The backwardness of the Song cavalry determines that the composition of the troops can only be mainly infantry, and the infantry is slow to act. Coupled with the various disadvantages of passive defense strategy and military command system, the tactics of war are monotonous and dull, making it difficult to carry out long-range raids and mobile combat to gain the initiative in war. Judging from the comparison between the Song Dynasty and Xia, Liao and Jin Dynasty in terms of military strategies and tactics, the Song army's blind passive defense will inevitably lead to failure. History has made the best footnotes in this regard, and it has also become a consensus.

The ancients said that boats in the south were horses, and horse farming in the south, and grassing in the north. The people in the south were good at farming boats, while the people in the north were good at grazing. However, the people in the south were not good at riding horses. Zhao Bing thought that it was not that the people in the south could not master the horse riding skills, but the fact was that there was no horse to ride! People always blamed the Song army for the loss of horses on the loss of the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun, thus losing the land for horse breeding, which led to the Song Dynasty who could only obtain war horses through buying. After living in the south of the Yangtze River, there was no place to shed horses, and the way to obtain horses was narrower, making horse shortages a normal state. Later, the cavalry was even more in name only, resulting in repeated defeats in wars with foreign tribes.

Zhao Bing also accepted the idea that there was no horse farm in his previous life, which led to lack of horse farms. After coming to this world, he found that this was not the case. In fact, as early as the Spring and Autumn Period, the Chu State had already raised horses in the Lianghuai area for the use of chariots. The Mongolian Yuan even had large horse farms in all provinces and counties across the country. It should be noted that not only were there many official offices, but also many private horse farms of Mongolian nobles. Among them, it was not as good as establishing horse farms in the Jiangnan area, but also many horse farms in the Lianghuai area, especially the Huaixi horse farm as the most.

The reason is that Zhao Bing believes that it is actually a problem of contradiction between population and land and concepts, and the root cause is still interests. The economic forms of the Central Plains and Jiangnan region are mainly based on farming. Land is very precious and short of land. It requires a large amount of land to raise horses. This will create a sharp contradiction between the two. Therefore, the Central Plains dynasty is limited by national strength and production and lifestyle, so many times our cavalry construction is always difficult. This is the bitterness of agricultural civilization, but it is also an inevitable trend in social development.

In contrast, nomadic civilization is different. For them, horses are a necessity in production and life, and grazing cannot be separated from horses. Secondly, they have many pastures and grass everywhere, so there is no need to worry too much about the forage. After the Mongolian Yuan, who was born in the nomadic people, some people suggested turning all the land in the Central Plains into pastures. This suggestion was rejected by Yelu Chucai. However, although it was rejected, this evil policy was implemented on a small scale! The Mongolians could destroy farmland without any scruples, build horse farms, and even the Mongolian army robbed civilian fields, turned them into pastures, and "don't return for a long time."

Secondly, horses have a low feed conversion rate among all domesticated animals. The reason is very simple, because cattle, sheep and camels are all animals of the Order Order. The Order Order Order has three or four stomachs and can ruminate, and the digestibility of crude fiber is very high. As an Order Order, a horse cannot ruminate, and its digestibility of crude fiber is only less than 40%. If you want to ensure that the horse has sufficient growth rate, you have to keep eating. Feed must be supplied at night, and the demand for concentrated feed is also greater.

This is the origin of the saying "Horse without night grass will not be fat". Therefore, in ancient times, the war horses of some elite cavalry units were fed corn. This food standard is comparable to ordinary animals, and is one level higher than that of living people in famine years. As for black beans, it has almost become a special term for horse feed, and high-end forage grass such as alfalfa. In ancient times, they were almost exclusively for war horses. It can be seen that farming people raising horses is really time-consuming and labor-intensive and expensive.

In addition, in ancient times, there was another problem with horses that made it difficult for farming civilization to accept, that is, the purpose of horses was too single and could only be used as service animals. Horse meat has never been popular, horse skin and horse hair are not very useful, and horse milk production is not enough to favor farming civilizations. Even in terms of manure, horses are the most unpopular. Most of the manures of other animals can be used as fertilizer to fertilize the fields. Horse manure is not good, horse manure is acidic, and thrown directly into the fields is harmful to the soil and is useless. Therefore, horses are left with cost-effectiveness by cows for service animals, and even donkeys are not as good as donkeys.

There are other horses that are alternative among herbivores, and their personalities are very bad. We all say that people have a stubborn temper like donkeys, but in fact, horses are even more stubborn than donkeys. A crazy horse is more terrifying than a mad cow. Killing a few people is like playing. When a horse breaks out of conflict, in addition to slapping, it also likes to solve problems with bites, and its teeth are good. Therefore, male war horses need to be castrated, otherwise it will be difficult to control. However, castrated horses have become a luxury for them to pass on their family line, so it is difficult for you to ask the cavalry to breed horses by themselves, which is more immoral than letting eunuchs visit brothels.

In addition, the peak of the physical strength of war horses is only seven or eight years, so in a sense it is a military consumable that is shorter than the peak period of ordinary soldiers. After all, a full ten years from twenty to thirty can be called the peak period of physical strength. In extreme cases, an old soldier in his forties and fifties will be dragged to guard the border, but the horses are really unable to go to the battlefield after their lifetime. It can be seen that if they want to maintain an elite cavalry, they need to invest for a long time, and there is no such thing as solving the cavalry problem once and for all.

It can be seen from this that for the agricultural civilization, horses are really a very low-cost-performance manure-making machine for agricultural civilization, and the manure made cannot be fattened. Therefore, even if many preferential policies were offered for the people's horse raising, it was difficult to provide horses to the cavalry troops with quality and quantity. In Zhao Bing's view, it was the court's blaming behavior in order to reduce the financial burden. According to modern terms, it was "lazy government", which increased the burden on the people and made the policies difficult to last.

There is another disadvantage of raising horses in the people, which is that they cannot provide qualified war horses. After all, a horse requires a large area as an activity venue. However, raising horses by the people obviously does not meet this condition and can only be kept in captivity. Unlike nomadic peoples, they only need to passively complete the mandatory tasks assigned by the court. They only need to pay enough of the specified number and will not conduct necessary training on horses.

For example, the several powerful enemies in the north faced by the founding of the Song Dynasty. The Jurchens were not nomadic peoples. They used farming and hunting various economic activities to support their families. Raising horses was considered an important tool to protect their family property and expand the scope of robbery, rather than a necessity for economic activities. Although they were raised by the people, they were for the purpose of war. Their cavalry were generally equipped with two horses, and their continuous charge ability was far better than the Western Xia cavalry, which generally had only one horse.

However, after the Jurchens counterattacked the Liao Kingdom and the Northern Song Dynasty, the Jurchen soldiers handed over the labor of raising horses to the Khitans, handicrafts and other labor to Han slaves, and they were all determined to be the master. As a result, in the late Jin Dynasty, the Khitans who raised horses took the initiative to lead the way for the Mongolian army, causing them to lose hundreds of thousands of war horses. The war horses of the Jin Dynasty army became robbed of clothes and elbows.

The reason why the Mongols' horse raising left a deep impression is that they trained on the grass for one or two years after they were born, for three years. The horses trained from this are very disciplined. The herds of hundreds of horses will not bite or yell, and even if the owner dismounts, they can still drive them and will not escape.

Moreover, the Mongolians did not feed grass during the day, and only started grazing at night. They grazed in the wild as the grass was green and withered, and then rode on saddles at dawn. When they set out on the battle, everyone had several horses and took turns to ride every day, so the horses would not be tired during the battle. In addition, the Mongolians were different from the above. They used ox carts as carts, and used two groups of eleven cows in front and back to pull the carts side by side. Horses were also cultivated according to the conditions of the war.

These were difficult to achieve for the "people-raising" of the Song Dynasty, so according to Zhao Bing's intention, it is better to run a horse farm in the official position. In the past, there were no conditions in Qiongzhou and Jiangnan, and the land was very tight and the refugees who lost land were difficult to resettle. Now the population density of Lianghuai areas has a very low population. He found that it was rare to see a village after traveling a hundred miles. Even if the city had a population of 20,000 to 30,000 people, it was considered the land of Shangzhou. It was vast and sparsely populated, so there was no problem of people competing for land.

In addition, in the war to recover the two Huai Rivers, the Song army received many horse farms and seized tens of thousands of horses. Zhao Bing planned to integrate them based on this and set up several large military horse farms to cultivate war horses for military use, thereby alleviating the predicament of the Song army's shortage of horses to a certain extent and laying the foundation for the expansion of cavalry. At the same time, having a horse farm can also give the Song army a stable channel for the supply of military horses, and no longer be controlled by others due to changes in the surrounding environment.

As for the cost, of course it is not expensive, but Zhao Bing thought it was still worth it. Strategically speaking, a powerful cavalry can change the passive defensive situation. From the perspective of the situation, the battlefield in the future will be more deployed on the northern plains, which has higher requirements for the army's mobility, so more horses are urgently needed to improve their mobile combat capabilities and rapid supply capabilities.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Zhao Bing thought it was not a loss. In the past, the cost of farming civilizations to resist their robbery was so high. Therefore, we had beacon towers, Great Walls, blocking forests and blocking canals, with the purpose of making the other party's attacks lose their suddenness and mobility. In short, it was just to demolish the east wall and repair the west wall, and we would not spend more money on building a horse farm.
Chapter completed!