Chapter 80: True Gold and White Silver

That evening, in a clearing a few dozen paces beyond the mulberry grove of Hei Fu's home, a small earthen pit had been dug, inside which a pile of black manure rose half the height of a man.

There was chicken, duck, and dog dung that the family's two children had gathered from all around in their back-baskets, great slabs of plow-ox dung, and even some human waste… Already quite a few flies had been drawn in, buzzing and swirling around it, and many fellow villagers stood watching from a distance, pointing and gesturing, snickering at Hei Fu's household for piling up dung here.

Jing, gripping a wooden shovel and reeking of the stench, wore a skeptical expression.

"Second Brother, can this really work?"

"Just do as I say, and it'll be fine." As he spoke, Hei Fu tipped a basketful of dry dung onto the pile, inwardly sighing that the development of agriculture truly could not be separated from fertilizer.

Several thousand years ago, when agriculture first emerged, slash-and-burn farming was practiced the world over. In forests or on grasslands, the ancients would bore wood to make fire and set the land ablaze, burning all the vegetation to leave only a ground full of ash. Then they would use stone knives and wooden clubs to poke holes in the earth, drop seeds in, and cover them by treading with their feet.

Slash-and-burn ended right there, with no further management whatsoever, leaving the crops to the mercy of drought, flood, disease, pests, and weeds. Crude as it was, this still counted as artificial cultivation. The yields, however, were very low — harvesting seven or eight dou of grain per mu was considered good.

Looking back now, the ash from "slash-and-burn" was the earliest fertilizer, but the ancients did not understand this. After farming a plot of land for a few years, the soil's strength would be exhausted and the harvest would dwindle, so they would abandon that land, the whole clan migrating to find a new territory and opening up new farmland by the same method, over and over…

The tribes of the Tang, Yu, and Xia dynasties were forever roaming about, and the Yin-Shang moved their capital five times — all connected to this migratory farming method. The farmers of that age had no concept of being rooted to their land and reluctant to move; planting and then running was the norm. It was in this way that the arable land of the Central Plains gradually expanded.

By the Western Zhou and the Spring and Autumn period, once the fertilizing effect of manure was discovered, true settled agriculture finally became possible. The state's people and the wilds' people tilled the land with lei and si plows, the well-field system arose in response, until it was utterly torn apart by the furrows drawn by ox-drawn plowshares…

Nowadays, in the countryside, excrement is the most commonplace thing — by the roadside, in ditches, inside privies, outside pigsties and cattle pens, it is everywhere. A city dweller would surely frown at the sight, but farming folk do not despise its filth, for people of this age already understand that fertilizing with manure can ease the exhaustion of the soil and make the crops grow more gratifyingly.

Just as Mencius said over a hundred years ago: "What the tiller reaps — one man to a hundred mu, and the hundred mu manured — a top husbandman can feed nine people." Meaning that one man tilling a hundred mu of land, all fertilized, can produce enough grain to feed nine mouths! Even the plant ash burned during the slash-and-burn era could not match the fertilizing power of manure.

Thus in the eyes of a farmer, "dung and earth" is not the disparaging term that those literati and scholar-officials toss about in their rhetoric, something to be casually discarded and unfit to touch a wall, but a precious treasure.

The plow-ox is so expensive not only because it can do the work of several laborers during the spring plowing, but also because in the other seasons, the ox is an endlessly producing manure-machine — one pat of ox dung is enough to richly fertilize a sizable patch of land.

A rustic village saying goes: "Dung is true gold, urine is white silver." Vulgar as it is, it makes perfect sense. Do not despise its filth and foulness — this is the very truth of the material cycle, as eternal and unchanging as the sun, moon, and stars high above.

Yet despite the invention of fertilizing, yields per mu had only risen to a few dozen jin. Part of the reason lay in crop varieties and farming techniques, but from Hei Fu's perspective, a major cause of the low yields was that farmers of this era utilized manure far too crudely!

So after finishing piling up the manure heap before them, Hei Fu leaned against the door of his home and explained the principles of composting to Zhong.

Ideas about using microorganisms and fungi to decompose organic matter into humus and the like — he himself only half-understood them, and he had no way of making them clear to Zhong.

Hei Fu could only raise the simplest example close at hand.

"Eldest Brother, in past years have you ever noticed this: when fertilizing the crops with dung, which makes them grow more vigorously — fresh human and animal dung, or the urine and dung that has been steeping for a long time in our family's privy pit?"

At this, Zhong had a sudden flash of understanding: "Indeed there is such a thing — the crops watered with a mix of privy-pit dung and water really do seem to do better!"

"Exactly!"

Hei Fu clapped his hands together: "Fresh excrement, or even dry dung, has fertilizing power, but it is limited in the end. Some method is needed to… fully release that power. Letting it rot in the privy pit is one method; piling it in an outdoor pit for a spell is another. This is steeping fertilizer and composting."

A truth that even a child in a later-age village could grasp was, in the Warring States and Qin era, a mind-opening innovation. For composting, simple as it seems, would not be recorded in agricultural treatises until at least the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties. After the treadle-hammer, Hei Fu had once again tossed out an idea centuries ahead of its time.

"Let's try it by the method Second Brother says!" Hearing that his younger brother's words seemed to hold some sense, Zhong's eyes lit up with interest. For a farmer, nothing was more exciting than something that could boost the harvest.

Just then, several neighbors passed by and amiably greeted Hei Fu and his two brothers.

With Hei Fu serving as Village Chief, promoted to Shangzao, and even Chuan having won the county magistrate's favor and gone to the county seat, Hei Fu's household had plainly become the hottest family in Xiyang Village, and the neighbors all treated them with deference and respect.

That, however, did not stop a few stubborn old farmers from laughing in their faces about the two things their family was doing: hunting everywhere for dung to pile up for fun, and planting sugarcane in the fields.

Because it really did look very foolish.

Village society is closed and ignorant; any new thing is at first treated as a joke. Only when people see real, tangible benefits and taste definite, unmistakable sweetness will they change their view and follow eagerly behind with envy.

This was true of the present ox-plowing and composting, and it would be true in later ages of building roads and bridges, sending children to school, and going to the city for work. The densely populated city is forever the engine of new thought, while the countryside at the margins is always the tail end of the era's tide — suffering the most harm, yet gaining the benefits last and least.

So Hei Fu did not get angry; instead he laughed and loudly declared: "Gentlemen, just watch! When the Field Overseer rates the village's crop yields per mu in the tenth month, my family will surely earn the 'top' grade!"

The neighboring farmers paid no mind, thinking Hei Fu was merely joking, and walked off with a few cheerful replies.

Hei Fu, however, was in earnest. He exhorted Zhong and Jing that, besides the traditional human dung and stable manure, even straw and weeds could be piled in together, as they too would slowly decompose into humus.

"This year we must make our family's grain yield per mu the highest — give them a shock!"

That said, feeling that the compost heap was too dry and would not ferment well, the three brothers loosened their belts on the spot and each took a piss onto the dung pile…

The white silver traced arcs through the air, landing amid the pile of true gold, turning them into a true farmer's treasure with a deeply stirring aroma.

"I heard all these things from that Guanzhong merchant. I'm not sure how long is best to let it compost — let it sit for a month first, then work it into the fields. Remember to turn it often and let it breathe from time to time. Eldest Brother, don't forget to take good care of that sugarcane for me! When autumn comes, I'll have a great use for it!"

After tossing out these words, Hei Fu hitched up his belt, went home to wash himself, hastily ate a few bites of food, bid his mother farewell, and hurriedly packed his traveling bag to return to his post at Huyang Village.

Officials in Qin's county seats had one rest day every five days; a petty officer like Hei Fu, a Village Chief, had one rest day every ten days. He usually saved them up and took three days off each month.

As he left Xiyang Village, looking back at his family's broad fields, neatly plowed into tidy rows, Hei Fu could not help but sigh with emotion:

"Plowing in spring, tilling in summer, harvesting in autumn, storing in winter — truly a life unchanged for a hundred generations."

But sweet sugarcane and stinking compost — once these two things were added to life, they might just bring a different flavor to this autumn…

Though spring had only just arrived, Hei Fu was already beginning to look forward to the coming of autumn.

…

"In the third month they ready the plow; in the fourth they lift their heels. With my wife and children, we carry food to those southern acres; the field overseer comes and is pleased…"

Time flew swiftly. Amid the farming songs, the last days of the first month hurried by in a flurry of busy spring plowing.

The second month was just as hectic. This was the season of Rain Water: peach and plum began to blossom, orioles trilled, hawks soared on high with outstretched wings, and cuckoos darted through the fields, urging the common folk not to miss the farming season…

Hei Fu also stepped up his patrols, mainly to check whether there were any idle loafers in the villages under his public-order jurisdiction. Qin placed extreme importance on the spring plowing; in the first and second months of each year, even the corvée labor rotations were canceled. Whenever there were construction projects, convicts, merchants, and live-in sons-in-law were conscripted first.

Fortunately, aside from a few trivial trifles, throughout the entire second month, none of the villages in Huyang Village's territory encountered any major cases — perhaps Hei Fu's reputation for capturing the tomb robbers had cowed those petty villains. For minor cases, Village Chief Hei Fu had no duty to mediate domestic squabbles; he simply sent them straight to the township seat for the Township Overseer to handle.

During this period, he also took advantage of his rest day to return home once, where together with Zhong, Jing, the four hired farmhands, and two servants assigned by the village heads to help out, they diluted the finished compost and applied it to the fields.

Because their family had a lot of land, at Hei Fu's suggestion, Zhong used compost on ten mu, used the steeped manure from the privy on ten mu, and used ordinary fresh ox and horse dung and urine on ten mu… to make a proper comparison.

And so, the peaceful and leisurely life continued until the last third of the third month, late spring. Duckweed began to grow on the ponds, and the crop sprouts in the fields were gradually poking their heads out of the ground, when the township finally assigned a new case down to them…

PS: The words may be crude, but the reasoning is sound — don't be disgusted, everyone. I too lived in the countryside as a child; back then I didn't quite understand, but looking back now, I'm filled with feelings. Stinking and sweet — this is the true taste of farm life.

Also, I'd like to recommend a very niche historical novel, "Return to the Northern Wei." A 21st-century civil servant returns to the era of Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei and becomes the emperor's second son. A very rare subject. Though the author is a newcomer, they write very earnestly and are willing to research sources — a true textual-research devotee. The plot is a bit slow, but it's still worth a read.

(End of chapter)