Working Prophet.

Chapter 96 The Agricultural Revolution
Li Yu didn't forget to solve the problem of eating while he was talking about building a house.

The food that the lizard people brought out from the swamp was mainly some dried meat and wild vegetables, plus the grain and some poultry that they looted after looting several villages.

These foods can probably last them a month, or even a little longer, but Li Yu still paid for another batch of food from Black Rock City, mainly wheat and rye, plus kidney beans and peas. There are onions, which are also the most common foods on the tables of ordinary people in the Red Lion Empire.

In addition, there used to be a lot of farmland on these two pieces of land, and it was almost time to harvest.

Although some of them have been ruined by the lizard people, some of them can be salvaged. In addition to the special carrots of the green field, there are also barley and wheat, which are almost ripe.

Of course Li Yu didn't want to waste it.

Some time ago, he and Ilea jointly made a lot of money selling pepper, but now he has spent most of the money in just a few days.

And this is only a small part of the upfront investment.

After Li Yu followed Ms. Rabbit to her territory, although she seemed a bit idle, she wandered around the green field with her little maid Clara and a few young children every day.

But it is also this valuable experience of field research that gave him a deeper understanding of this land.

Among them, agriculture is the focus of Li Yu's investigation.

Food production is the most important thing no matter when and where.

If you've ever played a game like Don't Starve, you know that in the early stages of the game, most of your time will be spent collecting food to feed yourself, which sounds simple enough.

In fact, overproduction is one of the basic conditions for the creation of civilization.

If you can get the land to produce more food, you can free more human hands from the land to do other work.

The level of agriculture on the continent of Bratis is so backward that the crop-to-income ratio of 1:4 is actually the result of a combination of various conditions.

Regardless of factors that are temporarily difficult to change, such as geographical climate and the species differences of the starting crops themselves (for example, rice in Asia is inherently more productive than wheat in Europe).

First of all, there are big problems with the tools.

Li Yu has seen the plows used by the farmers in the green fields, and they are still similar to the scraping plows used by the ancient Romans.

This kind of plow is made of wood, with blades and iron birch on the head, and can be dragged by humans and animals. However, it can only plow the surface soil, and cannot really turn the land, loosen the soil, and cannot remove the roots of weeds located in the lower layers.

Once the seeds are sown, weeds will start competing with the seeds for nutrients in the soil.

Moreover, even such plows are pitifully small. There are often only one or two plows in a village, which are owned by the lord, which is far from meeting the farming needs of a village.

Li Yu prescribes the right medicine and plans to introduce the plow. This kind of plow actually appeared very early in China, but it was introduced to Europe thousands of years later. It is still widely used all over the world. Of course, many of them have been hung on tractors. later.

Its structure is not complicated, including a share, a soil divider, a plow frame, and a small wheel that can adjust the height.

Among them, the rubber wheels can be replaced by wooden wheels. It is best to use iron for the share and the soil divider. If not, you can even use wood.

If the plowshare is replaced with a chisel, it can also aerate the hard soil layer that has been plowed too hard.

In addition, Li Yu is also planning to get a planter. The principle of this thing is also very simple. It is a wheelbarrow that can be pushed by hand, plus a wooden baffle and funnel that can be rotated. Sprinkling it on the ground can improve a lot of efficiency than planting seeds by hand.

There is also a sickle. The short-handled sickle used on the Bratis continent can only cut half of the straw, but if the handle can be extended, more straw can be cut. The straw can be used as fodder to feed livestock... ...

Li Yu can easily find suitable models on Taobao for the above tools.

Use it as a prototype, and then recruit blacksmiths to cooperate with the carpenters on the territory. As long as you try a few more times, you should be able to achieve mass production. If Li Yu finds other useful products on Taobao and can use the current technology of Bratis The reproduced agricultural tools will also be moved here together.

In addition to the backwardness of production tools, the lack of fertility is also a major factor.

Most of the continent of Bratis still adopts the two-field system, that is, the field is divided into two parts, and only half of the land is planted each year, and the other half of the land is allowed to rest. Wait until the next year, and then alternate. The previously cultivated land Under the empty space, cultivate another piece of open land, and the cycle repeats.

The reason for doing this is to allow the land to rest and regain its fertility.

Of course, the disadvantages are also obvious. The utilization rate of the field is only half, and half of it is empty every year.

Only a few areas with very fertile land will implement the three-field system.

This is very similar to the two-field system, except that the land is divided into three parts, and each part of the land is idle for one year, and the remaining two years can be cultivated.

A simple calculation shows that the efficiency of the three-field system has been greatly improved compared with the two-field system. The land utilization rate has increased from 50% to 66.7%, and each piece of land can almost harvest [-]% more grain.

Unfortunately, not all places are fertile ground.

Taking the green field where Miss Rabbit lives as an example, we can only adopt the two-field rotation model and forcefully change to the three-field system. Maybe we can get a bumper harvest in the first two years, but the harvest will get worse and worse in the future, until it can't be cultivated at all.

The Silvermoon Church claimed that it was the goddess who taught the people in this land not to be too greedy.

But Li Yu knew that the nitrogen in the land was exhausted.

And it is very simple to solve this problem. Every modern person who has completed the nine-year compulsory education can easily say the answer, that is - beans.

More precisely, it is the rhizobium bacteria that live in the roots of legume plants. This special bacteria can return nitrogen from the air back to the soil.

Taking advantage of this feature, not only can the land that can only be implemented in the two-field system be upgraded to the three-field system, but it can also go a step further and develop a four-field crop rotation model.

Moreover, each of the four fields is not a three-year break for one year, but all four years are full of crops, and the land utilization rate is increased to [-]% by planting different bean crops every other year.

This is a necessary means for Li Yu, because compared to the land he got, the number of lizard people is obviously more, twice as many as the number of households living on this land before.

To be self-sufficient, every piece of land must be put to good use.

(End of this chapter)