Chapter 317: Land Policy

"How's the situation?"

Seeing Mi Shuo enter, Liang Le — square-faced and large-eared, leaning back behind a desk piled with files — smiled as he asked.

"Good news and bad!" Mi Shuo dropped into a chair. "The seedlings are coming up well, but Huo Xiong cornered me and I had to agree to twenty thousand mu of fodder fields."

Liang Le chuckled at that. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. Wouldn't it have been easier if you'd just agreed earlier?"

"The problem is, with this on top of everything, the thirty thousand mu of new fields we originally planned are going to be under a lot more pressure."

"Yeah, the pressure's no joke." Ever since Liang Le became a Cabinet Minister, his moments of levity had grown far fewer.

He leaned back against his chair, rubbed his brow with his fingers, and his tone carried a hint of resignation. "At the morning meeting, I made a point of talking to Zou Guoqing. The issue now isn't just the tractors — the Chemical Plant had another accident the day before yesterday. The sulfuric acid production line killed six people in one go. The scene was... gruesome. The whole line is shut down for inspection and repairs now."

"Motherf—..." Even the normally easygoing Mi Shuo couldn't help cursing at this news. "When it rains, it pours!"

Sulfuric acid was the raw material for producing quick-acting phosphate fertilizer. Guano stone had to react with sulfuric acid to transform from a slow-release fertilizer into normal phosphate fertilizer that plants could readily absorb.

Among the three major fertilizers — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — nitrogen and potassium, with their difficult-to-collect raw materials, weren't even worth mentioning. And the process of synthesizing sulfuric acid from Taipei's volcanic sulfur plus producing phosphate fertilizer from island guano had originally been the Kiln District's one and only reasonably stable fertilizer supply route — even though this pitiful phosphate fertilizer output was less than a thousand tons.

And now, just great — the sulfuric acid line was down. Mi Shuo's first thought was that the phosphate fertilizer was done for too.

After that one curse, Mi Shuo asked, "And what's the story with the tractors?"

"Supposedly some Combustion Chamber Pressure Research Group failed... I don't really understand it either. Anyway, the ten tractors they promised are going to be delivered late."

... Hearing this, Mi Shuo had no energy left even to complain.

In later generations, a large tractor pulling an eight-meter folding plow could till one hundred eighty mu in an hour. That meant three mu every minute. But the gas tractors the Transmigrators had built could only till fifty mu per hour — their efficiency wasn't even a fraction of the other's.

That kind of tractor-plowing scene was something you couldn't see in most parts of the country in later generations. It came back to the same point: in the mountains, you could only use oxen. The few places with large, flat terrain like Northeast China involved land-rights issues — unless you contracted the land of an entire village or township and then combined the private plots into large fields, no one would buy a tractor just to plow.

And the situation the Transmigrators now faced was the exact opposite of later generations: too much land, vast stretches of wilderness, and nowhere near enough tractors. As for private owners — there simply weren't any... which brought things back to the issue of land policy.

In theory, the land rights to all the arable land on the Tainan Plain now had been assigned by the Government to the Grain Corporation. So Mi Shuo, as the Corporation's legal representative, was nominally the number-one landlord: Tainan's total area was over four thousand square kilometers, which converted to six million mu of arable land.

Of course, one day in the future, the Grain Corporation would certainly have to divide up the family property... a capitalist society, after all — if the Transmigrators didn't get their share of the family property, what would the lords use to build their own fortunes?

So even now, the Crossing Regime didn't refuse private land purchases: the Transmigrators' ultimate goal was to divide the plain into private farms similar to those in North America, so as long as someone came to buy, the chief landlords were all welcoming. What was the alternative? The lords themselves going out to farm those several million mu?

Yes, anyone could buy land from the Grain Company and become a landlord — as long as they could meet the requirements.

What requirements? First, of course, was having money.

Here, farms were sold with five hundred mu as the starting price, and the Grain Company's warmly recommended figure was two thousand mu and up. So, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the penniless immigrants who came to Dayuan couldn't afford to buy a farm.

And the few local old-money types and merchants who brought silver with them didn't dare to buy.

Unlike the land in an old-money type's conception, the Transmigrators' farms were not meant for the old wealth to recruit tenants and collect rent. On the land here, not only could you simply not hire any tenant farmers, but even if you did, after one grain season ended, the old wealth's entire family would have to go begging.

Yes, a certain Government's tax rate for private farms was formulated based on one farm-owner household plus a few temporary workers.

In other words, a farm-owner family hired a tractor to plow, bought pesticides and fertilizer, then used mechanized harvesting... the harvest from two thousand mu of land, after paying all costs and taxes, would only amount to that of a rich peasant household, or a middle-class family.

This situation was very common in later-era America: rednecks who owned private ranches or farms might technically be millionaires or multimillionaires, but their assets were all real estate, and their liquid capital was extremely scarce.

The majority of farm owners owed bank loans, and if disaster struck, these well-off individuals would likewise lose their ancestral family property.

And the few old-money types who had come to Dayuan were now facing exactly this situation: under the land policy the Transmigrators had designed, the old wealth's low-efficiency tenant-plus-hoe model would go bankrupt in the very first year after buying land.

So after studying the land policy thoroughly, the old-money types who had originally been full of enthusiasm all dropped to their knees — they couldn't comprehend this strange land policy, and most of them thought it was some kind of moneymaking scam by the local authorities.

One had to realize, a high-efficiency farm-owner household, exclusively enjoying the harvest of two thousand mu, still lived so tightly — if the old wealth kept muddling along with tenant farmers, they were absolutely certain to die.

In fact, aside from having a bit of silver in their pockets, the old wealth here were just ordinary households with no power or influence — Great Ming scholarly ranks held no currency in Dayuan, and that whole routine of committing outrages and running roughshod over the countryside was something they could forget about entirely.

And so the current situation had become a tangled mess.

The Grain Company was dying to sell every piece of opened-up field to private farm owners, so it could just be responsible for providing technical support. Yet on this side, there was no one but paupers and old-money types with heads full of outdated thinking — not a single one of the knowledgeable, skilled, and financially capable new-type farm owners the Transmigrators had hoped for...

So the land had never been able to sell.

This was the source of Mi Shuo and the others' headache: the entire society was too new and too green, lacking a qualified middle class. Because of this, those of them who controlled the resources couldn't focus their energy on technological upgrades and could only bury their heads in farming and opening up wasteland — which was, in truth, a waste of the Transmigrators.

After hearing the two pieces of bad news, Mi Shuo had a splitting headache and was already considering his fallback. "Sigh, if that's the case, then we'll just have to reduce the acreage of wasteland we open up."

But Liang Le, on the contrary, sat up straight in his chair at this. "No, not only must we not reduce it — we need to expand the wasteland reclamation area!"

"Make up for losses outside the dike from inside the dike!" Liang Le said, rising and pacing the room with his hands behind his back. "If the fertilizer can't keep up, then we should expand the planting area all the more. With proper field management, the yield will still be higher than those farmlands in Great Ming no matter what."

Liang Le paused, glanced at his wristwatch. "There's no time today — I've got too much on my plate here. Tomorrow, let's go down and take a look around."

Mi Shuo nodded and then headed out the door. And Liang Le, after a brief rest, buried himself once more in the endless documents and meetings.

Originally, given his temperament, a spur-of-the-moment field trip was exactly what he ought to be doing. But that was no longer possible: as of the end of 1628, the permanent population under the Transmigrators' control had surged to four hundred thousand, with the transient population also above fifty thousand.

Even in later generations, four hundred fifty thousand people was the population of a standard county. And to manage this population, it was an absolute necessity for a portion of full-time cadres to sit in offices... such as the gentlemen of the Cabinet, such as a supporting staff of clerks.

This wasn't bureaucracy. When a power base grew to a certain size, it was inevitable that full-time civil officials would appear. Liang Le could no longer roam the fields and ditches as he used to, working on the spot with a few subordinates behind him.

Early the next morning, the two set out from the Chikan District Government, still riding an electric tricycle, and bringing along the office director.

Heading all the way east from Chikan, after passing through large stretches of residential areas, as the road surface material degraded from asphalt to cinders and gravel, fields planted with all kinds of plants appeared accordingly on both sides of the road.

Since the Tainan Plain in this period was still very primitive, the coastal land along the side near the strait was entirely saline soil and lagoons, so the land belt the Transmigrators had chosen to cultivate was gathered on the plain between the Central Mountain Range and the coast — the land near the mountains, due to the rock layer beneath, was likewise unsuitable for agricultural activity.

In other words, the Chikan District and the large residential areas currently built along the Taijiang were all constructed on saline soil and hadn't encroached on any farmland.

So by the time crops appeared beside the road, the tricycle had actually already traveled nearly ten kilometers straight east from the seaside.

The crop varieties along the roadside were very mixed: rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, sugar beets, soybeans, sugarcane, sorghum, barley... and so on and so forth.

In short, for crops from every corner of the world — whether from Great Ming or from the West, whether native or imported — there were experimental fields allocated here.

These experimental fields, targeting nearly all crop varieties, had been initiated and pushed forward last year when Liang Le and Mi Shuo first arrived in Dayuan.

This was a necessary piece of homework: regarding the climate and soil conditions of Tainan after 1627, there were no historical records; so the Transmigrators first had to run a round of experimental fields before they could grasp the detailed agricultural data of this place and make targeted adjustments to crop varieties.

The Dutch who had occupied this place in the original timeline had recorded some simple climate data in their diaries, but this bit of data was far too simplistic and fell far short of the requirements of Liang Le and Mi Shuo, who had once worked as agricultural technicians.

And after over a year of cultivation and planting, the Grain Company's side had now mastered detailed data on Tainan's soil, climate, water conservancy, and every other aspect. One could say that the reason all kinds of field crops could grow smoothly in the future was that this data was the foundation.

Watching the fields flash by along the way, smelling the fruity aromas wafting from the various crops, the two Transmigrators sitting on the electric tricycle enjoying the breeze felt their moods inexplicably lift considerably.

Waving a hand to have the cart stop casually by the roadside, Liang Le stood on the ridge of a soybean field covered in sprawling vines, stamped his feet hard a few times, then looked up and said, "I think the old method is still the most reliable. For the initial planting on all new fields, the variety should be soybeans. No other crops to be considered."