They didn't pay much attention to the problem of food surplus!
No, you can’t say that, I should say you are proud of it!
They have all been hungry since childhood. For the decades they have experienced, they have not had much food. It can be said that they have been in a state of hunger and cold for half of their lives. They have to wait for the army to occupy Jizhou before they can really eat. After that, that is, in the past few years.
So when Niu Gui saw these reports, he thought it was their contribution. The more grain Daqian produced, the greater their contribution, so he allocated funds to grain officials in various places and asked them to build a large number of granaries to store the grain. I don’t think this is a crisis for Daqian. On the contrary, the food shortage is a prosperous period for Daqian. Wen and Jing’s rule was based on food. But last time, food piled up like mountains, and the whole world didn’t worry about hunger. That was three hundred years ago.
But these documents seemed different to Xu Wei. He lived in an era of abundant materials, and shortages of food and materials were things in his memory. Instead, what he often saw was a surplus of apples, watermelons, cabbages, etc. , so he has the deepest understanding of this situation.
Judging from the data he obtained, the current grain statistics of Daqian states are 1.2 billion dan, which is enough for the people of Daqian to eat for two years. If the stock of private grains is included, the grain of Daqian should be enough to feed 3- About 4 years.
Grain shortage is no longer an adjective, but a real reality. Even the private granaries are now full. Many prefects in prefectures and counties have already responded to this problem, because 30% of the tax revenue is collected from grain. The collection of grain is an extremely huge amount.
While various infrastructure construction and other factories need to be carried out in various places, farmers can still pay for food, but craftsmen need real money, but their money only has warehouses full of food. To a certain extent, food is equal to money. , but in the era of food accumulation, the value of food is obviously less than money. Now even rural people in many places do not like to ask for food, but ask for money for infrastructure construction. This has further aggravated the situation in various counties. financial crisis!
Because most of the food stored in their county treasury is grain. If these grains cannot be used as money, many counties may even go bankrupt. Therefore, many local prefectures and magistrates now forcefully provide grain to the people, causing Got a lot of questions!
The governor of Yuyang, Xi Zhong, even wrote a letter stating that continuing to use grain to pay taxes is no longer suitable for the current situation in Daqian. The wealthy counties in Daqian should instead collect five baht!
Of course, after Niu Gui read the letter, Niu Gui gave up. After decades of hunger, coupled with more than ten years of war, in Niu Gui's opinion, there is no resource more precious than food, let alone, Daqian's financial system is completely based on grain collection. How can it be changed just by changing it? Moreover, Niu Gui instinctively senses that if such a change is made, although it will be easier for local officials to collect taxes, it will have a very big impact on the people. The harm is, after all, one more procedure will lead to more exploitation for the people.
Moreover, Niu Gui was also worried about using five baht money to pay taxes. If the court ran out of food, he would not be able to buy it. Otherwise, the world has not yet been unified, and the natural disasters in the Han Dynasty have not been completely over, and the five baht money In comparison, food is more expensive than cattle. They see it as real wealth!
After Xu Wei read Xi Zhong's memorial, he immediately thought of Zhang Juzheng's whipping method. Although the problems faced by both parties were different, if Daqian's food supply was really large and the warehouse was full, a whipping method would indeed solve it. One approach to this problem.
Because the massive accumulation of grain has affected Daqian's financial health. In the past, he was able to lower the price of grain by controlling Daqian's prices. This was because he controlled the entire large-money grain sales channel, and the world was short of food. , there is no need to worry about selling food, and only then can Xu Wei’s system be stabilized.
But now the supply and demand of food are out of balance. Originally, the price of food would have fallen to the bottom. However, because Xu Wei set a structure where the purchase price of food is 100 yuan, this is equivalent to forcibly raising the price of food by three times. The behavior can be tolerated for a year or two, but if your food continues to be as high as this, I'm afraid the market will call you a big man, because even with a lot of money, it will be difficult to purchase endless food to stabilize prices. !
Xu Wei has even discovered a loophole in the price of grain in Daqian. Now the price of grain sold in Dagan is 130 yuan per stone. But now there is also a large amount of grain storage among the people. If the residents in the cities and towns buy it at the price of 120 yuan or even 110 yuan Don’t even think about the grain in their hands, but they know that many rural people are willing to sell it.
Because the current price of grain is that there is a price but no market, Xu Weiding’s purchase price is high, but now that Dagan’s granary has exploded, Dagan collects taxes from rural areas at most, but it is basically impossible to purchase grain from rural areas. Farmers have grain in their hands. But if you can't sell it, you can only sell it at a reduced price. Urban residents can eat low-priced grains from farmers, so why should they eat high-priced grains from state-owned grain stores? In this way, the price of grains in Daqian will be two, and eventually it will fall to the whole Grain prices collapsed in Daqian! After all, in Xu Wei's era, even the power of the Celestial Empire could not withstand the rise in prices, so it could only be market-oriented.
Xu Wei also looked helpless. It had only been more than a year, and he actually had to find a way to sell the grain. This kind of thing should not happen after the war in the world ends, or even after ten or even decades. According to the situation, the Wenjing Reign happened 60 years after the Han Dynasty. Xu Wei remembers that during the Zhenguan Reign of Li Shimin, the lowest price of food was 5 cents per dou. That only happened several years later. This was the whole situation in the Tang Dynasty Only after an unprecedented bumper harvest did such low-priced food become available (of course Xu Wei didn’t think that the people at that time would benefit much, after all, most of the people farmed, and even if they had a hundred acres of land, they could only earn 50 cents per stone. For less than a few dollars, the common people had no choice but to take advantage of the sharp rise and fall in food prices.)
Xu Wei did not even unify the world, so he encountered such a problem. Although he also built some water conservancy facilities, these water conservancy facilities would not allow the world's food to grow so fast.
Xu Wei thought about it carefully and found that the most fundamental reason for the sudden increase in food was beyond the expectations of the people in the world was bird droppings.
It can be said that Xu Wei did not realize the power of struvite. After all, he had not farmed in the past, not to mention that he used chemical fertilizers in his era. The grain yield per mu was quite close, and there was no difference between going to the fields and going to the fields.
But in this era, the fertility of the land has a real impact on food production, and even barren land must be often left fallow to protect the fertility of the land. But since Xu Wei discovered struvite, all this has changed dramatically. With the changes in the land, it is easy to double the grain output by spreading struvite on the land.
In Xu Wei's experimental park, there has been a grain output of more than 10 shi per mu. Of course, the reason for the fertilization is several times more when using guano. Now the price of guano is three times higher than that of grain. It is impossible to make money with such a fertilizer ratio. It's money, but this shows that the potential for food growth is very large.
It can be said that it was the struvite, a plug-in for food growth, that allowed Daqian to solve the food problem in the economy, and Daqian's food revolution allowed the entire society to add countless manpower to join the industry and strengthen the power of industrial development.
But the opportunity created by food a few years ago has now turned into a crisis, and Xu Wei and the others have been asked to find a solution.
Of course, Xu Wei and the others still have some time to solve this food crisis. It is still the most precious resource in the hearts of the people, because everyone's ideological concepts have not been changed. After all, the world has not yet been unified, and the world has not yet been stable. The people have not yet come out of the food crisis that year, and every family will still find ways to stockpile food at home to cope with the crisis if they have the conditions.
The local government of Daqian hired them to do projects with grain, and the people were willing to collect the grain. But Xu Wei knew that this situation would not last forever. After a few years, the people's granaries were full, and they found that grain was difficult to store. When they sell it, even the food in their hands is still depreciating.
At that time, reality will reshape the people's outlook, and they will not be willing to sell their labor force with food, and there will be big problems in the local construction of Daqian. After all, most of Daqian's fiscal revenue comes from food, especially It is a local government, and almost all of their fiscal revenue comes from grain. When grain is no longer what everyone wants, if the Daqian court wants to hire people, it must exchange it for real grain or money. If the people do not accept grain, big money It is equivalent to losing more than half of our finances.
But now in the entire Daqian court, only Xu Wei saw the potential crisis in Daqian, while Niu Gui and the others did not notice this crisis, and were still proud of Daqian's prosperous age.
However, local officials have discovered this problem in a daze. Even Xi Zhong thought of a way to solve this problem, which is not to collect grain, but only collect five baht, so that the people's grain can be sold on the market. They have since After you get money in the market, you pay taxes.
But Xu Wei was also worried that this would cause low prices to hurt farmers and poor crops to harm farmers. This kind of thing actually happened in history. Zhang Juzheng used this method to let the people of the Ming Dynasty be exploited by merchants during the autumn harvest. , they were exploited again when there was a shortage of food in the summer. As a result, people all over the world could not make any money regardless of whether the harvest was good or bad, and they had to pay back money to the landlords.
So there was the cartoon where Zhou Papi’s tenant worked hard, but his descendants couldn’t pay off Zhou Papi’s debt!