The Maojin knife from the late Jin Dynasty

Chapter 266
  Since Liu Han surrendered to Liu Tai, he has been raising horses in the north and working hard to cultivate the future for Liu Tai.

At first, Liu Han thought that he could raise war horses by himself, and that when Cao Yi left the position of governor of Youzhou, he would be able to take over smoothly.

Don't look down on raising horses. In ancient times, horses were much more expensive than people. The servant of one of the nine ministers was the official responsible for raising horses.

Even the Great Sage Qitian started his career from the official position of Bi Mawen.

Liu Tai entrusted the border horses to Liu Han, which to a certain extent paved a road to Jiuqing for Liu Han.

As long as Liu Han executes the work step by step and does not make any obvious mistakes, then Liu Han will be able to firmly enter the position of Jiu Qing in the future by relying on the sheep and horses.

At first, Liu Han thought so too.

It was only after he actually started taking over these tasks that he found himself in a big pit.

Because Liu Tai gave him a plan for transforming alien races and asked him to try it.

Then, Liu Han tried it, and he fell into it, unable to get out.

Because Liu Tai's plan was to help the aliens develop from nomadic herding to animal husbandry, and strive to change the way of life of the northern aliens who lived by water and grass.

Help them learn to cultivate pasture, wheat and barley, so that they can have a unified settlement. It is best to learn to build city walls and live in a unified way instead of chasing water and grass. If Liu Tai wants to send troops to conquer, he doesn't know where he will get lost.

Liu Tai held high the banner of Hanization, but that did not mean that just by registering his name in the household registration, foreigners could become Han Chinese.

Liu Tai had to be a foreigner to be assimilated into a Han Chinese, so he had to have common living habits, a common cultural inheritance, blood compatibility, etc.

It is impossible to say that one is a nomadic people who live in pursuit of water and grass, and the other is a Han people who cultivates fields, and they are the same kind of people.

Even though Genghis Khan has the blood of Liu Bang, he is still a Mongolian. What he hopes is not that the Han people's way of living has been changed by the grassland, but that the Han people can transform the way of life of foreigners.

Under such circumstances, Liu Tai asked Liu Han to start this attempt.

To be honest, Liu Han thought Liu Tai was crazy when he got the plan, but so what if Liu Tai was crazy, he was his immediate boss after all. After Liu Han discussed with Liu Tai in detail for a long time, he took this theoretical system I went north to try it.

Liu Han first communicated with Zhao An. Zhao An drew a circle on the land north of Youzhou and personally communicated with the local Xianbei tribe.

These Xianbei tribesmen were quickly moved to the Coal Department, which was still managed by Xi Jian at the time, to dig coal for the Han Dynasty.

They did their part to establish a new Han Dynasty with Han as the main body and multi-ethnic coexistence in China.

As for the Xianbei talkers in this land, the Duan Xianbei clan was at loggerheads with the Murong clan in western Liaoning, and Tuoba Xianbei was divided into two groups and fought among themselves, and there was really no time to come forward and make decisions for these Xianbei people.

Soon after, the Tuoba Xianbei tribe was taken advantage of by the fisherman Zhao An, and he also accompanied them to the Coal and Steel Division to mine, and worked together to build the Han Dynasty.

After completing the land acquisition for the pasture, Liu Han began to select pasture seeds.

After all, there was only one sentence in Liu Tai's plan: "Let the aliens cultivate pastures and imitate the Han people in sowing in spring and harvesting in autumn."

But how to build pasture, what kind of grass to use for cultivation, and what method to cultivate, none of it is known.

But Liu Han could only rely on himself. His greatest trait was that he was obedient and serious about doing things.

With a step-by-step approach, Liu Han selected grasses that were easy to grow from the grasses eaten by thousands of foreign livestock, such as purple alfalfa, goosegrass, purple root vegetables, etc.

To select these forages, Liu Han really read poetry and history books to find out what kind of grass the Han's sweaty horse ate, and then whether this kind of grass could be cultivated on a large scale.

Finally, it was the foreigners who took the initiative to send purple root seeds the next year, and Liu Han discovered that this kind of grass was not only cold-resistant, but also drought-resistant, did not eat the land, and was loved by livestock.

The most important thing is that like leeks, it can be cultivated once and harvested many times. It is really the best feed.

As for the foreign race sending this kind of feed seeds in the second year, it was because at the end of the first year, Liu Han produced Qingzhu according to Liu Tai's method.

Although the results are not very good, at least the animals can eat, and the masons have built grazing houses on the grassland for the livestock to spend the winter.

This pasture house has a fire pit. The animals no longer have to crowd around in a sheltered place to stay warm. Instead, the animals can use coal to burn the fire pit. Even in winter, they can enjoy the same indoor warmth as humans.

This allows many livestock that theoretically cannot survive the winter to survive the winter without having to be slaughtered directly after freezing to death in the winter.

In China, people mainly burn wood cut and dried in the fire kang, because it saves the most money for the people.

But for the aliens on the slow grassland, wood? It's not easy to find wood for burning on the grasslands.

Livestock manure is their most common burning material, and if they want to save these things to keep the entire fire kang running for three months until spring, even if they need to light up the biogas technology, they are gradually squeezed out of the Chinese market. The coal-fired kang appears.

The most important thing is that the coal in these coal stoves was dug out by those aliens who were unwilling to switch from nomadic herding to animal husbandry.

To a certain extent, it can be regarded as self-produced and self-sold, making an outstanding contribution to the transformation of animal husbandry into nomadic industry.

But if they want to convert the nomadic industry into animal husbandry, the pasture houses that can ensure warmth in winter and allow more livestock to live can only be regarded as second place. The real credit lies in the green storage technology.

This technology with almost no barriers, under Liu Tai's persistence and guidance, Liu Han completely mastered it in the second year. From then on, the aliens in Youzhou area could no longer resist the development from nomadic to animal husbandry. .

There is no other reason, because it is getting colder and colder in the north now.

If it weren't for the fact that a large area of ​​grassland would be eaten clean quickly during grazing, forcing oneself to chase towards the next grassland, who wouldn't want to stay in one place peacefully and peacefully? It’s a lifetime!
  Green storage technology allows livestock to eat abundant food in winter, and pasture technology allows cattle and sheep to avoid freezing to death in wind and snow.

As the nomadic aliens truly feel the benefits brought by these two technologies, some of the aliens will naturally stay, changing from the nomadic aliens who live in pursuit of water and grass to the pastoral aliens who cling to a piece of pasture.

Liu Han drew a circle on the map. These aliens would plant grass and graze in this pasture, but they also needed to plant grass and maintain it. The most important thing is to calculate how many livestock are left for winter each year and how much rations need to be stored.

The extra livestock will basically go to the county town or even Youzhou to be exchanged for salt and grain, and even a lot of new clothes, even war horses and other things, as well as the most important luxury tea.

It can be said that with the opening of the North Canal from Youzhou to Jinkou, this gave the northern foreigners an opportunity to come into contact with Qingzhou products.

They discovered that by working hard for a year to cultivate livestock, they could exchange for their living supplies for the second half of the year, or even a year, from the market, which changed the way of life of these foreign races.

Under normal development conditions, even with a green reserve system, it would be very difficult for foreigners to develop from nomadic herding to animal husbandry.

Essentially, the area north of Youzhou is not a place with fertile water and grass, but Youzhou has become different after the coal department's massive supply of coal.

Because with the massive supply of coal, the lives of foreigners have fundamentally changed.

Especially in winter, it has to be said that the problem of water supply has always been very difficult, but coal allows them to directly boil snow water for heating, and use the boiled and cooled snow water to feed livestock and even Give yourself a drink.

Not only foreigners, but also Youzhou, Qingzhou, and even Jizhou. Although it has been so many years, Liu Tai's greatest role in the steam engine is only to use it in the mine or to crush things, and to work hard to pump out the water in the mine. For high-power equipment, a watt-level steam engine is still far away.

But the energy source itself, coal, was strongly advocated by Liu Tai.

It is not only the use of charcoal fires for heating in winter, but more importantly, the use of charcoal fires for productivity is promoted.

For example, it can be used to forge steel, or to simulate constant-temperature greenhouses for crops to grow. Even on dug canals, if you encounter some solid rocks that are difficult to cultivate, first burn them with high-temperature charcoal fire, and then use cold ice water mixed with saltpeter to spray them. Every craftsman has become proficient in this relatively simple digging method.

If you are familiar with it, you will naturally master it the more you use it.

Not to mention, the higher toughness and strength of steel tools brought about by high-temperature calcination of coal speeds up production even more.

It can be said that under Liu Tai's initiative, although coal has not yet become as popular in society as it did after the steam engine was invented, Liu Tai knows very well that the development of this society depends on the efficiency of utilizing cheap and large amounts of energy.

Although so far, Liu Tai has not invented a steam engine or generator.

But as Liu Tai took the initiative to introduce coal as a resource into the restructured society, and tried his best to replace industries that used to consume manpower but can now be replaced by energy, Liu Tai could clearly feel that the entire society was changing. develop.

Although the development speed of this civilization is not like the explosive development after humans mastered the steam engine.

But Liu Tai felt that the entire social level had at least gradually been able to be on par with the Song Dynasty. Even in the Song Dynasty, there would be no emperor like Liu Tai who advocated the development and promotion of coal resources for society.

However, no matter how much coal resources are promoted, the mainstream of this era is still livestock.

Even if coal resources have development potential, at least until the invention of the steam engine and the improvement of tractors that can plow the land, livestock power is still the most important resource, so Liu Han's opinions must also be taken seriously.

In the past, it was to conquer the north of the Yellow River, so all Liu Han's resources were tilted towards the war horses.

Even if Zhao An took advantage of the dispute between the Tuoba family and finally got a fisherman to get the horses, they were basically given to Liu Han to raise the horses.

This is why when Liu Tai and Shi Le fought, Liu Tai's horses were no less numerous than Shi Le's.

But now, as he took over the land in Hebei, Liu Tai's request to Liu Han was to increase the number of cattle for farming.

After all, foreigners now have to farm the land. Even if they plant grass, they still need to master the Han people's intensive farming techniques bit by bit.

After all, if you want to be incorporated as a Han nationality, but you don’t even know how to farm, then what kind of Han are you?

As long as there is cultivated land in the north and nose rings are added to cattle, some cattle can always be cultivated and transported to other areas in Hebei that lack cattle, accelerating the coverage of cattle.

After all, in this era, cattle are almost regarded as the primary productive force.

When can we implement one cow per household, I think we will be able to achieve a well-off society in this era.

Therefore, Liu Tai thought for a while and decisively made a request to Liu Han. This year, [-] war horses need to be slaughtered. It is best to increase the annual number of war horses to [-] in three years. The goal is to stabilize the number of war horses to more than [-] horses annually. .

Then there is no longer the development of war horses for combat, but to cultivate horses or mules that can carry more items.

The other is farm cattle. This year, the main task is to complete the improvement of dry land cattle, so that they can learn to cultivate fields after being tethered.

If the number of cattle can be plowed, the better. There is no upper limit. If it is successfully completed, they will be used during spring plowing next year.

After all, the main task last year was to defeat Shi Le, and all the development directions of the Northern Ranch were towards War Horse.

But this year we have won the land in Hebei, so naturally the demand for cattle has increased exponentially.

Liu Tai knew very well that if the cattle after being collared could really become cattle in the northern region, then no matter how many cattle there were, the land of China would be able to eat them.

After all, with the presence of cattle, the efficiency of reclamation has increased so much.

Even if the number of farm cattle becomes saturated in the future, just take off the ring from the cow's nose and it will become a beef cow.

However, Liu Tai thought about it and felt that it was too far away to expect every household to eat beef cattle in the future. As long as the steam engine has not been invented yet and mechanical energy can replace biological energy, then for the people, cattle are more of a productivity tool than food. Much more!

Liu Tai also quickly replied to Liu Han and invested in the construction of supporting facilities for the Grand Canal.

Liu Tai knew very well that if the Yongji Canal could not be opened smoothly, even if Liu Han trained cattle, it would be very difficult to transport them to areas north of the Yellow River. The consumption along the way would probably not be a small sum.

But as long as the Yongji Canal is opened smoothly, and there is one road from Bohai Bay to Qingzhou from Youzhou, and the Yongji Canal is the same road, then at least the entire elite area of ​​the North China Plain will be indispensable for farming cattle from now on.

(End of this chapter)