Chapter 595: Guests from Afar

When Li Long returned in the evening, Sister Yang told him something.

Someone came to look for him in the afternoon, saying they wanted to buy a harvester.

Buy a harvester?

Hearing that someone wanted to buy a harvester, Li Long was quite happy. After all, there was one harvester left, and if it could be sold, that would be clearing the field.

He wouldn't go to pull another harvester until spring. This harvester was considered a steady stream of income, and also a stable source of revenue.

In a situation where cooperatives hadn't emerged and land hadn't been gathered for large-scale cultivation, harvesters would have a usage cycle of ten to twenty years.

Twenty years later, when cooperatives emerged and land began to be unified for large-scale cultivation, the efficiency of harvesters wouldn't keep up, and then combine harvesters, or "combines," would be used.

The combines of that time were different from the current ones. The current ones could only harvest wheat, while those could harvest wheat, corn, and oil sunflowers, with comprehensive usage and very high efficiency.

At that time, high-horsepower tractors also appeared, and then crawler tractors would gradually withdraw from the stage of farmland cultivation.

Li Long, who had participated in this process in his previous life, was very clear about it; he only needed to grasp the development context well and advance or push it at the right time.

He wasn't greedy either; he only needed to participate a little bit ahead of time at each change and eat the first and most delicious bite.

Just like the fish in Little Haizi, he was considered the first to commercialize fish; there were sporadic ones before, but some were caught, and some couldn't earn money.

He was considered the first to use fish and mountain goods from the mountains to earn his first pot of gold.

In his previous life, he really just held a gun and didn't know how to hunt, and he never hunted. At that time, people were truly honest; he kept the gun as he was told, and he honestly kept it.

Actually, at that time, keeping the gun himself, it was also very easy to find bullets.

If he had really taken the gun into the mountains, figured out the situation, and shot one or two wild boars, he would have been enlightened.

But no one did that.

People were educated to be orderly, and thus lost the path and opportunity for breakthroughs and rapid development.

In this life, he could be considered to be taking an unconventional path.

"Did that person say where they were from?" Li Long asked. "When will they come back?"

"I heard the accent, it sounded like a minority person, and they said they would come back tomorrow morning."

"Okay, I know." Li Long drained the water from the jeep, and this time brought back a few kilograms of cleaned fish.

Sister-in-law Liang Yuemei and mother Du Chunfang said that he and Gu Xiaoxia didn't have time to clean them. Sister Yang also had her own things to do, and since they were free at home, they cleaned the fish and let Li Long bring them back.

They said to divide the fish into several piles and freeze them, and when eating, thaw them, use warm water to thoroughly soften them before cooking, and the taste would be just as fresh.

Li Long didn't decline; this was all a gesture of goodwill.

He took the fish, wrapped them well, put them in a basket, and hung them in mid-air, so he didn't have to worry about rats causing trouble.

If one wanted to freeze them in the snow, they couldn't touch the ground. The surroundings had to be packed with snow, otherwise, rats would find them and then cause trouble.

In his previous life, when he slaughtered a pig, he specifically put the pig bones in a bag and froze them in the snow in the courtyard, with the bag against the courtyard wall and snow packed on top, thinking it would be fine.

As a result, when he went to dig them out before the New Year, he found that rats had already drilled several paths inside. Not much meat was eaten, but the bones were covered in rat droppings and urine, which was a waste.

So Li Long was especially careful in handling this.

After getting the fish ready, Sister Yang's dinner was also ready.

When Gu Xiaoxia returned, she carried two small bags, saying it was millet issued by the Education Bureau.

It wasn't easy to get millet in this day and age, so Sister Yang put the millet in the storage room, saying she would boil millet porridge for them to drink tomorrow.

Gu Bowen came over, Han Fang returned, and everyone ate dinner together.

The lights in the big courtyard were all replaced with high-wattage bulbs, and the room was very bright. Li Long didn't care about this bit of electricity cost; since he had money, he had to make the quality of life as good as possible in this big environment.

After dinner, Han Fang went to do her homework, and Gu Bowen walked back with his hands behind his back. It was already dark, so Li Long gave him a flashlight, but Gu Bowen didn't turn it on, just tucked it into his pocket and walked back like he was taking a stroll.

Gu Xiaoxia returned to the bedroom, and Li Long first went to the glass room in the back, looked at the vegetable seedlings there, and added another shovel of coal to the stove.

His idea was to keep the temperature inside as much as possible, but it was basically impossible. It wasn't a specialized greenhouse, and although the coal in the stove was pressed with coal dust at night, it would slowly go out in the second half of the night, and there would be a gap until it was added again in the morning.

He was too lazy to get up in the middle of the night, so the growth of these vegetable seedlings wasn't that good.

Li Long himself was doing an experiment, so he didn't think it would be that smooth. At least looking at it now, the vegetable seedlings were growing quite well, and the temperature and humidity in the glass shed were also quite good, which was enough.

Getting up the next day, after breakfast, everyone else left, and Li Long went to the glass shed again, raked out the residual ash in the stove, set up a new stove, and returned to the big courtyard.

Since someone was coming today, he would leave a little later.

He added boiling water to the jeep's radiator, started it, warmed up the car, and drove it to make space. After turning off the engine, he went to clean up the tractor head.

If the other party didn't drive a tractor over, he would have to start his own tractor head for demonstration.

Then he went to lift the plastic sheet off the last harvester, clean up the residual snow, and make space.

If it could be sold, he would sell it; keeping it was also a matter.

At ten-thirty in the morning, a knock on the door sounded, and Li Long went over to open the door.

Sister Yang had given a reminder, and Li Long had also made assumptions; it was indeed two minority comrades who came.

"Hello, is this Comrade Li Long?" The first to speak was a middle-aged man wearing a Zhongshan suit, looking about the same age as Yushanjiang, followed by a man in his thirties who looked very much like his younger brother.

Both of them were wearing fur hats, with the earflaps flipped up and tied on top; they weren't wearing overcoats, and in this weather, one could see that both of them were shivering a bit.

He didn't know if their overcoats were left at the hotel.

"I am, hello hello, come in, Adashi, please come in." Li Long roughly guessed that the two were Uyghur comrades, so he immediately invited them in.

"I read in the newspaper that you are a model of ethnic unity," the comrade in his forties said with a smile after entering. "We are very happy to meet you. My name is Abulaiti, and this is my younger brother Abudusaimaiti."

"Hello to you both, may I ask where you are from? Did you come just to see the harvester?"

"We are from Yili," Abulaiti said. "We just wanted to see the harvester that the newspaper said was very good."

"You must have had a hard time crossing the Guozigou, right?" Li Long invited the two into the room, poured them tea, and then pointed to the cups, saying, "New cups."

"Comrade Li Long knows Yili quite well, huh?" Abulaiti didn't expect Li Long to know about Guozigou, and also know that it was very difficult to walk here.

At this time, it wasn't like the future, where there were mobile phones and the internet, and various information didn't need to be walked; one could just search for it.

Forty years later, because of a song "Apple Fragrance," many people across the country knew about Yili and Six-Star Street. But at this time, what Northern Xinjiang people knew most about Yili was apples.

And at this time, there was no Guozigou Bridge; Yili people had to walk for three days to get from the river valley to WLMQ, one day from Yili to Guozigou, a whole day to cross Guozigou, and it was easy to have a car accident in winter.

From Guozigou, walking the Wuyi Highway to WLMQ, a car still had to run for a day.

It wasn't like forty years later, when one could drive there in a day.

"I know a little. The apples there are very good," Li Long said with a smile:

"Turpan's grapes, Hami's melons, Yecheng's pomegranates are praised by everyone, Korla's fragrant pears are the best in the world, Yili's apples are top-notch, Artux's figs are famous, Xiayedi's watermelons are sweet and sandy, Kashgar's cherries are like pearls, Jiashi's sweet melons are sweet enough to make your teeth fall out, Hotan's thin-skinned walnuts don't need to be knocked, Kuqa's white apricots have the best taste. There are melons and fruits all year round, and once you come to XJ, you don't want to go home."

At this time, Yili's apples were still the most famous in Northern and Southern Xinjiang; Aksu's apples didn't have as much fame as Yili's at this time. It was just that later, Yili's apples were almost wiped out due to a disaster, and then they slowly faded out of people's vision. Forty years later, a large number of tourists poured into Yili and found out that the local old apples like Xialimu, Gala, Qiulimu, and Xiaqiuzi looked ugly, but tasted fragrant and sweet, with a little bit of sourness, and then people recalled again that forty years ago, the apples here were truly good.

Abulaiti smiled, and Abudusaimaiti behind him took out two apples from the black leather bag he was carrying and placed them on the table, saying to Li Long:

"These are the apples we brought, Comrade Li Long, try them."

The Yili apples at this time were truly big, the kind the size of a bowl. Li Long had actually eaten Yili's Red Five-Star at this time, which was a mealy apple. The Guoguang that Abudusaimaiti brought was another taste.

"Thank you," Li Long said with a smile. "You came to see the harvester, I mean, if you like it, how will you transport it back?"

"We have already found a transport vehicle. If we reach an agreement, that truck has already gone to WLMQ to deliver goods, and it will come over on the way back to pull the harvester back," Abulaiti explained.

"That's fine, you warm up, and then we'll look at the harvester. I'll start my tractor in a while and demonstrate it for you. Do you grow more wheat on your side?"

"No, we don't just grow wheat, we also grow corn, oil sunflowers, rapeseed, and rice. We were thinking that besides corn, the other few could be harvested by a harvester, right?" Abulaiti asked.

"Hmm, yes, you can," Li Long thought for a while and said. "They are all about the same, as long as you knock down the stalks in the field, the tractor with the harvester can harvest them."

The water conservancy project in the Yili River Valley was built by people led by Lin Zexu when he came, and the famous one was the Imperial Canal. And it is said that growing rice in the river valley also started from the time of Lin Zexu and Zuo Zongtang.

!.

The two guests drank water, and Li Long also broke the apple and ate half; this apple was truly fragrant and delicious.

Then they went out, and Li Long pointed to the harvester and introduced it part by part, and after the introduction, let them look at it themselves, while Li Long went to boil water.

Abudusaimaiti saw that there was only one harvester in the courtyard, and muttered a bit:

"With just this one harvester, could it be broken?"

"Let's see in a while." Abulaiti was also a bit unsure; if they bought a broken one back, it wouldn't be easy to repair after coming from so far away.

Seeing Li Long so enthusiastic, he didn't want to ask now.

Besides, seeing that Li Long had a jeep in his courtyard, it was even harder to ask. There really weren't many people in the Yili River Valley who could drive a jeep; this Li Long had a great background.

The water had been in the pot, and it had already boiled, but after removing the coal, it cooled down a bit, and now Li Long added water again, and it boiled again very quickly.

Li Long scooped the water into a bucket, took it out, poured it into the tractor, and tried it with the crank. It felt quite heavy, so he went to clip two pieces of red charcoal to burn underneath.

Seeing the two brothers looking at the harvester, Li Long came over and said proactively:

"I pulled five harvesters from the factory in total, and this is the last one. You can look, and you can also try it in a while; whether to buy or not depends on your own situation.

This one is the initial model, so it will be a bit cheaper at this time. If you come next spring, there will be an improved model, but it will be more expensive then."

"How much more expensive?" Abulaiti asked.

Both brothers' Mandarin was quite good, even better than Halimu's, so Li Long guessed that they had been working and living with Han comrades for a long time, so they spoke quite fluently.

"Fifty to eighty yuan more expensive."

"Then how much is this one?" Abudusaimaiti asked.

"Five hundred and fifty yuan," Li Long said. "Unified price."

Abudusaimaiti looked at his brother.

"Comrade Li Long, how many mu of land can such a harvester harvest in a day?" Abulaiti asked.

"I harvested wheat in the summer, and I harvested more than a hundred mu in one day at most," Li Long thought for a while and said. "Actually, I could have harvested more. But because the road back and forth was quite far.

This year was the first time using a harvester to harvest for others, and some people didn't believe it, so the places I went to harvest were quite far."

Both brothers could understand; after all, it was a new thing, and it needed a process for everyone to accept it.

"A hundred mu a day, then how much do you charge for harvesting one mu?" Abudusaimaiti asked again.

"Two yuan."

"So expensive?" Abulaiti was a bit surprised.

"The price for plowing land here is already four or five yuan per mu," Li Long said with a smile. "The harvesting price is two yuan per mu, which everyone can still accept. We have a lot of land here, and each family has ten, twenty, or more mu.

If harvested manually, the wheat at home would take several days to harvest. Using a harvester, it's harvested in a moment, and the saved time can be used to do other things.

Besides, you should also know that harvesting wheat is still very hard work. Your Yili River Valley is fine, the climate is good, and it's not that hot in the summer.

Here, in the wheat season in the summer, it's hot to thirty-seven or thirty-eight degrees during the day, and some people even faint from heat while harvesting wheat manually."

Both brothers understood; the climates on both sides were different, and the degree of acceptance of the harvester should also be different.

"You can actually charge a bit cheaper on your side, of course, the pricing depends on yourselves. If you buy the harvester back, I think it should be the first one in the Yili River Valley, so the pricing power is in your own hands.

In addition, this harvester can also cut grass. After I finished harvesting wheat this year, I cut thousands of mu of grassland for the herdsmen brothers in the mountains, and it was also very smooth."

The two brothers looked at each other and didn't speak.

Li Long didn't say anything more; he turned around to start the tractor.

Whether it could be sold or not was another matter; since others had come from so far away, what should be introduced should be introduced in place, and what should be demonstrated should be demonstrated in place.

The charcoal fire was almost burned, and Li Long cranked the crank again. He found it was much lighter, so he didn't press the decompression, cranked it several times first, and then pressed the decompression.

Abulaiti came over to help, but Li Long had already cranked the tractor to fly, released the decompression, and the engine's muffled sound made Abudusaimaiti shake his head, looking at the slightly pale black smoke rings coming out of the chimney, thinking it wouldn't start this time.

It would have to come again.

However, what he didn't expect was that after removing the decompression, Li Long actually cranked it three or four more times, and the faster he cranked, the sound from the small four-wheel tractor engine changed from the "keng-keng" sound of an old cow to a cheerful one, "guang-guang-guang," and it actually started!

"Hehe, almost embarrassed myself," Li Long pulled out the crank and smiled. "It's okay, it started, come, let's put the harvester on, and then I'll demonstrate it for you."

"Did you adjust this tractor?" Abudusaimaiti asked while helping to move the harvester.

"No adjustment," Li Long drove the tractor head into place, guided the two brothers to adjust the harvester, and said, "It's the same as it was originally.

By the way, let me tell you, although this is a first-generation harvester, it's very sturdy. I harvested nearly three thousand mu of land this wheat season, and the money I earned was almost enough to buy a tractor, and this harvester never broke down."

"Really?" Hearing that Li Long earned a tractor in one wheat season, the two brothers' originally swaying hearts immediately became firm.

"Of course it's true. This year I plan to organize a cooperative and get a few more harvesters, and everyone will work together. We have large plots of land here, and with the demonstration this year, there should be more people who want to use harvesters to harvest wheat next year."

After Li Long guided the two to put the harvester on the tractor, he turned off the tractor, removed one of the engine's belts, and put on the harvester's belt.

Abudusaimaiti didn't believe Li Long's words, and when Li Long was about to crank the tractor, he snatched it and said:

"Let me try."

Li Long smiled and let him try.

Abudusaimaiti should also have a tractor at home; he skillfully pressed his hand on the decompression, inserted the crank, and started cranking.

It was fine with decompression, and it wasn't particularly strenuous to crank. When smoke started to rise from the chimney, Abudusaimaiti felt it was about right, and as soon as he released the decompression, a huge recoil force made his body sink, and he didn't even crank half a turn, and the tractor "keng-keng" twice and stalled.

"Comrade Li Long, you have great strength!"

Abulaiti knew his younger brother's strength wasn't small, but it was obvious that he couldn't crank it, so he exclaimed: "I really couldn't tell!"

"Haha, I'm young," Li Long smiled, took the crank from Abudusaimaiti, who was blushing, and started demonstrating various operations of the harvester while looking at the tractor head he cranked quite easily. (End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 596 =====