Chapter 84 After the Autumn Harvest
By the end of August, the bean pods on the river bank had turned from green to yellow, the moisture had gradually dried up, and they were almost ready to be harvested.
With his sleeves rolled up and wearing a robe, Jagbu personally stood in the experimental field and made the first cut.
When planting beans this year, he used many different fertilizer ratios and farming methods to experiment on one acre of land.
This crude method is also the most intuitive. The yields of the four experimental plots ranged from low to high, ranging from 250 pounds to 320 pounds.
This year, soybeans were cultivated on a large scale, with an annual yield of about 280 pounds per mu, an increase of 30 pounds over last year.
This is also thanks to the fact that the land was barren that year and accumulated fertility.
I planted it once last year, so I have experience and I am not worried this year.
He breathed a sigh of relief and felt grateful for the stable high yield of soybeans.
Such high-yield beans can fulfill many food storage plans.
Behind him, a dozen or so tenant farmers were also harvesting bean pods.
This year is the first year of Einweiden's establishment, and Jacob's own plan is to store 100,000 pounds of food in the town warehouse.
At the same time, it also covers the payment of wages to all tenant farmers.
And it was provided to the army for food starting in October.
If you store grain this year, you won't have to worry about famine next year. You can sell the old grain at a cheap price at any time and regulate the market.
Jagbu calculated that the more than 200 soldiers in the army, if they had a balanced diet of vegetables, fruits, fish and meat, would consume at most 10,000 pounds of staple food per month.
That's 100,000 pounds a year.
Apart from this part of the food that must be taken out.
If we can harvest 350,000 pounds of grain this year, there will still be 250,000 pounds left.
Initially, there were only three hundred tenant farmers who needed to be paid wages, from the beginning of the land reclamation in mid-April this year to now.
Each person was given three sori per day, which amounted to one hundred and eighty gold coins.
Later, the number of tenant farmers increased by 200. From June to July, up to now, less than 50 gold coins have been distributed.
From next month onwards, the monthly salary of the five hundred tenants will be forty-five gold coins each.
That is to say, 15,000 pounds of grain must be sold every month, totaling 180,000 pounds a year.
The two items of food needed to support the army and the tenant farmers alone amounted to 280,000 pounds.
There are still 70,000 pounds of grain left in the warehouse this year, and if the harvest is good, it will be almost 100,000 pounds.
Jagabu didn't know how his wife would distribute the food. He simply wanted the output to be able to handle more tasks, and he didn't naively expect the tenant farmers to be able to feed themselves.
Isn’t there a saying that goes, “Those who grow crops cannot afford to eat them themselves?”
Jagbu thought that the lady might sell the grain to a grain merchant and get a good price.
All he could do was to ensure that the tenant farmers' wages were paid as usual.
From late August to early September, they harvested the beans, dried them, gathered them and weighed them.
A total of 116,500 pounds of beans were harvested from the four hundred acres.
Soybean production accounted for 80% of the total, with an average yield of about 300 pounds per mu. Jagabu didn't know why, but the annual soybean production was 20% more than his expected minimum production.
However, he had no time to think, as he had to send the grain to the large warehouse in the city.
After the beans are harvested, the straw is burned and returned to the fields. Starting in mid-September, the harvest of 1,000 acres of wheat will begin.
Harvesting wheat was hard work. Each tenant farmer could only harvest about one acre of land a day. It took five hundred tenant farmers two days to harvest all the wheat.
After the harvest, the wheat needs to be dried and threshed, and the whole kernels with shells removed must be sent for weighing.
The total is 285,800 pounds of whole grain.
The yield per mu increased by 100 pounds compared to last year's 180 pounds, which is considered a bumper harvest.
This did not surprise Jagbu.
In terms of land, the land along the river has been fallow for a year and is easily irrigated.
Composted human manure was also used, and each tenant farmer only had to take care of four acres of land, cultivating it carefully.
As October approached, he counted the 285,800 pounds of grain several times and sent it all to the town warehouse for storage.
By the way, the news of the good harvest was passed on to Lavosen's estate.
At the Lavossen Manor, Olivia made a draft in her mind as soon as she received the news.
One thousand acres of wheat yields 280,000 pounds, which is an average of 280 pounds per acre. If converted into catties, it is 254 catties.
This number is barely comparable to the average wheat yield of the last feudal dynasty in her previous life.
Compared with modern times, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Olivia was not in a hurry either. After all, agriculture needed to be tested and experience summarized on a yearly basis.
The total amount of beans and wheat in Einweiton this year is 400,000 and 2,300 pounds.
Together with the more than 20,000 pounds of grain produced on the estate where she currently lives, the total is 430,000 pounds of grain.
These staple foods are enough to feed the town’s current population for a year.
On the other hand, after harvesting the crops, Jagbu started to burn the straw and return it to the fields. By the way, he planned to mobilize all the tenant farmers to reclaim 400 acres of wasteland in October.
When it snows in November and the land freezes, it will be impossible to reclaim the land.
There are only a few months of slack time during the year, so we have to find opportunities to reclaim land.
From the end of spring plowing in early May to the end of August, they reclaimed 600 acres of land in the gaps between mowing and fertilizing.
Adding the 400 acres of land reclaimed after the autumn harvest, the arable land area will reach 2,400 acres by next spring.
Each manor is expanded by dozens of acres, which adds up to a lot.
As soon as the grain was in the bags, Olivia began to consume it. After issuing a few orders, she opened a government-run grain store in the city of Einweiton.
The manager of the grain store was her old acquaintance, the miller Declan.
After receiving the order, Declan took his family to the new city. He hired people to build a grain store in the market and counted all the grain in the warehouse.
The rules Olivia set for him were that grain was not allowed to be sold to any grain merchant and had to be sold according to the quota system.
Therefore, the first thing Declan did when he took office was to divide the grain in the warehouse into batches.
Each tenant farm sent food according to the population quota, and the tenants were allowed to buy it back with their wages.
However, the price of the quota grain sold to the tenant farmers was half the market price.
Currently, Jacob owns ten arable land estates, Lucy owns one livestock estate, and Lavossen owns one estate, and the annual quota for each estate is 20,000 pounds.
A total of 240,000 pounds of grain was sold to the tenants at the price of 150 souris per 100 pounds of coarse corn.
The circulating funds amount to 360 gold coins.
Of the remaining 190,000 pounds of grain, 100,000 pounds were used as the army's rations, and the remaining 90,000 pounds went to the city granary, which was supervised by Declan.
Therefore, the Declan grain store did not actually do business with grain merchants and city residents, but mainly served tenant farmers and the military.
When the grain comes in next year, the 90,000 pounds of grain in stock will be put on sale in his grain store and sold on the market at the normal price of old grain.
Meanwhile, in Jagabu's estate, the tenant farmers were rushing to buy the rationed food delivered from the large warehouse.
A hundred pounds cost only fifteen kernels, and their monthly salary could buy sixty pounds of whole grain.
Sixty pounds of whole grains, shelled at home and cooked into porridge or ground into flour and cooked into paste, are enough for two people to eat for a month.
Jagabu was stunned and scratched his head.
He originally thought that the grain would be sold to private merchants, after all, Letilen's family was not in the grain industry.
At best, he could only guarantee wages. He didn't expect that while the tenant farmers were guaranteed wages, they would also have cheap food to eat.
Right before his eyes, two tenant farmers, a man and a woman, pushed their grain home.
This couple's family has two working people, one old and one young, to support. The combined salary of the two is 180 li a month, which can buy at least 120 pounds of food.
It is enough for a family of four to eat porridge for one and a half months. They can then go to the river to catch some fish, plant some vegetables in front of and behind their house, and pick some mountain products, so they don’t have to worry about food.
It is legal for tenant farmers outside the city to do these things, and they have the right to pick up the debris, but refugees and migrant workers cannot do so.
Jagabu watched the two men in front of him pushing six bags of grain home on a cart, and he thought that they must have spent a lot of their salary.
I have to say, he has never seen such cheap food in his life. He wanted to buy a few bags just by looking at it.
But knowing that this is given as a quota, I just let it go.
Although he was also a Lenian, he felt that if such conditions could not make these fellow villagers obey, then there was no other way.
No Lenian noble could provide such a life to a tenant farmer.
Jagabu calculated again and found that based on this year's harvest, his bonus should be twenty gold coins.
Including his monthly salary, his annual salary is enough to support the entire village for a year.
This is not the salary level a manager should have.
Jagabu took a deep breath and walked towards the land where the straw was burned.
In October, the autumn harvest was completely completed and the grain quotas were delivered to the farmers and herdsmen's farms.
At the estate next door where Lucy lives, the herdsmen are also buying up food in large quantities.
The ranch Lucy is in charge of is located on a gentle hillside that is most suitable for livestock breeding. There is a stream and a large area of alfalfa is planted. The grassland covers an area of 200 acres and the forest covers 500 acres.
There are a total of 36 herdsmen here in Lucy, most of whom are families of local soldiers.
Many livestock were raised on the ranch to supply the construction needs of the entire city.
There are currently 30 underage horses, 60 underage mules, and 60 underage donkeys.
Once they reach adulthood, they are sent out to work in various parts of the city.
There are also fifty underage dairy cows and thirty adult dairy cows.
There are sixty lambs and fifty sheep.
Fifty kids and forty sheep.
There are also forty piglets purchased from Lavosen, which will take another six months to raise before they can be slaughtered.
In addition to these common ones, the ranch also has fenced land and raises deer.
There are even apiaries specifically for beekeeping.
These livestock are the ones that require the most care from herders, and they are busy from morning to night every day.
Milking, collecting eggs, shoveling manure, and feeding grass.
The work of making butter and cheese has now been moved to the direct-operated workshop in the city, and people from the workshop come to pick up the goods every day.
The wages of herders here are also higher than those of farmers. After all, they are tending cash crops, and the management is strict, so they don’t have that much freedom.
If the salary is any lower, these people will be dissatisfied in their hearts.
The chicken farm was also retained, and in addition to the existing one, a batch of chicks were purchased in Lavosen after the move, and they have been raised in the past few months.
There are now a total of 1,200 hens and 500 chicks.
Half of the eggs produced every day were sent to the barracks, and the other half were sold to Letilen's shop, which he then supplied to restaurants in the city.
As for poultry, there are ducks, geese, and even pigeons, hundreds of each, kept in cages.
This was also the shop sold to the Letilen family, but his family basically only made a small profit, and most of the profit was given to the lord.
The account still flows directly into the public treasury, and the money never passes through Lucy's hands, but she also receives wages and bonuses.
Lucy's salary was on the same level as Jacob's, also dozens of gold coins a year, which was many times more than her husband George's cavalry salary.
But she doesn't have much to spend, and now she lives at the ranch two or three days a week and lives in her house in the new city the rest of the time.
The land was divided, and she hired workers from far away to build the house.
George lived in the barracks all the time and had only two days of rest every month.
However, most of the soldiers' families, like her, were allocated land in the city to build houses.
However, they must also participate in production. If a woman wants to stay at home to take care of the children, that is not possible.
Their children were placed in temporary churches, taught by priests, and converted to Protestantism. The younger they were, the better.
Although it only takes half an hour to get from the ranch to the new city, these women can still only go home during their weekly rotation of days off.
Their homes were arranged along a street in a residential area in the city, alongside a makeshift church.
Each family built their own cabin in their own time, and whoever has a day off helps maintain it.
As for the temporary church in the residential area, four or five carts of grain were also delivered to the warehouse.
Currently, Fanon's Ein Wetten Church is still under construction. The church has a lower priority than the fortress and will not be completed until at least next year.
The temporary church where he lives now is a wooden house that the soldiers helped build when they first arrived in this land.
There are three long houses in total, each covering an area of more than 100 square meters.
In one of the rooms he placed statues of gods for people to pray.
There are two more rooms for activities and accommodation for children who are just learning to speak and crawl.
The older children, about thirteen or fourteen years old, had already been trained by him and Donald to become novice monks.
The older children take care of the younger ones, help with cooking, and read and learn languages with the younger ones.
The church provides free food to these children every day.
When their parents are on vacation and come to pick them up, they will be sent home.
As for orphans, they continue to stay in the church.
Although this was different from what Fanon had originally envisioned, he didn't have to worry about rice, flour, grain, oil, etc. He just had to collect his salary and do his job and educate the people.
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