Chapter 88: New Farm (Part 2)

"Your stamina is remarkably well-maintained."

"You make me sound ancient—I'm only thirty!"

"Huh?"

"This is what years of grassroots work does to a man." Yang Baogui flashed his sunny smile. "Walk with me." He whistled sharply and called out: "Beibei, go! Bring Ukraine back!" At his command, a dog shot off like an arrow and expertly herded a large white pig—which had been attempting to gnaw the bark off a roadside tree—back onto the path.

"The dog's name is Beibei?"

"That's right. I've got six of them: Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, Nini—"

"And the sixth?" Wu Nanhai found himself caught up in Yang Baogui's peculiar sense of humor.

"Aoyun—Olympics," Yang Baogui replied with a perfectly straight face. He shouted the name, and a dog that had been padding along quietly suddenly bounded to his feet, circling him with pure joy. Yang Baogui reached down to stroke its neck, clearly pleased with himself.

"You really know how to train dogs."

"It's a specialty of mine—though not my profession. Just something I do for fun." He cracked his whip, the sound snapping through the air. "I can drive wagons too. Learned that from farmers back when I was working the countryside. No wagons here though, so I went to the Industrial Group and asked them to build some rubber-wheeled ones. Hitch our captured Yunnan ponies to them, and a two-horse team could pull a thousand jin without breaking a sweat. But those people hemmed and hawed about how such carts are 'backward'—they're too busy 'working hard' on developing some four-wheeled farm cart." He snorted. "Nonsense. Can small horses even pull those?"

"Tieling draft horses certainly could." Wu Nanhai's gaze settled on two especially tall, robust animals in the column—heavy horses with powerful builds. These were among the finest draft horses bred in China since 1949, their bloodlines tracing back to Europe's premier cart and riding stock. Their maximum pulling force reached 450 kilograms; a single horse could haul a thousand-kilogram load on a double-rubber-wheeled wagon.

"They could," Yang Baogui conceded, "but these two must be kept as studs—we can't work them too hard. Besides, Tieling draft horses have actually deteriorated significantly over the years." He let out a sigh. (Note: Tieling draft horse breeding stopped in the 1990s; only a few degraded studs now exist. The breed will soon disappear.) "Nanhai, honestly, I'm very worried about our Agriculture Group."

"I sense the problems too," Wu Nanhai admitted, "but there are so many tangled threads—I hardly know where to begin." He imitated Yang Baogui's technique, waving a willow branch to keep the livestock moving.

"You studied agriculture. Surely you know what underlies modern agriculture's high yields?"

"Pesticides, fertilizers, improved varieties, irrigation, GMOs, soil chemistry..." Wu Nanhai rattled off the list.

"And can that model be replicated here?"

Wu Nanhai considered the question carefully. "Difficult. Conditions are too poor. Large-scale irrigation and promoting improved seed varieties are probably our most realistic yield-boosting measures. Fertilizer is somewhat manageable—once the Chemical Industry Group builds their ammonia and sulfuric-acid plants, anyway. But pesticides are another matter entirely. That requires an organic chemical industry. Without thirty or forty years of industrial buildup, I don't see how it's possible."

"No." Yang Baogui shook his head firmly. "Those problems are superficial. The real issue cuts much deeper. Modern society operates as one massive division-of-labor system—and agriculture is no exception. Under that system, our agricultural technicians' practical abilities have actually atrophied. The farmers' too.

"Think about it. Before, farmers had to select and cultivate their own seeds. Now they simply buy them. Agricultural technicians really only know which seeds to use, how to manage crops after sowing, when to apply which pesticides, what fertilizers work best...

"But here? There's no seed company. No pesticide factory. No veterinary drug facility. No agricultural machinery station. We have to do everything ourselves, and every one of us was trained within that division-of-labor system—each knowing only our own narrow piece. Modern agriculture is a complete chain, and all we have are scattered, disconnected links."

He gestured toward the dogs herding pigs. "Take those pigs, for instance—Georgia! Where do you think you're going?!" Yang Baogui's whip cracked, driving a wayward pig back onto the road. "Everyone expects us to start large-scale pig farming so we can have meat at every meal. But nobody stops to think about how many vaccines a piglet receives from birth to slaughter in a modern operation. How much medication. How many disinfectants are used just for the pens. And even with all that, when swine plague breaks out, they still die in droves."

Wu Nanhai felt a knot of worry tightening in his chest. He had considered these issues before, but never followed the thread this far.

"Seems like we'll have to rebuild everything piece by piece," he said quietly. His eyes followed the carefree pigs grunting and foraging as they ambled along. "Do they have names too?"

"Of course. They're all breeding stock—boars and sows. Names make them easier to remember."

"What are they called?"

"Ukraine, Big Bobo, Georgia, Russia—"

"Ha!" Wu Nanhai pointed at the largest, most formidable pig in the group. "Russia must be that boar?"

"No—that one's called Soviet Union."

The two men chatted as they walked, and the kilometers passed easily. The simple road stretched more than ten kilometers, well-maintained despite raising clouds of dust whenever vehicles passed. It made for pleasant conditions when herding livestock. On one side flowed the rushing Wenlan River; along its banks, rice ears had ripened to gold, though without the familiar rolling waves of a modern harvest. Agriculture here remained quite backward. Wu Nanhai walked and sighed, his mind churning through ways to transform their collective knowledge into productivity—yet obstacles seemed to pile up faster than he could count them.

The road was peaceful. Occasionally local people worked in distant fields, but they were too far away to matter. Several watchtowers punctuated the route, providing excellent security for passing transmigrators. What had originally been rough wooden towers had since been rebuilt as three-story brick-and-stone pillboxes, searchlights mounted on their roofs. Below each one, open ground was ringed by deep trenches and coils of barbed wire—if any attack occurred, transmigrators and vehicles on the road could quickly take shelter inside.

The entire marching column took nearly three hours to reach the Bairren Rapids camp. All Agriculture Committee members stood waiting to receive them—today marked the Committee's official move-in day.

Unlike departments already installed in the Committee Building compound downtown, the Agriculture Committee would be housed entirely at what had come to be known as the "Nanhai Model Demonstration Farm." Wu Nanhai had learned in university that agriculture is not created by people sitting in offices writing plans and reports. It is built through technicians walking step by step through fields, fish ponds, and orchards. If you were an agricultural technician, you lived near farmland. That was the only way.

The entire farm compound had been constructed with the brick kiln's newest red bricks, making it probably the grandest building complex in all of Bairren Fortress. There were offices, agricultural-tech labs, warehouses, a machinery station, cellars, and neatly arranged granaries. A water-powered mill stood by the river, and newly built animal pens still smelled fragrant with fresh lumber. The only concrete structure was a row of pressure-type biogas digesters designed to process waste, wastewater, and manure from both the residential and agricultural zones. The biogas they produced supplied the cafeteria for cooking, and once waste volumes increased, additional biogas could be used to generate electricity. The biogas slurry served double duty as fertilizer or feed additive; the final residue made excellent fertilizer as well.

The original plan had included a permanent glass greenhouse, but since the Industrial Sector had not yet begun manufacturing glass, that project was delayed. Fortunately, Hainan's subtropical climate meant that even during the Little Ice Age, accumulated temperatures remained sufficient for most purposes.

"The land assigned as our test field—" Ye Yuming pointed to boundary stakes in the distance—"extends from here to the water mill by the river."

Wu Nanhai studied the terrain. From where they stood to the riverbank was over a hundred meters, with a length of perhaps two hundred meters—an irregular long rectangle roughly twenty-plus modern mu in area. Adequate for vegetable plots and test fields. A small portion had already been leveled and planted with cabbage, greens, peppers, and tomatoes, some of which were ready for harvest. The cafeteria tables would soon become slightly more abundant.

But most of the land remained more stones than soil, still studded with tree stumps. It needed leveling, and probably imported topsoil as well. Wu Nanhai observed the riverbank height and traced the high-water lines, mentally calculating where irrigation channels would need to run and whether flood dikes should be built. Where to plant fruit trees and dig fish ponds, where to temporarily house tropical seedlings—all of it required careful consideration.

The farm compound's space shouldn't be wasted either. Courtyard economy, he thought. Build a grape trellis over the courtyard paths: half a mu of trellis could yield a thousand jin of grapes without consuming any extra space, all while providing welcome shade. Plant fruit trees behind the buildings...

His mind raced happily through the calculations. But with the current labor shortage, he would need to ask Wu De for some local farmers to help—ideally hired as long-term workers. As for local agricultural conditions, it would be best to consult a landlord—though he had heard that all the landlords and rich peasants had been released. A pity, really. Such people possessed rich farming experience and understood rural social dynamics better than anyone. Unfortunately, he couldn't speak Lingao dialect, which meant he would need interpreters. Troublesome. Better to learn the language himself. At minimum, if he ever hoped to take a wife or acquire a concubine, he would need the ability to communicate emotionally. Start from the basics? But all of that was tomorrow's problem. After walking for hours, exhaustion had seeped into his bones.

That night, he slept in the Agriculture Committee office. After so many days, finally having a roof overhead—sleeping indoors—felt like pure bliss. Apparently happiness really did come from comparison.

(End of Chapter)