Chapter 164 Meat
Mwanza fish processing factory.
Workers are pouring the fresh fish they have just purchased into wooden barrels and sending them to the workshop for further processing.
This is a factory built entirely by manpower, and its main product is dried salted fish.
Dried salted fish can be preserved for a long time, is easy to transport, and can even be carried as military rations.
In this era when preservation technology is still immature, East Africa can only produce this traditional product at its current level.
Canning is feasible to a certain extent, but the cost is too high. Canning requires materials such as metal or glass as a carrier, and East Africa has no production capacity for both of these things. It can only be considered after the subsequent iron and glass factories are built.
And this is just the first step. After all, after having the materials, we still have to consider the machines and other processes.
In this era, any metal, even bones, are important materials and are recycled in many parts of Europe. It is impossible for East Africa to be rich enough to provide canned food to immigrants.
It costs money to produce them, and it costs money to recycle the materials. After recycling, they have to be disinfected or recycled, which is really not cost-effective.
If they want to make a profit, they still have to sell it in Europe, but the competition in Europe itself is very fierce, and canned food is not accepted by the general public and is only popular in the military.
The armies of various countries have stable canned food suppliers, and Ernst cannot intervene now, unless there is a war when military supplies are in short supply and the army has an opportunity to purchase on a large scale.
The main agricultural products currently sold by the Hechingen Consortium in Europe are flour, logs and other primary agricultural products.
In this era, relying on machines to process fish meat is basically a fantasy. Just the first step of processing the fish scales is a problem. Therefore, the production of salted dried fish in the East African colonies is completely manual, without the involvement of any machines.
Every day, the Mwanza seafood processing plant receives a large batch of fresh freshwater fish caught that day from fishermen.
Workers at the aquatic product processing factory first use tools to remove fish scales and other debris. Then the workers in the next process gut the fish, remove the internal organs and gills, rinse the surface with water, stack the fish in large vats, marinate them with salt, and finally string them on poles to dry in the sun.
The processing methods are simple, but the scale is relatively large, so the production capacity is quite considerable. The Mwanza Aquatic Products Processing Plant currently has more than 500 workers and is the largest salted fish processing plant in East Africa. Its products are mainly supplied to the inland and arid areas of East Africa.
After the consumption of wild animals was banned in colonial East Africa, alternative meat sources became particularly important.
In East Africa, governments are unilaterally slaughtering wild animals and enclosing land, causing a sharp reduction in the range of animal activities and the extermination of a large number of wild animals.
East African immigrants who engage in physical labor need protein and supplements. There are three solutions: one is to develop East Africa's aquatic products, the second is to raise livestock, and the third is to grow soybeans.
Among these three, aquatic products are readily available. East Africa has a vast area of water, especially numerous lakes, and both freshwater and saltwater fishery resources are relatively rich.
Livestock takes time to breed, and the scale is not large. After all, most of them are imported. Without more than ten years of breeding and growth, it is basically impossible to rely on them.
Soybeans are the most readily available plant protein and are widely planted in East African colonies, mainly for crop rotation. Soybean nodules have the function of fixing nitrogen and are generally rotated with wheat. Tropical plateaus are also suitable for soybean cultivation, but it is unlikely to completely replace meat.
Therefore, the protein supplement of East African immigrants still mainly depends on the rich fishery resources in East Africa. Fish is safer to eat than other wild animals on the East African grasslands.
After the initial pickling process, it can effectively kill bacteria and parasites in the body.
In places like Mwanza, large amounts of fish are harvested. After workers manually remove the scales and internal organs, they are salted and dried. The dried fish can be preserved for several months in East Africa.
In coastal, lakeside and riverside areas, residents can get fresh fish, but in areas with scarce water bodies and fishery resources, they can only eat salted dried fish.
Of course, eating fish alone will definitely not solve the problem. Animal husbandry (breeding) is the real way out for the future.
The East African grassland itself is a natural pasture. Although it is not of high quality, its area is definitely large enough. The uneven distribution of precipitation is the biggest factor restricting the development of animal husbandry in East Africa. At the same time, livestock such as cattle and horses will not be replaced in the next 100 years.
Of course, East Africa cannot have only large livestock such as cattle and horses. Poultry such as chickens, ducks and geese must occupy an important position.
However, large-scale farming of chickens, ducks, and geese is not easier than raising large livestock such as cattle and horses. Free-range or domesticated poultry is safer and less prone to disease, so poultry farming in East Africa mainly relies on immigrants themselves.
There is another specialty poultry in East Africa, the guinea fowl, which is also promoted by the East African government.
This thing was once brought to Europe by the Ottoman Empire and was called "Turkish chicken". The meat is quite good.
The most important thing is that as a rare local species in Africa, it has much stronger disease resistance, and guinea fowl will chirp continuously when they see fire, so it can be used to prevent fire.
This is very important for the East African colonies, especially during the dry season when the weather is dry and fires can easily occur.
Poultry farming occupies an important position in East Africa, but it mainly relies on immigrants to carry it out spontaneously, and the immigrants also need to provide the needed grains themselves.
Therefore, the scale of breeding is limited to families. The more they raise, the more they eat, although East Africa does have a lot of wasteland for growing feed.
However, each immigrant had to complete the tasks in the fields assigned by the East African colony before they had time to manage the wasteland they had developed.
The land allocated to each immigrant in the East African colony was not a small plot, but more than ten acres. Even with the use of slaves, it was very difficult to complete the plot.
Therefore, after completing all the fields owned by the Heixingen Group, the immigrants had basically no extra energy to open up new land.
Moreover, the immigrants had no property rights to the reclaimed land, and the East African colonial government could take it back at any time. In other words, the last thing the East African colonies lacked now was land, so the immigrants were allowed to develop the land on their own.
However, if immigrants want to develop wasteland, they can basically only rely on the women in their families to do the job. The work assigned to women in East Africa is relatively light, so they can squeeze out time to earn extra income for the family.
Poultry farming and vegetable gardening are basically done by the women and children in the family.
Back to the seafood processing plants, there are basically such plants built near the larger lakes and seas in East Africa, providing meat supplements for the entire East Africa.
According to the principle of proximity, we are responsible for the supply of meat in this region, and combined with other permitted meat sources in East Africa, we can basically meet the meat needs of East African immigrants.
(End of this chapter)
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