Daming pirates

At this time, Tamsui City has become the lair of the sea wolves and the base camp where the sea wolves rely on to make a living. After more than three years of hard work by the sea wolves, Tamsui City has cultivated a large area of ​​farmland.

, the local ecological environment has also undergone huge changes due to extensive land reclamation and landforming. If people who were here a few years ago come here now, I am afraid no one will believe that this is the former Tamsui River.

Not only is the area of ​​farmland opening up constantly expanding, but the number of people immigrating to Tamsui River has also been increasing with the continuous efforts of Sea Wolf in recent years. Every year, a large number of immigrants will flow into the Tamsui area, and they will be

Seawolves were placed in various residential areas selected in advance, gradually forming new immigrant villages.

Now the number of immigrant villages in the entire Tamsui area alone has exceeded 100, and according to Yu Xiaotian's requirements, these immigrant villages are all large villages. The population of each village must exceed 1,000, and some of the earliest immigrants

Villages, some villages now have a population of 2,000 people.

In addition to the immigration villages, Yu Xiaotian also made some adjustments to the immigration policy at the end of the fifth year of Tianqi. He changed the previous method of dispersed arrangements for each household and began to set up a new type of collective farm.

The land was given to the immigrants piece by piece for them to cultivate.

Although decentralized farming by small households is simpler to manage, there is a problem, that is, the large-area farming that Yu Xiaotian hopes to promote cannot be effectively promoted.

Collective farms, on the other hand, can carry out centralized crop rotation on large plots of land. Among the new immigrants, they are no longer the civilians they used to be. Instead, after they were transported to the Tamsui area, they all signed a contract of sale with Sea Wolf. In theory,

On paper, they are all Yu Xiaotian's slaves, but in fact, these people are professional agricultural workers.

These immigrants were concentrated in farms, with dedicated personnel responsible for leading them, and they farmed collectively. In this way, the land could be reclaimed into large pieces of farmland, farmed intensively, and planted according to standards, and some simple large-scale animal-drawn agriculture could be used.

Machinery to manage fields.

Although there will be some disadvantages in doing so, at this stage, the land is actually in Xiaotian's hands, which is much better and easier to manage than cutting it into small pieces and assigning property rights to each household.

Therefore, at the current stage, the advantages of doing so outweigh the disadvantages. As for whether it will affect the development of productivity in the future, that is a matter for the future. At least for now, under the strong control of Sea Wolf, there will be no major problems.

In addition, Xiaotian and some people in charge of civil affairs have formulated many incentive and punishment measures for this kind of collective farm. The farmers who manage the farm through the system can still play a very good motivating effect.

In the past, when Sea Wolf wanted to promote some improved crops, it had to go door-to-door to those farmers. However, farmers are naturally wary. They dare not try to plant unfamiliar crops easily, so they like some selected crops.

It is very difficult to promote the improved crop varieties that have been developed.

This also affects Sea Wolf's agricultural development in freshwater. After all, most of the fields in this area are newly reclaimed raw lands. To mature the land, some effective methods need to be adopted to rotate crops with various crops.

Improve the soil.

Many raw lands were severely deficient in nitrogen. Although no one knew what nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium were at this time, some experienced farmers still knew that planting legumes on the land would improve the soil.

However, many ordinary farmers do not understand, so they do not know about using beans to rotate crops and improve soil fertility, and are unwilling to plant the land according to Sea Wolf's arrangements. As a result, some land is not mature enough after two years, and the crop yields are reduced.

Very low.

The collective farm system can solve the problem very well. The higher-ups decide what to plant and how to plant it, and the farmers on the farm will plant according to the instructions from the higher-ups. Whether it is good or not is none of their business, but in this way, it can speed up the improvement of the soil.

Effortless.

Another benefit is that Yu Xiaotian has always asked to find ways to accumulate fertilizer. In the absence of modern fertilizers, fertilizer has a great impact on the yield of farmland. However, most farmers did not pay much attention to the issue of fertilizer accumulation in the past.

That is to say, carrying a basket to pick up some cow dung can be regarded as good agricultural fertilizer.

But in fact, there are many ways to accumulate fertilizer. Yu Xiaotian has always been concerned about sanitation issues and strictly requires all villages to build public toilets. He has also begun to promote biogas digesters. Although the utilization rate of biogas is not very high, it can be obtained

A very good decomposed fertilizer.

In addition, in addition to collecting human feces and urine, the biogas tank can also put some rotten vegetable leaves, weeds, leaves and other organic matter produced in daily life or agricultural production into the biogas tank. After being decomposed, it can become a good organic fertilizer.

, sprinkled in the ground, it is a good agricultural fertilizer.

In this way, the rural environment is greatly improved, the threat of disease outbreaks is reduced, and a large amount of agricultural fertilizer can be obtained.

In addition, the implementation of the farm, in addition to the convenience of management, Sea Wolf also organized a fleet to go to various islands to find struvite or guano. In this era, some islands are a paradise for seabirds.

Over the years, thick layers of guano have accumulated. These guano and struvite stones are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and are excellent fertilizers. Before the advent of modern fertilizers, using this kind of guano to fertilize fields has already

It's the best way.

But even so, the collected guano and struvite are far from enough, so they can only be used on the farmland of Sea Wolf's own farm. It is impossible for every household to provide such things.

Overall, as the number of immigrants increases, the number of immigrants in the entire Tamsui area has reached 160,000 or 70,000 at the beginning of the seventh year of Tianqi. Such a population has almost reached that of a low-level small county on land.

The population size has allowed the sea wolves to firmly establish a foothold here.

As for the original indigenous people in this area, as the sea wolves became stronger and stronger, they had no way to deal with these outsiders. Although some of their tribes had tried to resist and drive these outsiders out of their lands.

They went to the land and used sneak attacks, assassinations, headhunting and other methods to try to deter these outsiders.

However, their actions often immediately lead to harsh revenge from the Sea Wolf. The Sea Wolf infantry will immediately lead the indigenous auxiliary troops into the mountains and forests to find the offending indigenous tribes, or wipe them out and kill those who resist.

The survivors who surrendered were taken out of the mountains and forests and thrown into farms to work in labor camps. The euphemistic name was "reform through labor" and they were gradually integrated into the immigrants.

In fact, once the indigenous people got used to the "modern" life of immigrants, they found that this kind of life was actually more comfortable than surviving by fishing and hunting in the mountains and forests. Most of the indigenous people also became accustomed to it after a year or two of adapting.

I don't want to go back to the mountains and forests and continue to live the kind of life of eating hair and drinking blood.

In this way, under the strong intimidation of the sea wolf, a large number of surrounding indigenous people also knew how powerful the sea wolf was, and they did not dare to continue to provoke immigrants. Gradually, the security situation improved a lot.

Moreover, Sea Wolf is not just using force against the natives. Yu Xiaotian knows that peace cannot be achieved by relying on swords and guns alone. Using force blindly will only buy deeper hatred in the end, so he must show

The reason is that they can feel that the Sea Wolf is not only an intruder here, but also can bring them a lot of help.

At least Sea Wolf took the initiative to contact the surrounding indigenous people, first gave them some daily necessities as a small favor, and then exchanged some hunted skins from them. In this way, after a long time, the indigenous tribes also discovered that their lives gradually

They can't do without these outsiders. From the hands of outsiders, they can get many good things they have never seen before, ranging from needles and threads to wood cutting knives, farm tools, iron pots, kitchen knives, porcelain, cloth and other items.

, they find that the things brought by outsiders are very useful, but once they get used to them, they can't stand it if they don't use these things now.

Therefore, the carrot and stick approach gradually frightened the surrounding indigenous tribes, causing the number of incidents of indigenous attacks in surrounding immigrant villages to decrease over the past year, which also invisibly reduced the number of people here.

Defense pressure makes the pace of pioneering faster and faster.

However, now Sea Wolf still encounters some problems. After all, Tamsui is not a plain area, and the area of ​​flat arable land is not very large. Most of it is hillside land. Although it can be opened up, it is not conducive to irrigation, especially for paddy fields.

Rice is cultivated in large areas.

People in the south are mostly accustomed to eating rice. There are too many dry fields, so they can only focus on other dry land crops. This is not very good for the agricultural structure. Especially the sugar industry, which can make a lot of profits, will be greatly affected.

In this era, sucrose was also one of the most scarce trade goods. Europeans purchased large quantities of sucrose from the Ming Dynasty and then transported it to Europe, which became a very profitable business. Europeans like to eat sugar, whether it is drinking tea or just eating.

Coffee, which has become popular, likes to add a lot of sugar, so the demand for sucrose is very high.

Of course, Sea Wolf also wants to start such an industry, but here in Tamsui, firstly, the land is not very ideal, and secondly, the climate is not very ideal either. Tamsui is located in the northernmost area of ​​Taiwan, and the winter temperature is still quite cold during this small ice age.

Yes, there is insufficient accumulated temperature throughout the year, so it is not a very ideal sugarcane planting land.

These factors have restricted Hailang's reclamation and agricultural development in this area. Therefore, the most ideal place should still be in southern or central Taiwan. However, Yan Siqi has already occupied the Bengang area first, and Yu Xiaotian had previously planned his own development.

I was not confident about the speed and did not want to get too close to the Dutch, so I chose the Tamsui River area.

But he himself did not expect that his strength would increase so quickly. Now he is no longer afraid of the Dutch, but the good opportunity to occupy the Jianan Plain has been missed.