Chapter 141: The Farm

Watching the fiery red molten steel gradually cool into ingots before his eyes, Chen Jingtai once again fell into a daze: Is this really the 17th century? High-quality electric furnaces, molten steel repeatedly rid of impurities, advanced furnace-front assays, beautiful type sand molds... all of this ought to appear in the 21st century!

And that broken factory of his that was demolished in the 21st century — that was what suited this barbaric wilderness: a smelting process with zero quality control, laborers carrying crucibles and pouring molten steel straight into the ground gutters, steel plates so riddled with impurities after hot rolling that welding torches had to patch the holes...

Shaking his head to return to reality, Chen Jingtai accepted congratulations from the various well-wishers while beginning to consider the future. Although the first batch of molten steel had been successfully tapped, the steel plant still had much to perfect: a flue-gas furnace-charge preheating system was essential, a steel rolling system was essential too — both cold and hot rolling were needed, hot rolling for steel bars, cold rolling for tinplate, and after that, naturally, machine tools, and after machine tools, stamping presses... generation after generation without end.

Another key point: they must urgently begin self-producing all kinds of steelmaking additives, ladles, as well as consumables like electrodes and cables — this was the pressing matter on which the steel plant's continued operation depended.

The Transmigrators had essentially forcibly lit a node in the middle of the steel technology tree, but the time this node could shine was limited; they had to punch through the remaining nodes downward as soon as possible to avoid halting production due to consumable shortages.

As the Crossing Faction's operations at Dayuan spread ever wider, virtually every aspect — production, daily life, military, medical — required import goods to sustain consumption; therefore, the Kiln Area Base now had to push as far upstream in manufacturing as possible, raising the self-production rate of all kinds of basic consumables. Otherwise, the import goods crates would sooner or later devolve into consumable resupply crates, and the entire system's development rhythm would grind to a halt.

After the first heat of steel ingots was successfully produced, it immediately received a stickied, highlighted thread on the forum, with nearly every department offering congratulations beneath the post.

And Chen Jingtai, already swollen with arrogance like a dog, smugly listed beneath the post a long string of equipment designated by his venerable self for import: hot rolling lines, cold rolling lines, all manner of matching smelting equipment, all manner of integrated machining centers, all manner of CNC lathes, planers, milling machines, and grinders of every model, all manner of...

The lads, who a moment ago were still gleeful as lambs, fell to their knees the very next moment.

Faced with the chaos of a quarreling mob, in the end it was the Great Office that, after a comprehensive analysis of the situation, stepped forward to explain: at present, there was not that much steel to roll. Because for a period going forward, most of that small amount of pig iron and wrought iron shipped from Hangzhou did not need to be refined into steel — refined cast iron from a secondary refining would suffice.

For material-heavy applications like ship frames, the bases and casings of various industrial equipment, most actually used cast iron, so the steel rolling line still had to wait. The current volume of pig iron imports simply did not warrant installing this equipment; the steel plant's next step should be to build its own cupola furnace, then import a few matching machine tools and hot auxiliary piping — that would be enough.

So when would the equipment be installed? That depended on the shipyard's progress.

Dayuan's strategic posture was currently one of retrenchment, because the Transmigrators did not possess a fist capable of striking outward — a fleet, native crewmen, self-made firearms and cannons usable without limit; all these necessary conditions for offense were not yet at hand.

Only once a fleet was assembled — and a Chinese-style fleet whose hulls closely resembled Cantonese and Fujianese ships — would it be cost-effective for the Navy to dispatch a pilot ship, leading the fleet through layers of obstruction to dock at the piers of Guangzhou or Fuzhou, to find a way to purchase bulk commodities — "population," grain, pig iron and wrought iron, iron ore.

Therefore, before the shipyard could burst forth with a fleet, or before the Zheng Zhilong problem was resolved, Dayuan could only passively receive external resources. This was terribly inefficient, but there was no helping it; for now, they could only endure in silence.

... After Chen Jingtai's lion's maw was blocked and sent packing, the onlookers narrowly breathed a sigh of relief. Had that fellow gotten his way, then at the very least for the first half of this year, everyone would have had to watch him swagger alone — that was intolerable. Import goods — a share for every man, that was the kingly way...

Liang Le and Mi Shuo sat together on an electric three-wheeler, one silently smoking a cigarette, the other fanning himself with a bamboo hat, looking quite leisurely.

There were currently four electric three-wheelers in total: the Infrastructure Department had two, the Kiln Area Base had one, and one more belonged to the Farm Department.

Liang Le and Mi Shuo were the current Great Kings of the Farm Department.

The Farm Department currently had no farm.

Ever since the Transmigrators occupied Dayuan, Liang Le and his agricultural comrades had essentially existed in an invisible state. There was no helping it — all the land was in a savage wilderness, upon which savages ran and flying mosquitoes drifted; it was not something a farmer with a hoe could handle.

Liang Le and the others called themselves the Farm Department, but in truth there had never been a farm for them to cultivate. Since occupying Dayuan, they had basically no presence; their most frequent work on ordinary days was eating grass — ahem... planting grass.

Idle hands and all... starting from the Chikan area, after much wild grassland had been burned flat, Liang Le and his crew directed the farm laborers under them to tidy up these salinized plots, then sowed salt-grass seeds on the spot.

The seeds had been purchased from Hangzhou — salt grass was a type of rush grass, salt-alkali tolerant, with good elasticity and strong tensile resistance, bright in color; it was an excellent grass for weaving mats and sandals. During Taiwan's Japanese occupation period, Beitou rush grass had been a very famous specialty.

The Tainan Plain was an alluvial plain; in the 17th century, nearly one-third of the coastal land was salinized soil. Those beautiful Tainan farms of later generations, like a green carpet, were all, without exception, the fruits of large-scale land reclamation.

Liang Le and his comrades had neither the capability nor the inclination to undertake any salinized-land reclamation. The Tainan Plain's cultivated area in later generations was 3,200 square kilometers; to the Transmigrators' pitiful scale, it was like a mouse falling into a rice vat — Liang Le and the others could perfectly well pick some good land to open farms, rather than toiling over salinized soil.

So they just casually planted a bit of grass and left it at that.

Later, as the Chikan New District expanded, they opened experimental fields on the district's outskirts, planting vegetables and some salt-alkali-tolerant crops — sweet sorghum, alfalfa.

This half-dead state of affairs persisted until the Tainan Pacification Command subdued the Madou Society. The gentlemen of the Great Office, long since restless and unable to sit or lie down over the current agricultural situation, had been summoning Liang Le and Mi Shuo in succession these past days, demanding that the two former agricultural technicians seize the moment and act swiftly, to resolve for the regime the mortal threat of external grain procurement at the earliest date.

The two, Liang and Mi, after extorting an electric three-wheeler on the spot from the Great Office today, and furthermore reserving a German Fendt electric tractor, still went out the door with a breezy laugh, climbed onto the electric three-wheeler, and vanished without a trace.

"Still dreaming of self-sufficient grain production?" Bah — what about nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium? What about pesticides? What about improved seeds?

The two men exited the Shang Hall gates, riding the electric three-wheeler to catch the breeze while raising middle fingers to curse the clueless court gentlemen a few times. Just like that, they arrived at the dock, shouting for men to lift the three-wheeler onto a boat, then crossed the Taijiang, set out from Chikan, and breezed all the way to the Kiln Area Base. The electric three-wheeler crossed the newly built temporary wooden bridge over Xingang Creek without pausing for a moment, heading straight for the opposite bank.

... Indeed, the new farm the Farm Department had selected in recent days was on the opposite bank of Xingang Creek, facing the Kiln District across the stream.