nodded and said to Li Guoding: "Li Baihu has always liked farming and farming. Among each of the hundred households, only Li Baihu has the best land planting. I have also taken time to see it. There are all methods for fertilization, weeding and extermination of water conservancy ditches..."

Li Guoding felt a little distressed. Did he ask himself to concentrate on going back to farm?

Li Guoding held his fists and smiled reluctantly: "There is no secret method of farming. It is nothing more than water source, fertilizer, deep cultivation, and more sweat... Don't think about relying on the weather to make a living. Our Dahewei is not as good as Jiangnan. The land there is originally fertile, and the rice harvest is stable every year. However, we also have advantages that the north does not have. We are as dense as Jiangnan, and the fertilizer problem cannot be solved in the north. We learn to dig river mud with Jiangnan, and there is fertilizer. There are many water networks and irrigation. But our disadvantages are also obvious. One is that it is easy to generate water. Fortunately, we don't have a lot of water in the Yuntiguan area. There are originally a lot of wetlands in a considerable area. When the flood comes, it will directly leak to the wetlands or go into the sea. But there are many saline-alkali lands, and there is no way to do it..."

Min Yuanqi highly praised it. It turns out that no one who is good at speaking has any words that are not on the point.

Due to the impact of the ice age, whether it is Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, and Hebei, they are all affected, among which the disasters in northern Shaanxi and Liaodong are still severe.

In addition to ambition and xenophobia with the Ming Dynasty, the significant reduction in farming production due to the influence of the ice age was also one of the reasons. Due to the population growth, Jurchens had already reclaimed large areas of cultivated land as early as the Juechang'an era. Their trade with the Ming Dynasty was mainly salt and iron, followed by seeds and oxen, and luxury goods such as ginseng and fur to exchange for salt and iron from the Ming Dynasty for farming, so as to accumulate strength and develop and strengthen the tribe.

Otherwise, the Jurchens had been moving to the Ming Dynasty for more than 200 years, and they had been beaten into dogs after many rebellions. The main reason was that the Jurchens were really fishing and hunting at that time. The tribe was small and had a small population. Although they developed a strong body and a tough and brave personality in the white mountains and black waters, and the ability to ride and shoot with fishing and hunting, the tribes were small after all, and they did not have farming to unite people's hearts, and the tribe was quite dispersed. How could such Jurchen tribes be the opponents of the regular army?

It was different in the Nurhaci period. After several generations of farming, the number of people and cohesion of the Jianzhou ministry increased greatly. After the merger of the ministry, it was even more difficult to control it. Li Chengliang saw this and took the initiative to withdraw from Kuandian and hoped to reconcile the relationship with the Jurchens to reduce conflicts...

However, the general trend is not subject to human will. As long as the ice age exists, the Jurchens' farming that has been run for a hundred years cannot sustain the tribe, and it is inevitable to raise an army to attack Ming Dynasty. This is the general trend, not based on human will.

During the Chongzhen period, various parts of the north were affected many times, with cold winters and no rain in spring and summer. Even the top agricultural experts could not ask the people in the north to continue to rely on the weather for such climatic conditions.

It can only be to mobilize manpower and build water conservancy on a large scale, so as to ensure production and even increase income.

When Lu Xiang was promoted to the Governor of Xuanda, he attached great importance to local agriculture, promoting production and increasing income, and sorting out hidden fields. Not only did he not ask for food in Xuanda, but he increased his income by hundreds of thousands of stones. This is the ability of a capable official.

But the Ming Dynasty was too big and Lu Xiangsheng was too little. The disasters and wars in the north were already difficult to return by the 17th year of Chongzhen. If it weren't for the complete support of the south, the Ming Dynasty would have been immortalized long ago...

Dahewei is also like Li Guoding said, with sufficient water conservancy and minor floods, but it is still good.

There is enough fertilizer, not like the north, where donkey dung eggs have to be picked up, because there is too little fertilizer.

From the Dahewei, Huai'anwei to Yangzhou, these Jiangbei guards are distributed in dense water networks, and the Huaihe, Yellow River, Yihe, Shuhe, and the canals in the river... These are all famous rivers, and those small rivers that are dozens of miles long and hundreds of miles long are countless... In terms of water conservancy resources, Jiangbei is not far from Jiangnan. Although it is not as easy as boats and boats to pass through villages and towns, irrigation of fields and fertilizers is still quite light and cheap.

From the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, Jiangbei gradually changed from a land of fish and rice to a poor place. The main reason was the harm caused by the Yellow River seizing the Huai River into the sea.

In addition to a few places like Yuntiguan, such as Suqian, Shuyang, Andong and Huaian, many prefectures and counties, floods will occur almost every few years. The original fish and rice land will become a country. Once the people have worked hard to farm, they will develop lazy and cunning local habits. The more severe the disaster in the Yellow River Flood, the worse the local people's spirit will be... People who have changed to wealthy places will destroy their property every few years, and they are afraid that their temperament will not be much better.

The troubles at Yuntiguan here are because of the poor drainage after the flood, the weather is dry, and the salt accumulates and condenses in the fields over time. From here to the yellowing area, a large amount of saline-alkali land is generally located in these places.

At night, the large area of ​​salt rafters was like snowy in winter, with white flowers...

It would be a waste of time to want to be productive in such a soil.

At this moment, Li Guoding smiled bitterly and said, "Even if I try my best to plant a high-yield harvest like Jiangnan in a field like ours, it is absolutely impossible... There is no artemisia seed in the ancestral grave, and it has been like this for generations. I am so dedicated to the field, that is, I want to harvest more, and I am idle, and I can't use all my strength, and I can't do it all."

After Li Guoding complained, Min Yuanqi was moved and said: "It's really difficult and dangerous, it's really not easy. The more this happens, the more admirable Li Baihu is."

Min Yuanqi knew that Li Guoding and his father had a good relationship back then. At that time, his father praised Li Guoding's thoughts and character. If all officials in the world were like this, the Ming Dynasty would not have been like this.

Li Guoding smiled bitterly and said, "It's a pity that there are not many eggs... The high-quality mature fields in Jiangnan cost up to six or seven stones, and the average is three stones. Here, we have worked hard to collect only one and a half stones per acre, and at most two stones. If you don't care, it's hard to produce one stone per acre..."

Jiangbei also harvests two seasons a year. Most of them have wheat and rice in one season. They harvest wheat in June and plant rice in July. After autumn, they harvest rice for farming and plant wheat. This way, they can maturize the benefits of the fields by ripening twice a year.

Of course, some people grow beans, sorghum, millet, and some people start to learn to grow foreign crops such as potatoes and corn. However, the area is small, and people don’t know how to eat these foreign crops, so the audience is quite small.

It will take at least thirty or forty years to truly promote these foreign crops and be widely accepted.

According to the average lifespan of Chinese farmers, this is the past two generations.

The yield per mu is less than one stone, and it only costs two stones of grain a year or two seasons. You have to hand over the grain of grain, the military households have to farm for the officers for free, and there are various training tasks. The next year, you have to transport the army north, and there is no chance to take on labor.

Even the private households have a lot of corvee labor and various exploitation. The military households do not provide food and clothing, so how good are the private households?

The entire Ming Dynasty, that is, the Jiangnan region was rich, and the average living standard of the people was relatively high. In the so-called Kangxi and Qianlong period, the consumption of average meat and staple food was the highest peak, which was about 70% of the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. The so-called prosperity was just like this.

"Food is the foundation..." Min Yuanqi said to Li Guoding: "If you want to talk about the current financial resources, it is more than enough to raise a battalion of troops, and you still have the spare time to do other things. Since you can do it, you have to hurry up. The ten hundred households in Yuntiguan here are probably more than 5,000. I have asked someone to calculate the land that has been opened. I am afraid there are more than 37,000 acres of land. Even so, there are still at least tens of thousands of acres of land in Linhai. It is too wasteful to abandon these land. In my opinion, I plan to use all the existing tens of thousands of acres of land, plus the wasteland that can be reclaimed, and set up an agricultural department to recruit landless people from the Haizhou area of ​​Xuzhou to farm and reclaim land. If there are 100,000 land, almost two thousand households will be recruited, and five or six thousand will be almost the same."

Li Guoding shook his head and said, "Many lands need to be dug ditches to dig water or use water trucks. One household can plant 50 acres of water. It is too difficult to just dig water. We are not as good as the north. We need to cultivate carefully. The southwards, the less land each household planted. In Susong, it would be good if each household can have three or four acres of land. Each household has 50 acres, I am afraid it will not be able to handle it."

"It's just that there is insufficient animal power." Min Yuanqi had thought about it a long time ago, and said in a deep voice: "Our China has been getting poorer and poorer in the past few thousand years. In the pre-Qin, the Spring and Autumn Period, the number of oxen and horses was more than now. The number of oxen and horses was gradually increasing. This is the main reason. Those who rule the country did not think long and only knew that people were used as cattle and horse envoys were important. I have already known that the Zhu family will not only buy war horses, plow oxen, pick horses, and strong mules, but also buy more people who can be used to cultivate land. As long as there is sufficient animal power, it is common for each household to grow fifty acres..."

The situation in China is indeed as Min Yuanqi said, with increasing population density, coupled with land annexation, rising and falling dynasties, and frequent technological dynasties caused by not focusing on technology, which does not improve over time, but instead regress.

For example, Qimin had many records of agricultural and related equipment in art, which were left in the Ming Dynasty.

The equipment and technology developed in the book "Tiangong Kaiwu" became the book of heaven again in the Qing Dynasty. Technology was dying and information was not spread smoothly. Even if there were practical technology, it eventually became a pile of old papers covered with dust.

When the Ming Dynasty fell and the Qing Dynasty rose, Europe had already begun its era of great navigation. At that time, snatched global wealth, and the people's living standards would also rise, leaving China farther and farther away.
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