Xu Yaoping patted his chest and assured her, "Auntie, you don't need to worry about that. I'll build a thatched hut outside and stay there at night. After all, we still need to raise a lot of chickens and keep an eye on them."

Zhang Xuemei laughed and said, "That's right, your chickens are more valuable than oranges, so you need to keep an eye on them. Since we've already agreed, I'll have Minghan draft an agreement, and that'll be settled."

“Okay, we have no problem, but don’t we need to ask Uncle Xu?” Zou Yu asked hesitantly, as she hadn’t seen Uncle Xu since she came in.

"Why ask him? I'll make the decisions about my family. Xuemei, go find Minghan."

The group then signed an agreement stipulating that the orange grove would be leased to Zou Yu and Xu Yaoping for the next five years, with the condition that they manage the orange grove well.

After finishing the business, Zou Yu felt relieved and chatted casually for a few minutes.

"Originally, we wanted to contract the school cafeteria. My uncle is the principal of the elementary school in town, and he gave us this information. However, I am currently pregnant and can't take care of it, so I thought we should just give up. It would be good to raise some chickens and deliver them to restaurants and schools, which would be a stable source of income."

"Contracting the cafeteria? That sounds like a good job, but the contracting fee must be expensive, right?"

Zhang Xuemei thought about how school cafeterias in later generations often cost two or three hundred thousand yuan to contract, and she figured that school cafeteria contracts wouldn't be much cheaper now either.

Seeing that Zhang Xuemei was interested, Zou Yu told her everything he knew.

"It also depends on the size of the school. My uncle's school only has one cafeteria, and the contract fee alone is 38,000 yuan, not counting other expenses. If you add other expenses, I think the investment will be quite substantial."

"I remember the school had a convenience store, right? Is this considered part of the cafeteria? Otherwise, it's hard to break even, isn't it?"

"No, that doesn't count. There's another one, Xuemei. Are you interested? But the contracting rights have already been taken by someone else. They signed a five-year contract, but the money has to be paid in full upfront, so I gave up."

Although Zou Yu received a considerable amount of money in her divorce settlement, she was unwilling to invest it all in this business. She feared that if she lost it all, she would have nowhere to turn for help.

Of course, most importantly, besides her ex-husband, even her parents didn't know how much money she received, and naturally, her current husband, Xu Yaoping, didn't know either.