Dominate the Country

The Chinese town across from Pensacola is called Ansheng.

In the north of Ansheng, going north from there, there is also a town called Anping composed of Chinese immigrants.

The population of this town is not as large as that of Ansheng. Not only are there only six Japanese production teams, there are only about 200 militiamen, and the official residents of the town are just over a thousand.

Since the local Indians were carefully cleaned up last year, there are no Indian chiefs with bird feathers on their heads and muskets in their hands anymore in the Ansheng and Anping areas, and the environment has become much more stable. The once active Indian guerrilla forces also disappeared. These people are originally outsiders - this generation of Indian tribes began to migrate to the interior of the continent seventy or eighty years ago. The mouth of the Mississippi River and the coastal areas were occupied by the Spanish and the French respectively in the following decades. , the British occupied it, but there was no Indian share.

As for where the once 'prosperous' Indian troops came from, and how they managed to maintain a 'guerrilla' state for a long time, it seems obvious.

The Spaniards supported the Indians behind the scenes, and whether the Americans even participated is a different matter.

It is impossible for any army to continue fighting for a long time without effective supplies - this is a matter of common sense. Even Indians with rich wilderness survival experience can't do it. Coupled with the fierce conflicts that broke out between Chen Han and Spain, the Indians were not idiots. They also knew the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is a friend" and began to actively contact the Spanish and even fought against the British and Americans. Report.

With the Spanish in Florida as their backers, these Indian teams will naturally be very active.

This is the same as the relationship between the original space-time IS and the native chicken. It's just that their common enemy is extremely powerful, and the Spaniards can't understand the feeling of having a local chicken feed a tiger.

But the Indians won't hold on to a single point.

The Chinese have a border that stretches for thousands of miles, and there are too many villages and strongholds in the "attack range". When they encounter a tough problem, the Indians also know how to move. Especially the Mississippi River Basin has not yet been invaded by the Chinese.

Many Indians calmed down after their initial anger. The specific manifestation of this situation is that after many Indian guerrilla teams fought for a few days, the environment became difficult, the number of casualties increased, or they retreated to the rear, the team was no longer a team.

If the people's hearts are scattered and people run away, the team will not be able to carry it forward.

Along with the "Taiping" in Anping Town, the latter turned into a state of large-scale construction.

The leadership headed by the town mayor—mainly retired veterans due to injuries and administrative trainees—supported the government leadership agencies of each village and town. Every day, we organize everyone to build houses, dig wells, cut down trees, dig trenches, and grow food. They are very busy. Thanks to everyone's efforts, Anping Town, which was originally a wilderness, has now changed dramatically after this period of hard work.

Most of the wooden houses have been transformed into thick and solid brick houses, three meters high and two meters thick, completely surrounding the town. There are also brick and stone turrets standing outside the town, and there are towers every two miles. A rising outpost, in short, it already has what a settlement should look like.

The only thing that may be lacking is agricultural planting. So far, the food here is still not self-sufficient. The threat from the Indians was eliminated last year, but the planting time has been delayed. The first half of this year is not over yet, and the food is not yet mature. Spring wheat cannot be harvested until mid to late June.

At that time, the entire town of Anping will be under martial law - not against theft, but against fire.

If someone suffering from the plague sets it on fire, the hard work of the people in Anping Town will be completely over.

Chinese people attach great importance to food. Almost everyone who can immigrate to the "Land of Abundance" thousands of miles away is a good farmer. Thousands of people, as long as they are given enough time, tens of thousands of acres of more farmland can be created next year. If there was completely no interference from external factors, with the current population of Anping Town, it would be impossible to have 100,000 acres of fertile land, but 50,000 to 60,000 acres of fertile land would be a certainty.

It wasn't until the immigrants in Anping Town, a "remote area on the border", that every household had a surplus, sold their horses, and realized the convenience of combining agriculture and animal husbandry with horse farming that the Chinese truly established a foothold in America.

"The first batch of immigrants in Anping Town were all from Shandong. Among them were 13 families of disabled soldiers. The town's militia was well established and they had certain self-defense capabilities and tendencies. Their agricultural technology was pretty good. Yes, the progress of agricultural production was greatly restricted because of the Indians' troubles, but after last year's After struggling, they expelled the Indians and had half a year of stable time to work. They have cultivated 15,200 acres of land and plan to expand the number of acres in the town to 30,000 acres in the second half of the year, striving to achieve food production as soon as possible. Self-sufficient." As long as the Indians stop causing trouble, the food harvested in a month or two will probably be enough for Anping Town. Although there will be some growth in the newly cultivated fields, it is still only fifteen acres per person, so it is still very confident that we can achieve self-sufficiency in food.

Zheng Yan, who had just been appointed president of the Deng Guo Branch of the North American Reclamation Bank, stood on the undulating fields and listened to the secretary behind him. He came to inspect. All the loans in the hands of these immigrants had been transferred to the Bank of Reclamation. As a new child separated from the mother body, how far the Bank of Reclamation could develop? He took an old man who had been the president of Zhongyuan Bank for ten years. Dad can't tell for sure.

Zheng Yan is already thirty-four years old. He may not have reached his current position solely because of his father's reputation. He himself also wants to leave his own masterpiece on the blank white paper of America.

Previously, he worked in a commercial bank and was responsible for the trade credit of a certain government in Lelang Province. He made profits of more than 1 million yuan for three consecutive years, which made Zheng Zhilun look good. This time when Reclamation Bank was born, Zheng Yan relied on his performance and his father's network to become the top leader of Deng Guo Branch.

Among the series of border villages and towns Zheng Yan visited, the situation in Anping Town is considered good. You must know that there are less than 1,100 residents here, and there are 15,200 acres of farmland, which is 15 acres per person. This is really a level that many ‘border areas’ cannot reach!

Although the number of acres of land per capita is still far behind the immigrants from Tokyo and Hanjin, don't say that they are planning to open up another 15,000 acres of cultivated land in the second half of the year. Let's just talk about the 15,200 acres of land now. As long as it is taken care of well, next year, when the land regenerates, it will be able to grow enough food for a thousand people to eat for a whole year.

However, keeping immigrants fed is only the most basic pursuit of each country. The long-term goal is to make them rich.

According to the natural conditions and population of the six American vassals, the farmers here really have no reason not to be wealthy.

Because the land is vast and sparsely populated, and because there is so much land per capita. In addition to their own land, there is also public official land that can be rented for farming. Not only the contract period is long, but the number of acres is also large.

Moreover, the Norfolk crop rotation system is slowly being promoted here in the Americas. Even local farms, large and small, as well as military and civilian joint-stock companies have begun to operate this system.

Because this method introduced from foreigners has indeed played a significant role in promoting the development of agriculture.

At the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century in the Christian era, with the increasingly frequent trade between Britain and the European continent, crops such as turnips, clover, cabbage, and cauliflower were introduced from the European continent. Turnips are a row crop that facilitates weed control, can replace fallow land to a certain extent, and can also provide important winter feed for livestock. Clover and other leguminous grasses not only use their root nodules to fix nitrogen to cultivate soil fertility, but also provide high-quality feed for livestock. The introduction of these new crops was difficult in open fields under the traditional British crop rotation system. For example, the tradition of treating the harvested fields as grazing land for the entire village’s livestock is not conducive to the cultivation of winter pasture. With the beginning of the British Enclosure Movement, large areas of open fields were transformed into enclosed fields, and the planting area of ​​new crops became larger and larger, thereby promoting changes in the farming system.

By the beginning of the 18th century, a four-field rotation called the Norfolk rotation was rapidly popularized in Britain, gradually replacing the original three-field or two-field rotation. Under the Norfolk crop rotation system, the fields are planted with wheat in the first year, root crops, mainly turnips, in the second year, barley, oats, etc. in the third year. After the barley and other crops are harvested, clover or other leguminous grasses are planted in the autumn. So that the soil fertility can be restored before planting wheat again in the fifth year.

This system is of great significance for ensuring the fertility of cultivated land and increasing grain production.

Why did the Chen Han cabinet implement the Norfolk rotation system so resolutely? That's because this system already provides the perfect answer in the UK. The promotion of Norfolk's crop rotation system had a profound impact on British agriculture. First, it greatly increased British crop yields. Taking wheat in England as an example, by around 1735, the yield per acre increased to 20 bushels.

This 1 bushel is approximately equal to 45 kilograms [600g], and one acre is slightly larger than six acres. In other words, according to the British agricultural standard, one acre is only 150 kilograms. This data is really embarrassing.

But such a shabby data is fully double the unit wheat output under the old British manorial system. In the more than 100 years after the 1660s, British wheat was not only self-sufficient, but its export volume gradually increased, from about 6,000 tons per year in the early 18th century to more than 50,000 tons per year during the Seven Years War.

Secondly, this rotation model also promotes the organic integration of planting and animal husbandry. The cultivation of crops such as turnips and clover has provided livestock with a more reliable source of winter feed, creating favorable conditions for livestock to survive the winter, thereby avoiding the previous practice of slaughtering large numbers of livestock in autumn. The organic combination of planting and animal husbandry simultaneously promotes the development of both, forming the benign concept of "more cattle, more fertilizer; more fertilizer, greater harvest; greater harvest, more cattle" cycle.

The organic combination of planting and animal husbandry has led to changes in the agricultural structure, that is, from planting as the main industry to planting and animal husbandry as equal emphasis. After the first industrial revolution in British history, industry developed rapidly, the urban population greatly increased, and the demand for agricultural products continued to grow, which further promoted the improvement of agricultural technology.

Of course, what Chen Ming needs to learn is not the British's ultra-low yield per acre, he just wants to learn the British's farming method.

Under the relatively crude agricultural production methods in Europe, this crop rotation system can greatly increase the grain output. So it makes no sense that it would not work under China's more sophisticated agricultural production methods.

The advantage of this method is that it allows villagers to raise a large number of livestock while ensuring grain harvests, so as to obtain as much economic income as possible. After all, cattle and sheep can be sold at a higher price than grain crops such as wheat. When the local Chinese government collects agricultural taxes, it now mainly collects cash, and basically no longer collects taxes in kind. This is beneficial to farmers.

And as the British say, in this era when agricultural fertilizers are basically accumulated, feeding more livestock can also allow them to obtain more fertilizers, making the soil more fertile when planting grains next year. For relatively poor land, the superiority of this crop rotation system is higher than that of fertile land, and the rate of increase in crop yields will also be higher. Moreover, the crop straw and forage harvested on weekdays, such as the turnips, clover and alfalfa that have been widely planted in China, can be used as livestock feed. With the silage technology, there will be no shortage of fodder in winter, let alone using precious food to feed livestock, so as to prevent livestock from losing too much weight in winter.

Although the war is about to start.

Zheng Yan's ears are still very sensitive, not to mention his father Zheng Zhilun. The court is preparing to fight the Spaniards again in America. This news has long been an open secret among the top leaders of Chen Han.

But he doesn't think there is a possibility of a large-scale counterattack by the Spaniards, especially in Florida, which borders Deng State.

If it were Cai State or Xu State, it might be pushed back by the Spaniards in Mexico, but Deng State and the Spanish power in Florida are too weak.

To be honest, Zheng Yan doesn't understand the Spaniards' choice.

Is it because they are full that they don't have much desire for North America? Florida is such a great place. Looking around, it is just flat land, warm climate, fertile soil, and abundant water resources. It is a natural paradise for developing agriculture and colonization. But the Spaniards have been in their hands for so many years, and they have never properly developed it.

Even the French in the Mississippi River estuary area only came here at the beginning of this century. It is simply a waste of natural resources.

Such excellent conditions, such good land...

Zheng Yan came out this time to get a clear understanding of the "local" situation of Dengguo. When the next war starts, the material needs of the military will inevitably further stimulate the development of agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, and fruit forests here. Regardless of whether the immigrants can get the exact benefits, at least their debts and loans will be offset.

Zheng Yan is considering whether he can make the reclamation bank active and put more money in, so that the people below can "prepare for a rainy day" in the future war period, so as to gain greater benefits?

But he still needs to discuss this matter with King Deng, who is also short of money.

The war is coming. King Deng also needs to show some "preparation" before the war, but Zheng Yan is in the Colonization Bank, not the parent bank, the China Bank.