Chapter 105: Threshing Grain

In mid-August, the autumn air was high and crisp. Under the deep blue sky, Cloud Dream Marsh welcomed the earliest flock of wild geese returning south. Beneath the V-shaped formation, the great earth was coated in a layer of white frost, the grasses and trees withered and yellowing.

Yet around the hamlet where people lived and worked, there was no bleakness at all. Outside the five-mu homesteads, children drooled as they watched the fruit on the trees turn red with longing eyes; in the fields, golden ears of rice swayed and danced in the breeze.

In Sunset Hamlet of Cloud Dream Township, on the open ground beside the farmland, bent-over villagers busied themselves everywhere. This was the harvest season, the busiest time of year for farmers, and not a single idler could be found in the whole hamlet.

Hei Fu, his leg wound mostly healed, could no longer sit still and wanted to come out and help. Standing by the soft, cool paddy field, his nose filled with the ripe fragrance of rice, the days of chase and slaughter, of living on the knife's edge, seemed to recede a little further from him.

At this moment, his eldest brother and sister-in-law, leading several hired laborers employed by their household, were facing the rice, backs to the sky, sickles in hand, cutting the grain in the paddy.

Since Hei Fu had become a petty official, their family's livelihood had improved considerably; even their farm tools had all been replaced with bronze and iron. Looking at the other households nearby, some were still using stone sickles…

Even with an iron sickle, cutting rice stubble was still not fast. The work was exhausting — after a whole day, your back felt nearly broken.

But you couldn't afford not to harvest quickly. Once rice ripened, it could not stay in the field too long.

Ah, this was the trouble with having too much land. Now Hei Fu's family had three people holding noble rank; although nominally they had divided the household, the land was farmed together. At the start of the eighth month, his eldest brother had only helped Hei Fu harvest half of the hundred mu of millet land where compost had been applied, leaving another hundred mu of millet land fertilized the old way, plus a hundred mu of paddy rice.

That said, farm work could not be rushed, and Hei Fu's family was hardly the sort of skinflint who worked hired hands to death. Seeing the laborers were tired, he called them to sit on the paddy ridge for a while. They set down their sickles, took off their bamboo hats, dusted their sleeves with both hands, drank a few mouthfuls of plain water brought by the women, ate two bowls of rice steamed by Hei Fu's mother, and the master and hired hands chatted idly for a while, in perfect harmony.

If Han Fei, the eminent disciple of Xunzi, were still alive and saw this scene, he would surely frown and say something like, "The master does not love the hired hand, nor does the hired hand love the master." But with the harvest in sight, the field-owner's face brimmed with joy, and the hired laborers were happy from the heart as well — after all, as agreed beforehand, the bigger the harvest, the more grain they would receive as their share.

After the brief rest, it was back to the heavy labor.

Hei Fu watched from above for a while, then could not resist wanting to go down and help. But Zhong would not allow him into the paddy field because of his injury, so Hei Fu volunteered himself and, together with his younger brother Jing, took on the work of threshing.

The cut rice was stacked in bundles on the paddy ridges, each bundle of a just-right weight — too much and you couldn't carry it all, too little and it wasted time.

Hei Fu's nephew Yang, though only seven, had already begun to help. The child obediently squatted at the field's edge, helping carry bundle after bundle of grain from the ridge to the threshing spot. After several trips, he was drenched in sweat from running. Yet under the adults' praise, the child was utterly delighted, though his little face was scratched by the stalks, which made one's heart ache to see.

Their family's threshing tool was actually just a large wooden tub, called a "pouring bushel" or "half-bushel." Its working principle was very simple: grip the lower end of the ripe rice stalks with both hands and beat them forcefully against the inner wall of the tub to knock the grains off.

Around the tub's edge was a ring of tightly woven bamboo strips, so that even if the threshed grain flew outward, it would be blocked by the bamboo and fall back into the tub.

Hei Fu grabbed a handful of grain stalks with both hands, raised them high above his head, and swung. The whooshing sound of the grain cutting through the air and the impact of the grain striking the inner walls of the pouring bushel were pleasing to the ear, and then one could see grain after grain of golden rice leaving the stalks and leaping into the tub.

"When the half-bushel rings, ten thousand taels of gold; with grain in hand, the heart knows no panic."

For some reason, Hei Fu recalled this old saying from his hometown in his previous life. Over two thousand years, the farm work of Chinese peasants had not really changed much.

Besides this simplest kind of wooden tub, Hei Fu noticed that some households nearby were using flails. That tool consisted of a long handle and a set of flat bamboo strips arranged side by side, looking like an oversized nunchaku, used to beat millet, rice, hemp, and the like to make the seeds fall.

Hei Fu was observant and secretly did a rough calculation of the time. In truth, whether it was the half-bushel or the flail, both were time-consuming and exhausting, and the grain threshed was not clean — it had to be winnowed clean before it could be used to pay rent or carried home and stored in the granary.

"It's too late for this year. Next year, I might be able to have my brother-in-law try making that kind of foot-operated wooden threshing machine. That thing is far more efficient than the half-bushel and the flail."

"Second Brother, your leg still has a dull ache — rest a while. There isn't much grain left; I can handle it."

The one threshing with Hei Fu was his younger brother Jing. Jing was sixteen, at the age when he was still growing, and in half a year he had grown several inches taller. After being spurred on by Hei Fu the year before, Jing had also become much more sensible. Over the past few months, Hei Fu had arranged for him to study reading and writing in the township, to prepare for entering the academy as a disciple when spring came next year. He heard that Jing was very diligent in the township hamlet and could already write complete sentences; he only came home to help during the busy farming season.

Part of the reason Hei Fu had become a Qin official was to get Jing registered as a disciple, exempting him from military service and avoiding the great war between Qin and Chu. But now, after that incident, he truly was not sure whether he could even keep his post. Even if he kept it, he had heard that the County Right Commandant would soon be transferred away; without that backing, Hei Fu would have a hard time getting by in the commandant's system.

"You can't put all your eggs in my one basket. The Qin laws are too strict. In case I one day commit an offense and am dismissed from office, Jing must have other paths out…"

As Hei Fu pondered this, he sat down beside Zhong and listened to his eldest brother chat with a neighboring farmer. Over the past year, as their family had prospered day by day, his eldest brother was no longer the tongue-tied man of the past; he had become talkative. And because he was honest and kind-hearted, he had won the neighbors' trust. During hamlet sacrifices, they even asked him to distribute the meat on their behalf… though of course, there might also have been an element of currying favor out of fear of Hei Fu the Chief's fierce reputation.

Seeing this, a plan suddenly sprang to Hei Fu's mind!

…

After several days of busy work, the once-abundant ears of rice in the fields had vanished, leaving only short-cut stubble standing lonely in the paddy.

By this point, Hei Fu's family's rice paddies and millet fields had all been harvested. Oh, and there were also the ten-plus mu of sugarcane planted in the spring, which were growing vigorously. But those would not be harvested until winter began, when the cane was at its sweetest.

After the grain was harvested, the farm work was not yet over. The grain was carried home and had to be spread out overnight on large bamboo mats, ensuring it was ventilated and aired to dry off the damp and prevent mold. Midway through, they had to constantly use a rake to turn it over on the surface, flipping the grain to speed up air-drying.

By the next day, it could be spread out under the blazing sun to dry — the government office would not accept wet grain, and when collecting rent they measured by volume, not weight, to avoid unfairness from varying degrees of dryness.

At this stage, the grain was still mixed with a large amount of debris, husks, and broken shells, all of which had to be removed one by one.

Sieving could not get it all. Hei Fu found that his family used dried, large plantain leaves as fans. The force could not be too heavy or too light — it had to be just enough to blow away the light debris, leaving only the plump grains behind.

Fanning listlessly, Hei Fu thought to himself, "Next year, I can also have my brother-in-law make a hand-cranked winnowing fan. That thing is not only a sharp tool for winnowing grain, but also comes in handy when pounding rice."

Looking over everything, Hei Fu realized just how terribly backward productivity was in this era. Not to mention the planting season — even in the harvesting process, to his layman's eyes regarding farm work, nearly every step had much that could be improved.

At the same time, Hei Fu also borrowed the "dan" used for measuring volume from the hamlet gatekeeper's house. It was actually just a large hollow wooden tub. They poured the dried grain harvested from each mu into it in one go. After a round of calculations, that hundred mu of millet fertilized the old way indeed still yielded less than two dan per mu.

As for the hundred mu of "test fields" where compost fertilizer had been applied, because Hei Fu was not at ease, he selected the millet harvested from over ten more mu and weighed them one by one. He found that, just as Zhong had said a few days earlier, the yield per mu was close to three dan…

"The millet seed is the same, the original land is adjacent, and the watering and weeding were no different. The only difference is the fertilizer used. So it seems that composted and retted fertilizer is indeed more effective than fresh dung and urine!" Patting a full dan of millet, Hei Fu said.

Not only did the results show this, but Zhong also recalled the process of tending the fields. The crops where composted and retted fertilizer had been applied had indeed grown lusher and had noticeably more grain ears. Those few old farmers who had mocked their family in the spring for playing with piles of dung and urine had been clicking their tongues in wonder these past few days, and were trying every which way to get Zhong to tell them the secret of his farming.

"The sharper old farmers have probably already guessed the reason. Next spring they'll surely imitate it. This secret won't be a secret anymore."

But Hei Fu was not worried at all. He laughed and said, "My leg has fully healed; I must return to my post at the station. How about this: tomorrow is the day to go to the township hamlet to pay the rent. I will go out together with Eldest Brother, and just so happen to meet with you the Assistant of the Fields Section of Cloud Dream Township."

Just then, Hei Fu's sister-in-law passed by and asked curiously, "In past years, the rent was handled by the petty officials of the township. Why must you go see the Assistant of the Fields Section this time?"

Zhong caught on. "Second Brother, could it be that you want to tell the Assistant of the Fields Section about the composting method and have him help present it to the authorities? A method that can increase the yield per mu by so much is indeed a sharp tool for farming… Our family cannot keep it selfishly hidden…"

Eldest Brother was still too honest. Hei Fu laughed. "Eldest Brother, it's not me presenting it — it's you! If this succeeds, Eldest Brother will surely be rewarded. Who knows, the authorities might even grant you an official post!"

Zhong, however, was still somewhat dazed and muttered to himself, "Wasn't this method something you, Hei Fu, heard from a traveling merchant from within the Passes? Could presenting this old method from within the Passes really earn a reward? It doesn't make sense…"

(End of chapter)