The sky is vast and the wilderness is vast, and the wind blows the grass and appears fat sheep.

It was completely beyond Wu Haogu's expectations. What he saw in the legendary "yellow flood zone" was not a scene of endless yellow water. Instead, the green grassland was filled with flocks of sheep like white clouds, flowing around the grassland. The whole world was like a grassland landscape painting.

If it weren't for knowing that this place belonged to Hebei East Road, the Song Dynasty, Wu Haogu would probably think that he had arrived on the prairie where the people of the Bubu people were!

"Sister, why are there so many grasslands here? Didn't this place be a yellow-floor area?"

After leaving Chaijiazhuang, I had been walking west for two days. The embarrassment between Wu Haogu and Ximen Qing gradually faded. When the road was boring, Wu Haogu began to take the initiative to find Ximen Qing to chat.

Ximen Qing also restored his true nature to the children of the world, and was not at all disgusted with Wu Haogu. He replied with a smile: "The Yellow River has been broken so many times, and it has been several times just to divert the route on Hebei East Road. This yellow flood area is everywhere on Hebei East Road. The place we pass by now is the old yellow flood area. The flood has retreated for several years, and no one has come to farm, so it has become a grassland. The nearby imperial guards have occupied the fattening sheep.

The mutton that Dalang ate in Kaifeng Prefecture probably came from the yellow land on the east road of Hebei.”

Wu Haogu nodded. Since he woke up from his soul, he had eaten a lot of mutton. In the Song Dynasty, pork seemed not to be on the table. Lamb was the main meat for rich people of Wu Haogu's level, and the annual consumption should be huge.

"Didn't those sheep be bought from Liao?"

In the mindset of Wu Haogu's ancient past lives, there were not many places to raise horses in the Song Dynasty, which was also an important reason why the Song Dynasty was always passive in military affairs.

But how could Dasong, which had no place to raise horses, have so many sheep on the territory?

"What a joke?" Ma Zhi laughed when he heard this, "How many people in the Liao Kingdom are herding sheep? They still have to eat it. How could there be so many sheep sold to the Song Dynasty? As far as I know, the sheep sold on the market every year is 300,000 or 400,000, which one can eat?"

At this time, according to later research, the Song Dynasty had a population of 100 million, but not so many, and sixty or seventy million were indispensable.

Among them, there were at least tens of millions of Song people who were able to consume mutton, and there were hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic landlord class members who could eat. At least hundreds of millions of sheep were eaten a year - a sheep didn't have many kilograms of meat! It was impossible to import them all from the Liao Kingdom, otherwise the Liao people would have to eat vegetarian food.

So on the land of the Song Dynasty, where there was no place to raise horses, sheep were raised countless times!

"By the way, Brother Ma," Wu Haogu suddenly remembered an important matter at this moment, "Do you have a way to smuggle a few good stallions from the Liao Kingdom to the Song Dynasty?"

"How many stallions?" Ma Zhi smiled, "Do Dalang want a good horse? Brother is going to find a way for you."

"That's thank you," Wu Haogu bowed immediately, "Hagu wants to find a grassy field to raise horses by the Yellow River... If it's convenient, please ask Brother Ma to hire a few horse-raising people to come south."

"Raising... Raising horses?" Ma Zhi was stunned, "This is not easy.

Moreover, there are only a few stallions, how should we raise horses?"

Wu Haogu smiled: "If there are too many horses, it means shepherding, and if there are too few horses, it means shepherding. Shepherding and breeding have their own strengths, right?"

"House a small amount? Isn't that a stupid method used in the "Horse Protection Method"?" Ximen Qing couldn't help but mutter when he heard that Wu Haogu wanted to "raise horses".

The so-called "Horse Protection Law" is the Baojia horse raising method. The original intention was to reduce the expenses of the government's horse raising, and to spread some of the official horses to Baojia in Hebei, Hedong, Shaanxi, Jingdong, East and West 5 counties and Kaifeng Prefecture to raise. The government provides a certain amount of horse raising costs. If the horse dies of illness, the horse owner will compensate.

The original intention of this reform is like Wang Anshi's other new laws, and is naturally good. However, it has risen and fallen a few times during the implementation process, resulting in the failure of "protecting horses" and the pastoral supervision has completely lost its abolition. Now, due to various problems in the implementation process, the "Protecting Horses" has become a method that has always "disturbs the people" and "harm the people".

The Ximen Qing family all bought and started businesses on the east and west roads of JD.com, so they naturally suffered a lot from the "Master Protection Law".

Wu Haogu smiled and said, "The method of "The Horse Protection Law" is stupid, and it does not mean that raising horses is not feasible... Besides, I won't raise more, I'll just have dozens of horses."

"Since Dalang wants to raise it, it will be wrapped around someone..." Ma Zhi thought for a while, "There are many good horses in the Liao Kingdom, but the best horses are there to go to the Uighurs in the west. It is the origin of good horses. Brother, please think of a way to see if you can get a few sweat-blooded horses to make stallions."

"It's not just a stallion," Wu Haogu added, "You must also find a good mare."

"The mare must be good too?" Ximen Qing was stunned. "Dalang, are you too particular?"

Of course, the Song Dynasty people knew that horse breeding required breeding, but the Song people did not seem to be able to breed - stallions and mares can be improved through artificial breeding (mainly breeding and inbreeding). For example, if you want to get tall and strong horses, you can use tall stallions and mares to repeatedly inbreed (inbreeding is divided into three types: inbreeding, internal and reverse mates), strengthening tall genes, thereby obtaining tall and strong mares.

Then cross the tall mare and sweat-blooded, Turkmen, and Arabic stallions to obtain a tall and fast "pureblooded horse".

In the "Master Protection Law" promoted by Wang Anshi, the Song people ignored the issue of breeding even more. Wang Anshi was proficient in moral articles, but he was completely a layman in the way of raising and breeding animals. Therefore, his "Master Protection Law" only carries the number of horses and the quality of horses.

According to the rules of the Horse Protection Law, households must like to raise horses that are easy to raise and are relatively small. Because these horses eat less and are not prone to death from illness. As for whether they can raise war horses, households will not care.

Therefore, the "Master Protection Law" only preserves the number of horses, but does not preserve the quality of horses. Therefore, the "lack of horses" in the Song Dynasty today is just a legend, and it is true that there is no war horse.

Wu Haogu actually doesn't know how to raise horses, but he knows a little bit about raising dogs. Because he had raised purebred golden retriever dogs in his previous family, and it was a purebred dog that could afford to sell for money. He has been raised for several generations. Therefore, Wu Haogu knows how expensive high-quality purebred dogs are, and also knows that good dogs also have "family genealogy" (blood certificate), and also knows how to mating dogs in relatives...

Now, Wu Haogu wants to use the method of raising dogs in later generations to raise horses. However, he is not a biology after all, and he doesn't know how to raise high-quality war horses.

It is not easy to know! Because there are no good stallions in the Song Dynasty, and there are no male or female breeds. The former can also buy blood horses and Alabamas at a high price, while the latter can only find ways to breed and breed themselves - stallions are responsible for shooting artillery, and one stallion can handle dozens of mares, so one or two stallions can be bred from a distance. Because the demand for mares is large, it is impossible to get them, so they can only raise them by themselves.

Therefore, the difficulty of cultivating excellent war horses in the Song Dynasty was probably to introduce stallions with Arab species or sweat-blooded species and raise tall local mares.
Chapter completed!