Li Zhi decided to build a pig farm outside Fanjiazhuang City.
Originally, there were many wealthy households in Beijing and Tianjin, and the demand for meat was huge. There were a large number of farmers near the capital raising pigs and sheep to supply these wealthy households. The price of pork and mutton was relatively stable. Although Fanjiazhuang used to consume more than 2,000 kilograms of meat every day,
But compared to the large number of powerful people in the capital, these consumptions are not too much.
The capital has a population of more than one million, and there are at least hundreds of thousands of officials, gentry, and nobles who drink and eat meat every day, and consume a huge amount of pigs and sheep. Correspondingly, there are farmers near the capital who supply pork and mutton to these officials, gentry, and nobles.
The quantity is also huge.
If the pigs near Fanjiazhuang are sold out, pig dealers will definitely transport pigs near the capital. Fanjiazhuang is only more than a hundred miles away from the capital. The cost of hiring a carriage to transport four pigs to Fanjiazhuang is only one or two hundred yuan. Fanjiazhuang’s meat
If the price is higher than the capital, pig dealers can transport pigs from nearby capital to Fanjiazhuang in two days to make money.
Therefore, before the Tatars entered the customs and plundered in the ninth year of Chongzhen, the price of meat in Fanjiazhuang was very stable, always in the range of more than fifty cents per catty. Li Zhi supplied each worker or soldier with six taels of meat per day, for a month
It only requires five or six pieces of silver.
But after the military disaster in the ninth year of Chongzhen, the situation changed.
After the Tatars broke through the border, they plundered all the pigs and sheep in the villages near the capital and transported them all back to Liaodong.
Under this situation, the supply of grain and meat in Gyeonggi Province is insufficient. The price of meat has skyrocketed along with the price of rice. In the past few months, it has risen to more than 100 cents per catty, making many wealthy households unable to afford meat.
In order to control expenditures, Li Zhi also changed the three meals of meat for workers and soldiers to one meal of meat. Only when the price of meat dropped, Li Zhi would resume serving meat for three meals.
However, he defeated the Tatars and defended Fanjiazhuang, but he could not afford meat, which made Li Zhi very unhappy. Now Fanjiazhuang has 10,000 farmers cultivating land, which can produce about 90,000 shi of grain per year, which is enough to feed 30,000 people.
Fanjiazhuang will soon be self-sufficient in food. Li Zhi decided to build another pig farm so that he can also be self-sufficient in meat.
If you can provide your own meat, you will not be affected by the natural and man-made disasters during the Chongzhen period, and Fanjiazhuang will not be unable to eat meat because of disasters elsewhere.
Li Zhi asked the masons who had repaired the farmers' houses to choose a piece of land outside the city wall in the south of the city and start building a large pig farm.
After recruiting new soap workers and 4,000 soldiers, there were 11,500 people under Li Zhi who had to eat meat every day. These people consumed more than 4,000 kilograms of meat every day. With a pig weighing 200 kilograms, one pig
Calculated for slaughter in six months of the year and a meat production rate of 70%, Fanjiazhuang's pig farm needs to raise 17,000 pigs.
However, Li Zhi was more ambitious. He expected that his business would expand in the future, so he estimated an advance amount and finally decided to raise 30,000 head.
This is a big project. Assuming that five pigs per pen and six pig pens occupy one pig shed, it would also require the construction of a thousand pig sheds. Calculated as a pig shepherd feeding two hundred pigs, Li Zhi would need to hire one hundred pigs.
Fifty swineherds. The hired swineherds must be seasoned farmers, and Li Zhi also gives them two or two months' money and meat for three meals a day.
Although the wages paid by Li Zhi are high, because of the centralized breeding, many tasks can be centralized to create economies of scale, and the final labor costs are similar to those of free-range farmers at home.
There is no feed in this era, so native pigs need to be fed bran, rice bran and pigweed, and occasionally broken rice. Pigweed is purslane, shepherd's purse, seven vegetables and other wild grasses. Farmers or even children can be hired to pick it in the wild during the off-season, which improves the quality of pigs.
Farmers' income, or allowing children to earn some pocket money.
The construction of the pig pen started on December 6, and it is estimated that it will be completed before the Chinese New Year. Li Zhi asked a hundred servants and officials to go out to buy piglets, and first purchased a batch of 1,700 piglets.
After raising them, 1,700 piglets will be added every month. In this way, after a year and a half, each batch of piglets will gradually grow up and be put out in batches.
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After asking the officials to buy piglets, Li Zhi returned to the gun workshop and began to trial-produce granular black powder.
The gunpowder used in modern rifle bullets is all granular gunpowder. Granular gunpowder can give the bullet a higher muzzle velocity after exiting the chamber under the same chamber pressure. Minie rifles using granular black powder will be greatly improved in power.
.
In order to fight against the Qing army with multiple layers of armor, it is important to increase the power of the Mini rifle.
Not only that, granular gunpowder burns more fully because of the larger air strike between gunpowder particles. Granular gunpowder leaves less residue after burning, which is helpful for riflemen to clean the gun bore. Cleaning the gun bore becomes easier, and the firing speed of the gun increases.
can be improved.
Li Zhi took ten pieces of black gunpowder for rifles, put the gunpowder on a wooden grinding plate and rolled it repeatedly until the black gunpowder was rolled into white grey. Then Li Zhi took some buckwheat flour mixed with water, and mixed it with the buckwheat into mud.
Add some water to the noodles and make it thinner. Then pour all the buckwheat noodles on top of ten parts of crushed black gunpowder. Mix the black gunpowder and buckwheat noodles into one, turning into a white-gray ball.
Then Li Zhi asked the blacksmith to make a porous iron plate, use the holes on the iron plate to scrape the gunpowder dough, scrape off the gunpowder particles one by one, and put them into a basin. Then he used the sieve made in advance to sift out the particles of different sizes.
, leaving only uniformly sized particles.
After screening, half of the particles were different in size and needed to be kneaded again and then scraped into particles. The remaining half of the gunpowder particles were about the same size. Li Zhi divided the particles into five parts and dried them in the sun, and he got a
Granular gunpowder.
Li Zhi didn't know what size of gunpowder particles would be suitable for his Mini rifle. So he made ten kinds of black powder particles of different particle sizes, making five copies of each, and then took them to the shooting range one by one.
test.
After drying the black powder, Li Zhi used different granular gunpowders to shoot targets.
Most granular gunpowders have average effects, and some are too large and even inferior to powdered gunpowder. However, there are several small-grained gunpowders that perform well and penetrated two layers of Qing armor at a height of 90 meters. Especially one of them
, penetrated two layers of Qing army armor one hundred meters away.
Li Zhi returned to the musket workshop, used the best-performing granular gunpowder as a template, and fine-tuned the particle size around the size of the template. Finally, he made ten kinds of granular black powder with slightly different sizes, and did the target shooting test again.
Li Zhi was pleasantly surprised by the results of this experiment:
The best kind of granular black powder penetrated two layers of Qing army armor at a distance of 120 meters, and also penetrated three layers of Qing army armor at a distance of 80 meters.
The performance of this new type of granular gunpowder meant that Li Zhi could launch a fire attack on the Qing cavalry before the most elite Qing troops could shoot their arrows. Li Zhi immediately asked the gunsmiths who prepared customized gunpowder to produce this granular gunpowder in the future.
Seeing the performance of the new gunpowder, Li Xing and several other senior officers were very excited.
"Brother! Where did you get so many new ideas? That's amazing!"
Zheng Kaicheng said: "You are constantly inventing new things, which is admirable!"
Zhong Feng excitedly grabbed the pellets of gunpowder and looked left and right, and said: "Your Excellency, you are so powerful. Now I am not afraid of the Tatar cavalry breaking out."
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Thanks to brother Shihui for the 2000 reward, and the reward is so much, thank you very much!! Thanks to Wenwei!! for the 200 reward! Thanks to the disciples of heaven and earth, Dong Heng, lonely people are so pitiful, another paradise in the world, Wen Shiqing
Han, `Wandering Insect`, True Red Cross, 100 reward from a ruffian in Chongqing.
