Chapter 318: Field Crops

Right now, Dayuan has three sources of nitre.

1: The excrement of all permanent residents, plus some rotten fish and shrimp, processed through nitre-bed composting into a finished product.

2: Nitre shipped over from India by Westerners.

3: Nitre collected from the Great Ming.

The current situation is this: aside from the first source, which yields a steady output of nitre, the latter two are both highly unreliable — shipments arrive intermittently and can only be used as off-plan matériel.

And what about nitre consumption?

Number one is, naturally, the military. Whether it's the black powder for the troops or the diatomaceous earth nitroglycerin for the mines, both require large quantities of nitre as raw material.

Number two is the Kiln Area Base itself. Industrial production consumes vast amounts of the three acids and two alkalis, and among these, nitric acid is an absolutely essential and the most widely used chemical.

After consumption by those two departments, if... if there is still a bit of nitre left over, then the Agriculture Department might possibly get a little urea to use for farming.

So from the very start, the Grain Company never pinned its hopes on urea, that great agricultural killer. You have to understand, Tainan's currently reclaimed farmland area is 300,000 mu, and within the next few months, Mi Shuo's plan is to double the total acreage, so whether that tiny bit of urea exists or not makes no difference — a mere drop in the bucket.

Unless a fleet lands on Bengal Bay and delivers mining machinery and railways to the native rajahs sitting on the nitre mines there, this raw material shortage is unsolvable, and Mi Shuo and his people have long been mentally prepared for that.

This is also why Liang Le and the others, during today's inspection, unanimously decided to expand the soybean planting area.

Leguminous crops have rhizobia and a natural nitrogen-fixing ability, which is equivalent to carrying their own nitrogen fertilizer — to some extent, this sidesteps the urea problem. That's why newly reclaimed wild land usually has a legume crop planted as the first rotation to enrich the soil.

This kind of soil nutrient deficiency is unheard of in later generations — instead, soil compaction from farmers over-fertilizing is everywhere you look.

So under Tainan's current agricultural conditions, golden-yellow soybeans have become the crop with the highest degree of suitability.

The yellow soybean is the highest-yielding variety of soybean, originally native to China, and called "shu" in ancient texts. This crop not only provides rich plant protein but also yields soybean oil, making it one of the most important societal crops.

Soybeans have an extremely wide range of uses. First, the glycerin used for mining explosives can be refined from soybean oil. Additionally, the paint made by mixing soybean oil with tung oil is exactly what the Kiln District can currently produce.

Soybeans are not only used as food, made into various soy products and soy sauce; their protein is also extracted to make all sorts of food products... things like certain synthetic steaks, crab sticks, and so on have soy protein mixed in — anyway, the plebs can't taste the difference.

The soybean cake left after pressing out the oil is a high-quality protein feed that livestock greatly enjoy. Moreover, soybean cake can also be used to fertilize fields, though this usage was replaced by chemical fertilizers in later generations. And because Dayuan is so poor, all the soybean cake goes to feeding livestock, with none left over for fertilizer.

In later generations, the soybean, which originated in China, became one of the world's largest crops by output. Those countries in the Americas, relying on their vast plains, have instead become soybean exporters... China has to import 300 million tons of soybeans every year for feed and oil pressing. This has also become one of the nation's weak points: the moment a trade war breaks out, feed and meat prices immediately start fluctuating.

There's no helping it: whether in industry or agriculture, the wealth plains can generate far exceeds that of mountain lands, while the cost is far lower.

Having decided that all newly reclaimed farmland would uniformly launch soybean projects, Liang Le and Mi Shuo got back into the Ling three-wheeler and continued driving east.

Not far ahead lay the proper field-crop zone. Across the boundless plain stretched vast tracts of potato fields, sweet potato fields, and corn fields. Farm workers, ant-like, were laboring in the fields, and in the distance, tractors as small as black dots could be seen slowly moving.

These three were the staple grain crops ultimately selected by the Grain Company after screening.

The Tainan Plain is warm and moist year-round; the average temperature in July and August is around 33°C, and even in the coldest months of January and February, the average temperature hovers around 16°C.

Coupled with abundant local water sources, aside from some tropical plants, the vast majority of crops can be sown and grown on the Tainan Plain... it's merely a question of yield levels. In fact, many northern crops actually grow even better in warm Tainan.

On the Tainan Plain of later generations, the main crops were rice and sugarcane. These two "high-end goods" have very little market in present-day Dayuan — or rather, the Transmigrators simply can't afford to serve these two Great Lords in the short term.

Rice and sugarcane are both crops that require large amounts of fertilizer and meticulous field management, and that is precisely the Transmigrators' current weak point.

For a cash crop like sugarcane, without enough fertilizer, the yield will be very low... although everyone knows that white sugar is hard currency in the 17th century, even the cleverest housewife can't cook without rice; for now, filling our bellies is the wiser priority.

The same logic applies to rice. Paddy fields that need to hold water not only easily attract terrifying mosquito armies but also require fertilizer, sophisticated irrigation systems, and field management — in short, rice is delicious but the seedlings are hard to grow.

Therefore, the current planting area for these two crops in Tainan is not large.

The ones truly stepping onto the stage are potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn.

The Age of Discovery was an era when East and West began close exchanges, and many plant seeds spread during this period. Among them, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn were basically all introduced into the Great Ming around the late Ming, early Qing timeframe.

These three American crops, rising suddenly as new powers, are the true "Rulers' Gospel," "Dynasty-Stabilizing Great Killers," "the crops most capable of resisting climate anomalies during the Little Ice Age."

What a pity — the Chongzhen brother was just one step late, one step... tears streaming, all the actors in China have collectively taken their calcium supplements.

As Transmigrators well-versed in history, they naturally would not let these three great killers slip by. Therefore, of the already existing 150,000-plus mu of rotationally farmed mature fields, the majority are planted with these three crops.

In later generations, improved potatoes can reach a per-mu yield of 3,000 to 7,000 jin. Yes, that's no satellite launch — in some places, yields of ten thousand jin per mu are nothing unusual.

On the Transmigrators' side, however, since conditions in every aspect can't keep up, the per-mu yield of potatoes is usually around 1,500 to 1,800 jin. Of course, given the existing conditions, this yield is already quite satisfactory; one cannot ask for more.

The per-mu yield of sweet potatoes is similar to that of potatoes. These two crops can not only be eaten fresh but also provide raw starch to food processing plants for making various easy-to-store food products.

As for corn... in later generations, Taiwan's corn industry took another path: fruit corn.

Fruit corn is a type of super sweet corn. Thin-skinned, juicy, it can be eaten raw directly — the thin outer skin bursts with one bite, juice overflowing, just like a fruit.

The Transmigrators naturally wouldn't grow such bourgeois stuff — ordinary corn suitable for field planting is their cup of tea.

Additionally, apart from field corn, on Jinmen Island, where the soil and water are suitable, the Grain Company also arranged for the reclamation of sorghum and corn fields — the Kaoliang liquor of later-generation Jinmen is famous; it doesn't cause headaches after drinking and is a very fine Taiwanese specialty.

The three crops above are the foundation of confidence behind the Transmigrators' large-scale immigration from the Ming country. These high-yield, fast-growing crops, together with rice purchased from Hangzhou and South Asia, have wave after wave withstood the ballooning population.

The reason the Great Golden Dragon Empire, tucked away in a corner, could develop so rapidly lies at its root in these boundless farmlands.

Liang Le and his group traveled along the dirt road, threading through the great fields for a long time before finally approaching the hilly zone near the Central Mountain Range.

The scenery along the way was very monotonous: aside from newly opened soybean fields, there were staple-crop fields growing vigorously, and the rest were all bare, fallow fields.

Due to the fertilizer shortage here, after one or two planting seasons, farmland is usually left fallow for one or two years to restore soil fertility. This method is also frequently used on large farms in later generations — whether it's compacted fields from excessive chemical fertilizer use or ordinary fields with insufficient fertility, both can restore their fertility through fallowing.

... Starting from the Chikan District Government and heading east, after a journey of roughly 40 kilometers, you reach the hilly area. And from here, the Central Mountain Range is not far.

Beneath the soil layer in the mountainous area is a gravel layer, so the arable land area in the hilly zone is zero. Or rather, before the several million mu of land suitable for cultivation in the central plain are developed, no one will come here to farm.

So, that being the case, what did Liang Le and the others come here for?

The hilly area has water conservancy projects.

The Central Mountain Range is the source of all streams and rivers in Tainan. And the Hilly Area Lake Renovation Project, adjacent to the Central Mountain Range, has been the Agriculture Department's key project since this year.

The importance of water conservancy projects to agriculture cannot be overstated. And all along, the agricultural departments and infrastructure departments, including the former Great Office, have invested quite a lot of resources in water conservancy.

Regarding water conservancy, this is not just a matter for agriculture alone. The Transmigrators have suffered greatly in this area — just a few months ago, the first Transmigrator to die an unnatural death, Chen Youguang, perished in a summer rainstorm.

After that incident, the originally fairly steady pace of water conservancy construction immediately shifted up a gear. The Transmigrators, having tasted the power of a 17th-century primeval storm, swiftly mobilized large amounts of manpower and equipment to expand water conservancy works.

The already-built main farmland canals were all widened; the streams and rivers that had only been dredged and reorganized were all widened and deepened. For a main stream like Xingang Creek, the Infrastructure General Company even dispatched a Type 28 Seabed Scoop to start dredging sand and expanding it.

While a series of farm canals and stream-and-river water conservancy projects were being excavated on a large scale, the Central Mountain Range series reservoir project, aimed at thoroughly solving Tainan's water conservancy issues, was also put on the agenda. You have to understand, because it required mobilizing too many resources before, the original Great Office had planned to wait two more years before building the upstream reservoirs.

And what Liang Le and the others came to inspect today was the prelude to the series reservoir project: the Hilly Area Lake Renovation Project.