The wheat seedlings are green in the fields outside the village.
Ah Fu handed a few silver coins to Chen Twelve, "Uncle,"
"what does this mean?"
"Two pigs don't cost more than ten yuan. The total cost of buying piglets, paying pig tax, etc. is only three silver dollars. I will take back the remaining seven yuan."
Chen Twelve walked outside the village and patted Ah Fu with a smile, "Although you don't share the surname Chen with me now, you still call me uncle, so why are you so polite to me? My uncle is also a farmer, so why?
I don’t know that raising pigs is not easy. It seems that you only spent three yuan in capital, but in fact, if you raise four or five pigs, you need an acre of land to grow sweet potatoes, corns, radishes, etc. The piglets have to eat bran and rice peel when they are young.
You can’t make money raising pigs.”
To raise four or five pigs, you need at least one acre of sweet potatoes and radishes.
For Ah Fu, there are ten acres of land, two of which are planted with mulberry and cotton. The remaining eight acres of land must be rotated to ensure fertility. Wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, potatoes, radishes and other crops must be planted in rotation. They cannot all be planted with staple crops, usually every two years.
In the three seasons, the main grains alternate.
You can't raise pigs without land. Even if you have dry land and mountainous land, you need at least one acre to raise four or five pigs. You can produce two or three pigs a year and keep two or three pigs in stock.
For farmers, poor land or land under rotational cultivation can be used to grow sweet potatoes, radishes, corns, potatoes, sweet potato vines, and bran.
Raising pigs can achieve good conversion efficiency, and more importantly, raising pigs can produce manure.
A pig can get twenty loads of manure a year. If you raise four or five pigs, you can get hundreds of loads of manure a year. The sweet potato vines, pig grass, grains, bran, etc. that the pigs eat are converted into manure, and even wheat straw is used to line the pig pens.
, can also be made into pig dung grass. This pig dung grass is a treasure. For the people who farm the land, it can be a magic weapon that can increase a lot of production.
There are even some landowners who cooperate with farmers. They raise sows themselves and give birth to a dozen or seventy-eight piglets at a time. Then, when they are 20 to 30 pounds, they are sent to farmers to raise them. They do not charge money at first, but agree to sell them only
The cost of collecting the piglets, and the farmer just needs to give him 20 loads of manure per pig. If the amount exceeds the amount, an additional fee will be charged. If the amount is not enough, the money will be paid to make up for the manure after selling the pig.
For farmers, buying piglets is not cheap. Now they can raise them first and then pay after selling the pigs. It is undoubtedly cost-effective. They only need to give manure to the landlord. After hard work in breeding, they still make some money. But for the landlord, after selling the pigs,
When piglets are born, manure is also obtained.
This is equivalent to a loan. The piglets are loaned out, and the interest charged is twenty truckloads of manure. The interest is usually collected on a monthly basis, and the principal is recovered at the end of the year.
This is a very good deal.
Ah Fu raises pigs and silkworms, and pig manure and silkworm excrement are used as fertilizer for crops in the fields. These can increase production a lot in a year.
Shifting farming land, dry land, etc. can also be used, and the sweet potatoes and potatoes produced can also be fed to pigs and sold for money.
It's just too hard.
"We are in a town with a large population and raising pigs is easy to sell. If the price is higher, we won't lose money."
Chen Twelve asked his nephew to take back the money. It was ten silver dollars for two pigs, each of which produced more than a hundred kilograms of meat. Giving them a little more was considered as taking care of them.
Today's banquet was held for dozens of tables, and each table cost an average of two silver dollars. The total cost was more than a hundred yuan, including tobacco, wine, and tea.
Two yuan per table is very sumptuous. Anyway, it is estimated that everyone will remember the Chen family's eight bowls for a long time to come. Two silver coins can buy an acre of ordinary land in Yongcheng now.
"Uncle, you are now a fifth-grade general, and your land holdings have also been increased. You should buy more land." Ah Fu suggested.
For officials of the fifth rank, the land quota is limited to five hectares.
Compared with ordinary people, who are limited to ten acres of land, the quota of five hundred acres is very high. In Ah Fu's eyes, he always feels that land is the foundation, has stable output, and is an inheritance that can be passed down to the family.
"Well, the imperial court will soon clean up the land in Henan. All the fields that were previously occupied, reported as deserted, occupied, etc., especially the feudal fields and military camps, will be cleared out. A lot of them will be sold at a different price. I will
Buy some."
Chen Twelve had a hundred acres of land before. He directly hired long-term workers to cultivate the land, and hired short-term workers when the farming season was busy. He did not hire tenants directly to rent it out. Now that he has money in hand, he plans to buy five hundred acres of land.
In the past, Henan had many vassal kings and clans, and the vassals and clans occupied a lot of land. Previously, most of them were occupied by various encroachments. Now if a comprehensive cleanup is carried out, a lot of land will be cleared. For example, Chen Twelve, a rich and land-rich officer.
This is an excellent property purchase opportunity.
Without this kind of large-scale land clearing, it would be difficult to buy a lot of land at once.
"After buying five hundred acres of land, I plan to build several villages. One will grow mulberry leaves and silkworms, another will grow cotton, and another will grow tobacco. The rest will grow wheat, and then I will raise some pigs, chickens, ducks, and geese. Please invite them all.
A permanent worker will take care of it."
The income from growing grain is low, but the income from growing cash crops is definitely high. For an officer like Chen Twelve, who has money and status, it is very cost-effective to build a manor model. This was also the case when he was training at the Tokyo Martial Arts Hall.
I learned this from my classmates. A classmate whose family is an officer in Jiangsu and Zhejiang has been doing this for two or three years. Although the investment is high, the benefits are high.
Even if we are growing rice, we can use fewer people to grow more fields and produce more grain. If we develop more economic planting and processing, it will be even more profitable.
For example, growing mulberry, raising silkworms and weaving silk, growing cotton to spin cloth, and growing flue-cured tobacco are highly profitable.
However, these require more professional skills and high management requirements. For example, tobacco is grown in many places in the south of the Yangtze River. No one has grown tobacco before. How to grow it is also a matter of knowledge. You have to ask a skilled veteran to teach you. Compared with growing grain, tobacco will grow after the year.
You have to start, which is more labor-intensive than growing food.
But if you grow it well, you can still make a good profit even if you sell the tobacco leaves directly. If you dry it yourself into dry tobacco, or build a curing house to bake it into flue-cured tobacco, the profit will be even higher.
Traditional family-style agricultural cultivation faces the important problems of less land and less labor. Some families have one husband and a few children, and only two or three strong laborers. However, women still have to raise silkworms, weave and do housework, and there is not much
Time is involved in farm work, and some people even lack cattle and horses, making it difficult to cultivate deeply.
In terms of watering and fertilizing, ordinary family farming is not as good as the landlord's farm.
Not to mention growing tobacco and mulberry trees.
Ah Fu sometimes smokes cigarettes now, but he only smokes dry cigarettes. He buys a handful of tobacco leaves, takes them home and cuts them into shreds. He makes a pipe, stuffs it tightly and smokes it. It is very strong, but he smokes one after he is tired.
Very comfortable.
Chen Twelve now has fifty yuan a month in salary, not counting other things, plus the previous rewards, share rewards, etc., he has a lot of money in his hand to buy several hundred acres of land and build a village.
Please give me your head, even if you want to buy cows or pigs, the money will not be enough for a while.
But now there is a policy. Even if the imperial court sells official land at a different price, there are actually some preferential conditions for officials, soldiers, royal family members, scholars, etc., such as installment payment. The installment interest is different for different statuses. The installment rates for the families of martyrs and disabled soldiers are also
The interest is the lowest and basically no interest.
As an active military attaché, Chen Twelve’s installment interest is not high and is very cost-effective.
"Uncle, now that you have returned home in fine clothes and become famous, take me to join the army," Agui said.
"You are still too young. I will arrange for you to join the Red Spear Club later."
The Red Spear Club is still there, and now it exists everywhere, blooming almost everywhere. The imperial court did not ban it, but only sent people to standardize and organize it. The official name is the Loyalty Red Spear Club, and the new rules and regulations of the Red Spear Club were revised to make it
It has become a local militia-like organization. The past model of secret forum gatherings is no longer used. Now it is an open and regular training camp, and it even takes on tasks such as patrolling, catching thieves, and defending the city.
The imperial court has now opened many new martial arts halls, sergeant schools, etc., and has canceled the martial arts and military schools in various places. The martial arts here in Yongcheng has now been changed to a small school run by the Red Spear Association, which is the same as the former Red Spear Association.
The Masters of the Gun Club taught the same lessons, including reading, literacy, loyalty, justice, benevolence and filial piety, Chinese history, and arithmetic.
Recruiting children from the Red Spear Club, the tuition is very low, and they mainly accept children between the ages of six and twelve.
Chen Twelve hoped that Agui would go to school, not because he wanted him to take the exam to be a scholar in the future, but because he wanted to open his eyes after studying.
"In the future, you have to be educated as a soldier. You have to be literate and able to count, so that you can be promoted. Otherwise, you won't have a future if you just know how to fight with swords, guns, and kicks. Just study for a few years and wait until you are eighteen years old to apply for the military academy. If
If you can pass the exam, you can make a career in the future, and when you get out, you can start from the head of the team or the platoon deputy."
Ah Fu asked Chen Twelve for help and wanted him to take his brother-in-law to serve as a soldier. He was now eighteen years old.
His wife was a hungry refugee from Huainan. Later, he asked Chen Twelve to borrow money to buy grain and marry his wife. His wife's family also settled in Daqiu. However, they were not locals, but they were not allocated land, so they could only become
Tenant, a tenant who cultivates other people's fields.
Compared with the owner-cultivators who pay more than two dou per acre in rent, the tenants have to pay 40% of the autumn grain rent, which is at least seven or eight dou. Not to mention that they are not as good as the owner-cultivators in all aspects. Therefore, the tenants have to work hard for a year and can hardly make any savings. Compared with the owner-cultivators,
, the income may be less than 10% of theirs.
Seeing that Chen Twelve had prospered as a soldier, Ah Fu's wife wanted her younger brother to serve as a soldier, which would be better than giving land as a sharecropper like now.
"We can't do it now. This time the Guide regiment training was reorganized into the Imperial Camp Henan Expedition. Long live the Imperial Army and it transferred nine battalions of soldiers. In addition to the previous ones and the auxiliary troops, there are almost nine thousand. Our original regiment training brothers
, this time we have to eliminate a group, and only about 3,000 will be retained, and the remaining 3,000 will have to be reorganized by soldiers trained by regiments from Kaifeng, Luoyang, Weihui and other towns."
Ah Fu was a little disappointed when he heard this.
"You can't enter the camp for the time being, but I suggest that your brother-in-law sign up to recruit postmen. Now Henan has to improve the posthouses and delivery shops, and recruit a large number of postmen. The postmen are affiliated to the Ministry of War, and the salary is not bad. In January
For two yuan of salary, you can also rent ten acres of post and farmland. They are all good land, the rent is not high, and there are no other burdens. If you do well, you will also get some other subsidies and benefits.
Moreover, the post soldiers are subordinate to the Ministry of War. If the provincial camp is short of soldiers, they will be selected from the post soldiers, regiment training, and garrison towns. If the imperial camp is short of soldiers, they will be selected from the provincial camp and the Beijing camp."
Ah Fu originally wanted Chen Twelve to take his brother-in-law to serve as a servant, but now he had to give up. He himself did not want to become a soldier. He had ten acres of land, a young wife at home, and a newborn child.
Although the days are hard, I am still full of hope.
"Thank you Uncle Twelve, I will explain it clearly to him later."
"Well, tell him that being a postman is not bad. It's better than being a tenant. Today's postmen are not as good as before. This opportunity is also rare. If you miss it, you won't have a chance to be one next time."
