After the Ghost Festival, farmers throughout Kaiyang County become busy.

The lovely golden fields remind the hardworking farmers that the harvest season has arrived again.

Seventy percent of the workers in the entire stationery factory took harvest leave and returned home to seize the opportunity to harvest the autumn harvest.

The remaining 30% of workers who received double monthly wages are still sticking to their posts.

As the chief manager of the ladies' boxes, Yunniang stayed in the factory this autumn to be responsible for the shipment of new products to ensure that the first batch of 100 ladies' boxes could be delivered on schedule.

With Song Yu in charge of the factory's operations, Qin Yao will have no excuse not to go to the fields this year.

But if you suffer, your whole family will not be spared.

Except for Li, who had to do laundry and cooking for everyone, and Xiao Laifu, who had to herd cattle and horses, the remaining four siblings, Yin Le and Dalang, all went to the fields.

At this moment, with the scorching sun ruthlessly destroying the rice awns, the four brothers and sisters, holding sickles and repeating the action of harvesting, began to miss their extremely "loving" old father at home.

If Dad were at home, it would not be their turn to harvest the rice in the fields this year.

The four siblings looked at each other secretly. It was the forty-fifth day since Dad left home. They missed him coming back to work.

Li came to the field carrying the prepared lunch. Yin Le, whose scalp was about to burst from the sun, immediately dropped his sickle and went to meet her.

The excuse is that the thing is too heavy and ask for help to pick it up.

As soon as the gauze on the basket was removed, Yin Le shouted in surprise: "Master, there is bitter melon drink!"

"What what?" Sanlang came over and said, "Wow! It's bitter melon drink!"

Li wiped the hot sweat from Sanlang's forehead pitifully, and called Dalang, Erlang and Si Niang to come over and rest for a while.

"Madam, you come and have a rest too." Before Li could finish her words, Qin Yao had already flashed in front of her and took the watermelon juice poured by Yin Le and drank it madly.

Li couldn't help but laugh, squatted down, spread out the gauze, and put the food on the table.

Harvesting rice is a physical job. We have had meat for three meals a day these past two days. Today’s lunch was braised pork, scrambled eggs with green peppers, and a jar of cabbage and tofu soup.

The portions of meat and eggs are huge, definitely enough for you.

The tofu soup was left to dry for half an hour in advance, and by now the temperature had completely dissipated, so it tasted just cool and refreshing.

Li arranged the dishes one by one, and Qin Yao and her son buried their heads in their bowls as if they were starving ghosts.

He kept doing this until he had finished most of the rice and the emptiness in his heart was satisfied. Then he slowed down, enjoying the shade brought by the straw shed and the breeze from the river, and appreciating the fruits of his labor for the past two days while eating.

More than half of the five acres of land at home have been harvested. If we work for another half day this afternoon, we will have harvested all of it.

This is the speed at which the mother and her sons work for half an hour and rest for a quarter of an hour. If it were another family, they would have harvested seven or eight acres of land by now.

After lunch, Qin Yao rested for a while and drank all the watermelon juice. Then she called the children and apprentices to continue working in the fields.

Yin Le took Dalang and Erlang to harvest the rice, Sanlang and Si Niang were responsible for tying the rice into bundles with straw, and Qin Yao threshed the rice on the spot using a protective bucket.

If she worked quickly, she would pick up her sickle and join the harvest.

We worked like this until the evening, and after two days, we had harvested all five acres of rice at home.

The next step is to dry the grain.

The backyard expansion has been completed, and Song Yu and his family of three moved in before the Ghost Festival.

Now the floor of the house is paved with bluestone, and the main bedrooms are pave with wooden boards. It is neat and clean, and the children feel that the house has become more spacious.

Now that her family has a spacious backyard, Qin Yao went to the town to buy six drying mats before the autumn harvest. Now they are all spread out, so that all the newly harvested grain can be dried.

Under the planting strategy of intensive cultivation of 30% of good land and extensive cultivation of 70% of medium land, Liujia Village's overall harvest this year increased by 10% over last year.

The fields that are carefully cultivated have a yield of at least 430 kilograms per mu.

More people, such as Liu Dafu's family, had good farmland and careful cultivation, and the eight acres of land produced an output of 530 kilograms, exceeding the per-acre yield record set by Qin Yao's family that year.

On the contrary, Qin Yao's family's yield per mu this year is much lower than last year, and it still does not reach 500 kilograms. The five mu of land yields a total of 2,300 kilograms of grain.

Of course the reason is very simple. She gave the five acres of land at home to the village heads of various villages and towns as experience fields.

Qin Yao left the millet at home to Yin Le and the children to look after, and rushed to the town without stopping.

After the autumn harvest comes the time to collect taxes. For the entire Sheng Kingdom, nothing is more important than this matter.

In order to ensure that grain taxes from all regions could be collected in full, Sheng State established a very sophisticated tax collection procedure.

The warehouse officials in charge of taxation in various places began to assign tax collection tasks to the states and counties before the official autumn harvest.

Qin Yao, a small village chief, will play a very important grassroots organizational role in this tax collection activity.

Taxes are paid from the bottom up, one level at a time, and each village is the starting point for tax collection.

Qin Yao and the village heads of several other villages in Jinshi Town went to the headman's house to report the autumn harvest situation in their respective villages this year and took over the tax collection task from the headman.

Because the intensive farming methods spread from Liujia Village, the county paid special attention to Liujia Village's harvest this year.

Qin Yao handed over the village's autumn harvest data statistics work to Liu Yang and Liu Qi.

However, there are early-maturing and late-maturing rice. August has just arrived, so we have to wait another half a month before all the data can be counted.

But just half of the autumn harvest data that Qin Yao brought over was enough to make other village heads envious.

"This year, the highest yield per mu in our Liujia Village was 532 kilograms per mu by Liu Dafu's family."

"The lowest yield per mu of intensive farming has reached 430 kilograms. However, because the high-quality rice seeds were selected at the beginning, the yield of the inferior fields with coarse seeds has remained within the average level this year."

Qin Yao put away the manuscript, raised her head and faced the village heads, and concluded with a smile:

"In general, Liujia Village's planting plan of '30% intensive cultivation of good fields and 70% rough cultivation of inferior fields' has achieved a phased success this year! The overall harvest of Liujia Village has increased by 10% compared to last year!"

The village head looked at Qin Yao with satisfaction. It was this young man who brought such a big surprise to their Jinshi Town.

It has increased by 10%, which was something I never dared to think of before.

If the farming methods of Liujia Village were copied to other villages under the jurisdiction of Jinshi Town, the harvest of the entire Jinshi Town would be able to increase by 10% next year.

If we use the yield of 100 kilograms per mu as an example, a 10% increase would be 110 kilograms.

All the tens of thousands of acres in the town add up to hundreds of thousands of kilograms of grain!

Just thinking about it, the village head couldn't help but feel so excited that he almost cried.

But before he could finish being excited, Qin Yao asked the question that everyone was most concerned about on behalf of all the villagers.

"Village head, is the grain tax still 1/15 this year?" (End of this chapter)