Chapter 315: Saving the Nation by Indirect Means

The strategic value of horses is actually tied to the entire Transmigrator Group's strategic layout and their projections for future societal development.

In short, given the current extreme demand for imported goods, the Empire's top brass won't allocate many resources to horse breeds — are horses useful? Yes! Are they a necessity? No!

Huo Xiong had a very precise grasp of policy, so he told Huang Xu plainly that the Animal Husbandry Corporation would not wade into these murky waters... expanding horse breeds was not the Empire's most urgent undertaking right now, so if the Army insisted on doing it this way, they could squeeze the resources from their own internal budget; as for public resources, that was definitely out of the question.

Huang Xu understood Huo Xiong's point. But a project like horse breeding, which requires a long-term infusion of resources, was far too uneconomical to fund with internal resources alone, so Huang Xu still made an effort to try and persuade Huo Xiong.

And so the two of them sat on the motorcycle and began a round of discussion.

The use of livestock is generally divided into two directions: draft labor and consumption.

Draft labor includes plowing and riding.

The technologically advanced world of later generations developed step by step, and this process included several thousand years of horse-drawn plowing.

Horse-drawn plowing is the most efficient method of tilling land; European farmers and early North American pioneers all used it, and the efficiency of heavy draft horses was the highest before the advent of the tractor.

However, horse-drawn plowing simply doesn't work here on the Eastern continent — the Han lands are a mountainous country, with mountains, hills, and plateaus accounting for 69% of the total national land area. In other words, the Han people have never been an ethnic group suited to raising and using horses.

This figure must also exclude the northern grasslands suitable for horse raising: before the Qing Dynasty, Menggu was always a base from which nomadic tribes attacked the Central Plains, so it should be reclassified under the mountainous terrain data where horse raising was impossible.

The ancient Han people, who could only utilize about 20% of the plain terrain, simply had no way to elevate horses to the level of everyday field plowing the way Europeans or North Americans did... The plains were packed with people, the endless mountain wilds could only sustain the small Dian Horse, northerners used hoes and oxen, southerners used water buffalo — an ethnic group constrained by its environment, with no horse-raising content branded into its genes.

Thus, for thousands of years, the primary methods of tilling land on the Eastern continent were the hoe and the ox; thus, for thousands of years, people could only trade salt, iron, and tea for horses from Menggu and Qinghai-Tibet.

As for those dashing cavalry tales in history, including Huo Qubing and Zhao Yun... in fact, from Qin's conquest of the six kingdoms all the way to the million-strong Red Army crossing the Yangtze, through countless internal and external wars, the Han people's primary means of defeating their opponents was always massive numbers of infantry; a few elite cavalry units could not conceal the fundamental scarcity of warhorses.

Matters become specific when we turn to the Transmigrators in this new time-space.

As mentioned earlier, once the Army reaches the north, it can simply purchase Mongol horses and various inferior breeds locally, including donkeys and mules, to form mounted infantry to kill the enemy; there is no need here to spend enormous costs on breeding a population.

This being the case, the riding function of horses is not an urgent current need. One must realize, the wars in this time-space are nothing like the World War I or World War II of later generations, where industrial nations fought until the sky was dark and the earth dim, with warhorse deaths numbering in the millions — this time-space is Ultraman beating up weaklings; the Imperial Army's advantage is too great, wars are usually one-sided, they simply won't be that brutal, nor will they require millions of horses.

With the riding function removed, what remains is the plowing function... yet in this new era of violent social upheaval, plow horses will find it very hard to catch up.

The nation established by the Transmigrators will, in just a few years or a decade-plus, traverse the developmental journey that took the Old World a thousand years.

The Empire's freshly minted Nobility are, in a sense, all prophets — foreknowledge of three matters brings wealth for ten thousand years, so these prophets will not choose backward modes of production.

In the entire East Asia region, where is most suitable for explosive grain production? Apart from the Tainan Plain, it is, without a doubt, Thailand's Chao Phraya River Plain. Whether in climate or water and soil, the plains along the Chao Phraya River are a heaven-sent rice-producing region, number one in East Asia.

In later generations, the desperately exporting Thailand had an annual rice output of 21 million tons. The vast majority of this figure came from the aforementioned land. Moreover, the land occupied by massive quantities of pineapples, bananas, lychees, and other fruits was not even included in this calculation.

In the Transmigrators' planning, once the nation's comprehensive industrial capacity reaches the minimum output requirement — gunboats, tractors, fertilizer, pesticides — then the immigrant fleets, escorted by warships, will prepare to land in Siam Bay.

Using mechanized methods to explosively open up farmland and produce rice in Thailand and the Tainan Plain — this is the most efficient model of grain production for the Late Ming.

These two heaven-sent lands, combined with great killers like the gas tractor, homemade fertilizer, and pesticides, even with two harvests a year, the output from these two places would be enough to feed all the disaster refugees of the Ming nation and incidentally support the Empire's early colonization efforts.

The so-called "overthrowing the local tyrants and dividing the land," after which a nest of hoe-wielding farmers crowd into a village blissfully shouting "the Emperor's grace is boundless"... this new time-space does not permit such low-efficiency scenes.

All farmers must go to the New World... rather than letting tens of millions starve, die of disease, or be killed in the Little Ice Age, it is better to send them out to colonize.

These people must, at the cost of a high mortality rate, open up tropical plantations and farms in North America and New Zealand for their descendants. On this mountainous land of the Ming Continent, apart from those few livable plains, the remaining population, under the Transmigrators' plan, is to be relocated.

Under this kind of strategic projection about the future, horse-drawn plowing has been pushed to a very far-back position — concentrating resources on mechanized agriculture on the two plains is the Cabinet's established strategy; if there comes a day when horses are needed, that will be a story for after the migration to North America.

Since the two most important functions of horses — riding and plowing — have been uninstalled and postponed, the remaining function of consumption is even less relevant.

Though similarly stripped of its draft function, the ox remains the undisputed number one domestic animal: steak, milk, and potato-braised beef brisket are truly the best foods for transforming the national physique.

After Huo Xiong broke down and explained the issues of oxen and horses in detail, Huang Xu had nothing more to say... after all, the era is different, and the internal and external environments the nation faces are different, so one cannot rigidly apply the experience of the Old World to attitudes toward oxen and horses.

After clarifying the pros and cons, Huo Xiong, in his final capacity as "technical advisor," gave Huang Xu a few ideas for "saving the nation by indirect means."

Considering the current situation of the horse farm, Huang Xu and his people arranging embryo transfer was actually superfluous. Because apart from those few Arabian Horses, the farm didn't even have surrogate mares with qualified shoulder height, so how could they even talk about embryo transfer? Thus, Huo Xiong suggested Huang Xu first calm down and focus on collecting mares before anything else.

Regarding mares, the small Southern horses were definitely out of the question: the size difference was too great; even if embryo transfer were performed in the future, the foal's height would still be affected by the mare's pelvis.

On this point, Huo Xiong pointed out: the Army actually has room to maneuver. Because what the Cabinet cares about is the import quota; as for the Army using its own silver to buy horses from the Natives, the Cabinet won't bother with that kind of thing.

So where to buy horses? Huo Xiong named two places: Hangzhou and India.

Since Hangzhou is the terminus of the Grand Canal, cattle and horse dealers from the north ship their goods to the port every year. It's nothing new for the rich and powerful of Jiangnan to use fine horses for carriage pulling, so the Army could commission comrades at the Hangzhou Station to purchase some mares of qualified height — of course, the price wouldn't be cheap.

As for India, they could commission Europeans to organize a supply of mares.

Regarding horse breeds, the Army's requirements are actually not high, because the Military's ultimate goal is simple: to breed a warmblood riding horse capable of long-distance trekking at a steady pace.

This requirement is far lower than breeding a hot-blooded horse capable of sprinting; in fact, most warmblood crossbreeds can meet the Army's conditions.

So here, Huo Xiong revealed some information: India not only has its own excellent native breeds like the Marwari Horse and Kathiawari Horse, but also, due to the needs of war and ceremonial rituals, plus the fact that South India's climate is unsuitable for horse breeding, the upper classes frequently import horses from Arabia and West Asia, among which are large numbers of Arabian Horses.

Hearing this, Huang Xu basically agreed with the routine Huo Xiong had pointed out.

And Huo Xiong finally made a promise: as long as the horse farm had a sufficient base population of mares, the Animal Husbandry Corporation would provide free technical support in areas like file establishment, crossbreeding and selective breeding, and embryo transfer.

Of course, for the frozen horse embryos requiring the Emperor's intervention, the Army would still have to figure that out on its own.

"At worst, just use the private quota granted by the Emperor. The embryo canisters aren't that big anyway, and you all love horses so much," Huo Xiong said with a sly grin as he was leaving.

"Get out of here!" Huang Xu tossed another cigar to Huo Xiong, then laughingly cursed and waved him off.

As for everyone's personal contraband... each person's one-cubic-meter private quota had long been bid up to sky-high prices. To have the Army's warlords personally contribute a bit of that space to serve the public cause of horse breeding... Huang Xu found the very thought utterly fantastical.

Judging others by himself, as someone who liked smoking imported cigars, that bit of private space would be used up sooner or later anyway, and no one could make him donate it — not even offering a beauty would do.

"A heavy burden and a long road..." Standing on the green grass, Huang Xu watched the distant motorcycle and let out a long sigh.

Comrade Huo Xiong, now far away, was in quite a good mood at this moment. Once certain things were spoken openly, everyone had instead found the crux of the problem. This also allowed the Animal Husbandry Corporation, which had been caught in the middle, to extricate itself: technical matters to the technicians, political matters to the politicians — this was the correct posture for handling affairs.

... After leaving the horse farm, Huo Xiong raced all the way back; before long, he returned to the bustling Chikan Avenue and then plunged straight into the Chikan District Government Compound.

The Chikan District Government was a three-story brick-concrete structure building in the shape of the character "gate." After parking his motorcycle in the compound, Huo Xiong, familiar with the route, went up via the annex wing.

Upon reaching the Third Floor, he wiped his face with his hand, put on the fierce expression of a gang boss coming to collect a debt, then strode up to an office door, violently shoved it open, and simultaneously bellowed: "Tell your boss to come out! Has he turned rebel? He dares hide from me?!"