Chapter 166: A Buyer's Market

In Jiangnan during the Song Dynasty, human manure was mostly applied directly to the fields. But by the Yuan Dynasty, farmers were already commonly using a decomposition method: "Place a brick trough at the field's edge, let it ferment thoroughly, and only then apply it."

However, the natural decomposition method took too much time, usually over half a year.

In the Ming Dynasty, Jiangnan began using the "steaming manure method." When the winter earth began to warm, they would dig a deep pit to gather manure, seal it to ferment, cover it with soil, and close the doors, letting it heat and decompose inside a shed. The resulting decomposed manure was also called "steamed manure."

Additionally, methods from the Ming-Qing period like "boiling manure," "simmering manure," and "cellaring manure" were all secondary processing techniques spontaneously developed by commoners to accelerate fertilizer decomposition. However, in the final analysis, these were all scattered, chaotic, manual operations with no technical standards, and neither quality nor output could be guaranteed.

Now that the Beggar Sect has unified the night-soil industry within Hangzhou City and consolidated the raw material transport channels, the Weituo Manure Yard outside the city can unleash the power of industrialized farmyard fertilizer production.

Large quantities of excrement and urban refuse soil are first piled up at the manure yard.

Various human and animal manures are stacked together with green manure like crop stalks in specific proportions. The most critical adjustment here is the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio: generally 30:1, meaning every one part of nitrogen requires thirty parts of carbon source.

Human and animal manure contains more nitrogen, while crop stalks contain more carbon, so typically, about 40% stalks must be added per ton of manure fertilizer.

After various stalks go through crushing and soaking processes, they can begin to be layered with the manure. In between, to preserve nutrients, a layer of finely ground refuse soil is sprinkled into each layer. The materials are stacked while being sprinkled with water until they form a 2.5-meter cone, and the process is complete.

Next comes the crucial "pile-turning" stage.

After the fertilizer pile is built, its internal temperature can generally reach 60°C–70°C within 5 to 10 days.

This is where a transmigration divine artifact makes its entrance: the temperature-measuring rod.

Several specially trained literate refugees, under heavy protection and surveillance, have the daily task of poking the temperature-measuring rod in and out of the cones.

Once the temperature inside the manure pile meets the standard and has been maintained for 10 hours, the pile is immediately overturned, large clumps are broken up, manure and straw are mixed evenly, water is replenished, and it is stacked back up as before.

After about 10 days, when the pile temperature rises again to around 60°C, it is overturned once more, and the composting is complete.

Guided by the transmigration divine artifact, the Weituo Yard produces a batch of farmyard fertilizer with consistent quality and stable efficacy roughly every 20 days. Row upon row of neat manure piles stand like a forest, with several hundred well-fed and watered refugees busy at work here.

The effectiveness of the new fertilizer soon became evident in the oilseed fields outside the city. Large numbers of vegetable farmers from the outskirts began spontaneously rowing their boats to the Weituo Yard to buy fertilizer. Before long, even manure boats from places as far as Haining and Huzhou were rowing over to trade manure for fertilizer.

This new type of fertilizer industry has provided employment for over a thousand night-soil collectors and boatmen within Hangzhou City alone, along with a public latrine construction crew of no fewer than 500 men... These people are also responsible for gradually clearing out years of accumulated refuse heaps in the city and dredging the sludge from various gutters. In short, nothing that can become fertilizer is overlooked.

This grand and vigorous urban environmental renovation transformed Prefect Liu Mengqian of Hangzhou—historically judged as only good for reciting poetry and painting, and satirized in Zhang Dai's writings—overnight into a "capable official," praised by all the gentry.

And the instigator of it all, Great Gang Leader Zhou Tong, can now swagger openly into the prefectural and county yamen in broad daylight—not only the officials, but every gentry magnate in Hangzhou City who cared about this matter, upon understanding how Zhou Tong's fertilizer industry formed this virtuous cycle, could not help but click their tongues in wonder.

Of course, when Gang Leader Zhou goes out, he goes out, but amidst his crowd of followers, the "Soft Hedgehog Armor" worn against his skin has never been removed. There's no helping it—his enemies are truly too many, and Old Zhou still needs to keep his life to survive until the day he becomes a CPPCC member.

As the Station Chief of Hangzhou Station, Lu Cheng was also incredibly busy during this period.

Not only did he have to stand behind the Beggar Sect at all times to guide their grand strategy, but he also had to oversee the overall work of Hangzhou Station, maintain communication with various parties, and additionally, help clean up certain people's messes...

A certain juren who posted a selfie video that caused severe discomfort among viewers had already fled. All the projects that guy left half-handled now needed Lu Cheng to manage.

First and foremost was the farmland.

After Master Huang passed the provincial exam, there was no shortage of landlords and rich peasants from all over coming to "donate" their land to him. This was essentially a form of affiliation: the land still belonged to the original owners, and everyone collaborated to profit from the juren's tax exemption quota.

However, the Transmigrators did not need this kind of affiliation. What the Transmigrators needed was their own land, completely under their control, without tenant farmers, where refugees could be placed as temporary laborers.

This kind of land was extremely difficult to buy in the Jiangnan region: there were too many gentry and wealthy households, and after centuries of changes, the farmland had long been fragmented into countless plots of private land, occupied by owner-farmers and tenants. Wanting to purchase large, contiguous tracts of land was harder than reaching the sky.

Of course, if Juren Huang could reach the level of Xu Jie, Elder Xu, he could also wantonly enclose land—Xu the Land King, from Senior Grand Secretary to country gentry, had his land holdings, through years of encroachment, reach as much as 240,000 mu, with tens of thousands of tenant farmers.

Therefore, for a juren like Huang Ping, wanting to buy large stretches of prime farmland in the Jiangnan region was basically impossible.

However, an opportunity now presented itself.

Perhaps it was fate's design; although the Little Ice Age spanned the entire Late Ming, starting from the Chongzhen First Year, natural disasters in the Jiangnan region suddenly entered a high-frequency phase: large-scale calamities represented by drought, flood, and locusts occurred year after year throughout the entire Chongzhen reign without cease. While the reasons for the Ming Empire's demise were many, the unending natural disasters were the thickest nail in its coffin.

In July of this very year, the Jiangnan region first suffered a severe drought, then continuous torrential rain. On the 23rd, a hurricane struck, and the sea tide breached the embankments on both banks of the Qiantang River. The entire coastal areas of the three prefectures of Hangjiahu were stricken. In Xiaoshan County alone, not counting the old and young, the death toll among able-bodied adults reached 10,000 people. The death tolls in places like Shangyu and Kuaiji were only higher, not lower.

Plague followed immediately after the flood, which then produced large numbers of landless farmers. After this, the farmland, having been inundated by the sea tide, would undergo salinization.

... Very well, large tracts of ownerless land, large numbers of bankrupt owner-farmers and tenant farmers—all of this would arrive after July. Lu Cheng's recent frequent trips to several coastal counties east of Hangzhou were precisely to investigate and compile statistics on the land data of various places.

In the original plan, all this work should have been completed by Master Huang, but plans could not keep up with changes. Now, Lu Cheng could only hastily open a "Rent Depot," using the guise of managing and purchasing farmland on behalf of Juren Huang to conduct his field surveys and investigations.

To cope with the tidal disaster that would arrive in a few months, Lu Cheng not only had to speed up the relocation of large numbers of "currently existing" refugees, but also investigate in advance, plan for the disaster-stricken fields, and additionally, apply to Dayuan for a dedicated agricultural specialist to bring seeds of certain crops to Hangzhou—in a place plagued by frequent floods and droughts, forget about rice; root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes were the true way.

Even amidst such overwhelming busyness, Lu Cheng still had to make time to attend some social engagements, such as the opening ceremony of Juren Huang's family bank.

As a juren, opening one or two businesses like a bank or a teahouse was perfectly normal. Before Huang Zhicheng departed for Fujian, he had already completed the membership procedures at the Banking Guild and had purchased a bank at Rice Market Lane.

This bank, specializing in silver and coin exchange, was nominally the property of Master Huang's family, but in reality, it was still managed by Lu Cheng's side. Its primary function was to provide Dayuan with industrial metals: gold, copper, lead, tin, and so on.

Gold was unnecessary; the gold-to-silver exchange ratio in the Great Ming and Japan was about 1:8, while in Europe during the same period, it exceeded 1:12, so colonizers had been arbitraging gold from the Ming Dynasty and Japan. Now, the Transmigrators had also joined in—this opportunity wouldn't last forever; in a few more years, the gold price ratio would be evened out.

As for the other metals—copper, lead, and tin—these were all industrial metals urgently needed by Dayuan, especially copper. The most important daily task of Huang's Bank was to use silver to exchange for all types of copper coins: even if they were such poor-quality coins that they'd shatter into eight pieces upon hitting the ground, Huang's Bank would still bring out gleaming silver to exchange for them. Of course, in that case, expecting 1 tael for 1 string of cash was out of the question; even 3 strings wouldn't do.

In essence, this was actually the Transmigrators using freshwater cultured pearls to exchange for high-grade copper, lead, and tin metal ores. Who was profiting and who was losing, no one could say for sure.

With the arrival of the first ship of industrial goods from Dayuan at the port some time ago, Tangzhuang, this 17th-century freight distribution station, finally ended its awkward operation of only buying and never selling, and began to step onto the right track.

Industrialization has one standard feature: cheapness. No matter the commodity, from sewing needles to oil lamps, paint, firearms, jeans, and automobiles, once the production line starts, even if shipped across oceans, these goods can still smash apart the markets of agricultural nations.

Those steam-powered nations of the late Qing era, which seem utterly crude to later generations, relied on their chugging steam production lines to ship goods across the seven seas, dominate the five continents, enrich the nation and strengthen the people, blast open the markets of countless ancient empires, and sign countless colonial treaties—foreign matches, foreign cigarettes, foreign oil, foreign cloth...

And in the Transmigrators' era, with the first ship of industrially dried and cut commodity lumber crossing through Tangzhuang, an epoch-making process in this plane began from this point onward—global trade entered a buyer's market 300 years ahead of its historical schedule.

Even if the Transmigrators might still need several more decades to let the world's people experience what "buy one, get one free" means, the arrival of this shipload of lumber at port, just like Watt's steam engine, sounded the clarion call of the Industrial Revolution, representing the advent of a new trade landscape.

Now, the goods crossing through Tangzhuang via the Sand Ship fleet have gradually begun to diversify in variety, and exquisite industrial products quickly found a market in Hangzhou.

"Master Gou, Great Lord Gou, you are an old patron of our shop. Can you, old sir, truly not trust the skill of me, Zhao Da? Among the eighteen masonry firms inside and outside Hangzhou City, if I, Zhao Da, claim second place, who dares claim first?"

On the riverbank flatland north of Tangzhuang, amidst rows of neatly stacked, knife-cut sharp, light-red brick piles, a group of masons were gathered around a man who looked like a steward, soliciting business. The Zhao Da who had just spoken was dark, lean, and wiry, his hands full of thick calluses, exuding the air of a craftsman from head to toe.

"Screw the Queen Mother of Heaven too, for all I care! Look how cocky you are!" Before Steward Gou could reply, Craftsman Guo nearby had already begun to speak up for justice. The tall, ugly Craftsman Guo, after finishing his furious rebuke, instantly switched back to a Shiba Inu-like fawning expression: "Master Gou, this skill of applying foreign cement, I honestly paid good silver to learn it at Tangzhuang. If you don't believe me, please take a look, old sir..."

As Craftsman Guo spoke, he flashed a "Grade A Cement Construction Certificate," gilded and framed, written in brush calligraphy, and stamped with two or three large red clay seals.