"This was all built by your predecessors, brick by brick, tile by tile, and hoe by hoe!" Wang Qi laughed loudly, "But there is nothing to envy. The conditions where you are going are much better than this broken island. As long as you work hard, you will definitely build a better home!"

The simple prospective immigrants became excited and for the first time formed a picture in their minds of the new life that the immigration officials had repeatedly described.

But I didn’t think about how close this place is to Jiangnan.

In fact, this is Jiangnan...

Anyway, at least they are full of energy now.

~~

After bringing the prospective immigrants back to Wangqingao, Wang Qi held a brief welcoming party in the yard at the foot of the mountain used for threshing and drying grain.

The main purpose is to introduce the training cadres of the brigade, talk about what the training brigade does, and the main tasks and precautions for the next three months.

The 58th Training Brigade consists of three training squadrons with a total of ten training officers. In addition to the brigade leader Wang Qi, there are two brigade deputies, and each of these three team leaders leads a squadron.

In addition, there is an accountant, a cashier who is also an administrator, three agricultural technicians, a physical education teacher, and a health worker. These seven people also serve as cultural teachers.

What surprised the immigrants most was that the accountant Xiao Liu and the health worker Yun Ping were both girls.

"How can this woman show her face in public?" Li Shouzhong criticized in a low voice: "She is dressed so indecently..."

It was already very hot in Jiangnan during the day. The two girls wore a thin silk short jacket with narrow sleeves and a waist, and a silk short-sleeved shirt with two ties tied at the front. The pleated skirts were also made of silk, and the hem did not even reach the ankles, revealing two pieces of white socks on the embroidered shoes...

How frivolous... Oh no, how frivolous and shocking!

Li Shouzhong had no reaction to their natural feet, because the women in Mizhi did not bind their feet.

"I think it looks pretty good..." Gundam grinned as he touched his inch-long hair.

At this time, Wang Qi on the stage also explained why there were female cadres in the group.

Because in the south, women are the main labor force in the family. In addition, women have a natural advantage in the main sources of income such as silkworm breeding, spinning and weaving, so the proportion of female workers in the group has been very high since its inception.

Later, Mr. Li Zhuowu also opened a girls' school. After graduation, the girls joined the group as cadres and their performance was no worse than that of men.

"You may not know this, but there are several women at the top of our group. There are even more female middle-level executives, young and old." Wang Qi said to the immigrants below the stage in a deep voice, "So, we have to put aside our old ideas. From now on, the first rule is that you are not allowed to beat your wife!"

There was laughter from the audience.

"Second, women also have to attend literacy classes. Third, women will also be assigned labor tasks in the future. The specific work for women will be handled by the two female cadres." Wang Qi had been communicating with new immigrants for half his life, and he knew that they would have a very poor ability to accept things at first, so there was no point in saying more, so he just gave a brief introduction and ended it.

After the meeting, he and two deputy battalion commanders settled down with the prospective immigrants from their respective squadrons.

There are three villages in Wangqingao, one on the mountainside, one in the mountain, and one at the foot of the mountain, just enough for one village for one squadron.

Basically, every immigrant household has a small courtyard, and firewood, rice, oil and salt are all readily available, so they can cook on the same day.

However, because the first half of the year was the peak period for immigration and housing was a bit tight, bachelors like the Li Shouzhong brothers did not have their own houses, but instead lived in the single dormitory of the brigade headquarters.

The dormitory room was for eight people, facing the sun and ventilated, with a cement floor. Although it was a bunk bed, it was much better than the large bunk beds along the way.

Especially for people like Li Shouzhong and Gaoda who have never slept in a bed since birth, let alone a single bed, happiness is bubbling up their faces.

Moreover, if you live in a dormitory, you can eat in the cafeteria without having to cook for yourself, which is really good news for bachelors.

Of course, there are some downsides, such as more rules. Every day, you have to make the quilt and sweep the floor to keep the room clean; brush your teeth and wash your face to maintain personal hygiene... In short, you are under the supervision of the training cadres every day, so you don't have the chance to be lazy.

Fortunately, they have been under strict requirements to maintain personal and public hygiene since they entered the Immigration Office in the first month of the year, and their discipline has been greatly improved, so there is nothing to adapt to.

~~

After settling down, each squadron first conducted a day of discipline propaganda, which was no longer unfamiliar to the prospective immigrants. There were only additional requirements for work and residence. The prospective immigrants were already accustomed to the group's disciplined and rule-abiding style, so there was no need to elaborate.

The training cadres divided each squadron into ten teams, with ten households forming one team. They also appointed team leaders to assist the team cadres in allocating tasks, organizing study, collecting supplies and other daily affairs.

Although the team leaders have no salary and no staffing, they do not work for nothing. Their performance will be recorded in the training files, and when they are assigned to administrative districts, those with outstanding performance will naturally get more opportunities.

The rest of the day, the team leaders led people to the brigade warehouse to collect clothing, farm tools, labor protection supplies and other necessary production and living materials, and then distributed them to each household, so that each family could put their own home in order and adapt to the local environment.

From the third day on the island, the extremely fulfilling training life officially began.

Every morning before dawn, the squadron would ring the bell to urge people to get up.

Adult men and women over the age of fourteen hurriedly got up, ate some dry food, and gathered at the village entrance carrying different farm tools and implements as requested by the team leader the day before.

Everyone had to arrive before the second bell rang, and those who were late would have their work points deducted. Everyone was still not quite sure what work points were, but they already knew that starting next month, their family's food and clothing would all be exchanged for work points...

Then the training cadres briefly explained today’s learning tasks and took them to various places in Wangqingao to start labor practice…

There are three main types of labor practices: farming, building seawalls and repairing reservoirs.

At first, the would-be immigrants were somewhat skeptical, thinking that it was necessary to learn such hard labor. Who didn't grow crops when they were young? Who hasn't performed labor service?

But once I started studying, it really opened my eyes. It’s completely different from before!

Take farming for example. Although rice is grown in this season, northerners don’t quite understand it, but they are still shocked.

It turns out that here we don’t just sow seeds directly into the ground. We use high-quality varieties provided by the Agricultural College, which are sterilized and cleaned before being grown in the nursery fields.

They heard from the agricultural technicians that early rice seedlings were all grown in greenhouses. My goodness, we in the north are still suffering from the cold, but here the crops are all grown in greenhouses...

Before transplanting the seedlings, the land must be prepared. This is what they started with. In addition to the normal tillage and weeding, they actually had to fertilize the land. In addition to organic fertilizer, there were also chemical fertilizers such as beggar and a certain type of fertilizer, and some disinfectant. They had to be mixed and stirred according to the ratio given by the agricultural technicians before they could be spread on the land.

The way of tilling the land is also very different. Originally, they relied on people to pull the plow, but here they use oxen, and they are all double-ox plows. What's even more outrageous is that not only is the entire plow body made of cast iron, but several blacksmiths among the immigrants also said with certainty that the shiny moldboard and plowshare are all made of pure steel.

This statement was later confirmed by the training cadres, which was far from the truth. The old blacksmiths said with regret that they used the good steel for blades, but you used it to plow the fields, which was a waste.

The training cadres laughed and said, "Food is the most important thing for people. Is there anything more important than farming?" The old blacksmiths had no way to refute. They didn't know that it was because the group had better steel...

In fact, it was because the soil in the south of the Yangtze River was wet and sticky. Even the Jiangdong plow, which was specially developed for paddy field farming, could not plow for a long distance before the plowshare was covered with clay. Farmers had to stop their animals and scrape off the clay before continuing to plow the land, which greatly reduced labor efficiency.

The technicians of the Agricultural College found through continuous exploration that if the moldboard and plowshare were polished and the mold plate was suitable, the plow could clean itself when plowing the land. After repeated experiments and improvements, the "Menghe Brand" self-cleaning plow was finally finalized in the 12th year of Wanli.

The following year, the plow steel production line specially built by Wuhu Iron and Steel Plant rolled out the first cast steel plow blade for the Jiangnan Agricultural Implements Factory.

By last year, the 16th year of the Wanli reign, Wuhu Iron and Steel had reached an annual production capacity of 50,000 sets of moldboards and plowshares, enabling the group to replace 60% of its paddy field plows with Menghe brand self-cleaning plows.

For mass production, any improvement in production tooling is worthwhile.

With the original Jiangdong plow, two oxen and three people could manage five hectares, or 500 mu of paddy fields, in one farming season. After switching to the Menghe self-cleaning plow, not only did the labor efficiency increase by 60%. In addition, the Menghe self-cleaning plow was equipped with movable plow arrows to control the depth of the plowing, and no one was needed to control the plow. So one more laborer could be saved.

An experienced ox-driving master can plow the field with two oxen by himself without even needing someone else to lead the oxen.

Two oxen and one person can plow 800 acres of land in one season. Isn't the labor efficiency more than doubled?

For overseas administrative regions with vast land and sparse population, this improvement is even more significant. Immigrants need such a magical tool to help them open up the boundless land.

Since self-cleaning plows are currently mainly provided to overseas, how to operate, maintain and simply repair self-cleaning plows is a compulsory lesson for prospective immigrants.

~~

In addition to learning farming in paddy fields, prospective immigrants also have to go to dry fields to learn harvesting.

Everyone thought to themselves, "Is it possible to finally get back the face I lost?" Can you harvest flowers from wheat? Isn't it just bending over, putting down the sickle, and scratching the wheat from the root?

But when we got to the field, we found that we really didn't know how to do it, because they used disc-type manual harvesters to harvest wheat, which were five to eight times more efficient than harvesting with a sickle.

Moreover, after the wheat is brought to the yard, it is also threshered manually to separate the straw and husks, which makes the efficiency even higher.

What shocked them the most was that, at the last weighing, an average of five stones of wheat were harvested per acre...

"Oh my God..." The prospective immigrants' jaws dropped to the ground.

In their hometown, the best land can only produce one and a half dan of wheat per mu. Most of the arable land can hardly produce even one dan of wheat.

Here you can produce five stones per acre!

If they hadn't harvested, threshed and weighed the wheat themselves, I would never have believed it.