If I let you farm, will you become the emperor of the empire?

After getting a new batch of slaves, Roman provided them with a very high standard of living, so their obedience was maximized.

It was bad, and it felt better to be a slave than not to be a slave.

This gave Roman more manpower to use.

He accelerated the progress of recruiting soldiers.

On the 260th day.

The number of troops in Sige Town increased to more than 400.

Professional soldiers consume a lot of food, especially meat, which is extremely amazing, more than 10,000 kilograms per month.

Roman had to organize the army and conduct large-scale hunting again.

This time it was not limited to the forest north of the manor.

There were also mountains, swamps, and rivers over there and to the east and west, all within the hunting range.

Roman ordered people to weave dozens of fishing nets and let them drag along the river.

The basin has a criss-crossed water network and a developed water system. The fishermen in Sige Town actually caught very little, and the river resources were rich.

This autumn group hunting lasted for a week.

In total, Roman was given more than 100,000 kilograms of prey and tens of thousands of kilograms of various fish, including cod, trout, and a large number of lampreys.

This method is a case of exhausting the resources.

Although many cubs and pregnant mothers have escaped from the hunting circle, the resources of wild animals will definitely decrease significantly next year. If this continues for two consecutive years, the damage to the natural ecology will be devastating, and it will definitely take at least ten years to recover.

But Roman doesn't care. How can the land where humans are involved allow wild animals to survive?

He will also carry out large-scale land development in the future, so it doesn't matter if it is reduced.

By next year, the scale of the farm will definitely be formed.

It is purely a luxury to expect hunting to meet the demand for meat.

The climate and soil of this land are extremely suitable for the development of animal husbandry.

The soil is moist, mild and rainy, and there are many grasslands. Basically, every noble's territory has a pasture covered with juicy and rich grass.

It's just that breeding is very difficult.

...

Because the increase in the number of troops means a decrease in qualified labor.

Although the arrival of slaves filled this gap and did not leave Roman without anyone to use, the dilemma of the scarcity of young and strong laborers still lay before him.

Young and strong laborers, pregnant women, boys and girls. Only slaves of this age group are valuable.

If you want to purchase slaves in large quantities, it will inevitably be mixed with fakes, or real ones with fakes.

Roman cannot expect a large number of slaves with high quality. It is too difficult to purchase them. You have to go to many places, or you can only buy conscripted prisoners from the battlefield who have no one to redeem.

And this requires connections and time.

As it happens, Roman does not have these things.

He has been in the fiefdom for less than a year, and he has not established a firm foothold and made a name for himself.

All the nobles in this land don’t even know that there is a lord named Roman in this rugged and wild corner.

Roman doesn’t like to make friends with nobles, and he doesn’t know anything about the conflicts of interest between nobles. He has very poor connections and doesn’t even recognize all his brothers and sisters.

It is impossible to make friends widely.

Those idiots are not worthy of being his friends.

But the consequence is that Roman cannot transfer a group of people from the nobles he is familiar with to develop the town of Sige.

He still needs to rely on merchants to buy things.

He cut off the connection with Earl El of Tieshuling through the salt and iron trade.

Roman doesn't care. If there are nobles who provide him with assistance, it will give him a headache. Should he kill them or not?

The lack of manpower is a long-term nature.

In other words, the more people there are, the more they are lacking, and there will never be enough at any time.

There are about 4,000 people in Sige Town now.

But not all of these people can be used, but they have to be evenly distributed in various fields.

Some people weed and farm, some cut wood and forge iron, some boil salt, and some take care of young animals...

More people are building farms, mining coal, smelting iron and steel.

There must be 300 people in the food camp, mills, ovens, chopping wood, boiling pots, serving meals, washing dishes, and taking care of children under five years old.

Which one does not require manpower?

In the hottest time of summer, they have to boil tens of thousands of kilograms of water to make herbal tea every day, and each laborer has to drink ten kilograms of herbal tea every day.

Faced with the burden of three meals a day, if there are not enough people, they will not be able to handle it, which will only affect the collective production efficiency.

It seems that there are many laborers, and everyone can share it.

…

It’s just development, farming, and animal husbandry. It’s no big deal.

The alfalfa and ryegrass that Roman planted on both sides of the river in the summer can now be harvested.

The grass of the two thousand acres of land is growing very well, with full branches and leaves, juicy and delicious. It is not a problem to produce one thousand kilograms per mu. There are more than two million kilograms of grass in total, which must be harvested as soon as possible.

It is autumn now, and the grass will soon turn yellow and wither.

By the winter, I am afraid that there will be no fresh grass.

Livestock can only eat hay in winter, so they will lose weight, even war horses are no exception, even if they are fed with concentrated feed.

But for livestock farming, you can't be short of feed anyway.

Without fresh grass and feed, you have to rely on fat to resist the cold, so it's a miracle if you don't lose weight.

Some herders will migrate to resist the severe winter and find suitable pastures.

Herders who don't have the conditions to migrate will slaughter livestock in large numbers in autumn and winter to avoid waste.

But for farming families, this is not appropriate, as farmers can't afford meat.

They would buy piglets and lambs in the spring or early summer, and then sell the adult livestock in late autumn and winter, exchanging them for food, or a few copper coins or a silver coin, and then save them.

Seeing that the number of livestock cubs was increasing, Roman knew that he would definitely need a lot of fresh feed in the future.

At this time, silage was the only choice.

The feed stored in this way could still provide rich nutrition for livestock in winter, with high sugar content, easy to absorb and improve digestion.

From a human perspective, this practice is the difference between raw meat and roasted meat, and roasted meat can be stored for a longer time.

Roman had to harvest a lot of grass with a sickle when the grass was growing at its peak, crush it with the guillotine made by Lax, and finally seal it in the cellar to let it ferment.

Only grass would not work.

Roman would turn 500 acres of soybean straw and green beans into silage to meet the feed needs of all livestock in winter and early spring.

The previous free-range and grazing methods are not suitable for large-scale farming.

They must be kept in pens to reduce their exercise and increase the meat yield.

He plans to raise 1,000 pigs, 2,000 sheep, and more than 5,000 chickens.

In addition to the draft horses and oxen in the livestock shed, and the wild horses, it is estimated that there will be about 1,000 large animals.

Don't survive the winter without 3 million kilograms of silage.

This amount is huge and requires sufficient time and manpower. It takes manpower to chop with a guillotine, and it also takes manpower to dig pits and build walls.

With this expected scale, don't think about taking care of all the livestock without 1,000 laborers, which means that a quarter of the population of Sige Town is now tied to this position.

When it is impossible to improve the overall labor efficiency, you can only settle for the second best.

This is also the disadvantage of large-scale farming when conditions are not suitable. Many things can only be done by pure manpower.

Fortunately, they are all cubs now, and the difficulty of raising them is not too high, leaving Roman with plenty of time.

He wanted the livestock to grow fat in winter, so he sent Daken to buy livestock cubs everywhere, and the number of cubs shipped was increasing.

The merchants upstream also learned about this situation and were very happy to send livestock cubs that were not suitable for winter breeding to Sige Town to make a profit.

...

After the fall, the high temperature faded and the air became rare and refreshing.

Roman rode his horse and headed northwest.

There is another benefit of building roads.

That is, there are more resource acquisition points.

A dirt road of hundreds of kilometers will inevitably pass through many terrains along the way, one of which is adjacent to a grassland.

The vast green fields are a natural pasture with lush grass and water.

If it is to be developed in the future, this grassland can build a new farm for grazing, which can greatly save manpower.

Roman came here not only to survey the terrain, but also because he got news.

Someone saw traces of wild horses in this natural pasture.

...

Roman wore a straw hat and rode a horse, wandering in this green wilderness, searching for traces of wild horses everywhere.

Soon, he found the wild horses here.

There were about 17 or 18 horses.

Roman felt that there was more than one horse herd in this basin, otherwise the herd could not be maintained, otherwise it would be extinct if there was a little turmoil.

This group of wild horses had not seen humans very often, so they were not very afraid. When they saw Roman, they came over and communicated with the white horse under Roman's buttocks by smell and neighing.

After observing, he was a little disappointed.

The quality of this group of wild horses was not good. They were about two meters long and one and a half meters tall at the shoulder, which was about the same as wild donkeys. They could not compete with the tall and straight plateau war horses from the east. Their khaki hair was not beautiful, but fluffy and sparse.

Use them to form a cavalry team...

It's not impossible, but it's very reluctant.

They have no endurance, dare not charge, can only be used as a means of transportation, and don't even have the strength to pull a cart. They need to be fed with fine grains and special training.

There is no way. Without hybridization and breed selection, wild horses can't even become pack horses.

But this is unexpected wealth, it's good to have it.

This is the gift of nature.

Roman ran on this natural pasture all day, searching for wild horses everywhere, and found that there were quite a lot of horses in those herds, about ten groups, some more and some less, all together there are about two or three hundred.

On the market, it costs four or five hundred gold coins.

Roman doesn't care much about money-he even found a gold mine waiting to be developed.

But horses are hard to buy even if you have money.

It fully verifies the truth that horses can't grow fat without night grass.

Even though wild horses are wild and difficult to tame, they need professional horse trainers.

But there are only horsemen who raise and take care of horses here. It is unknown how long it will take to successfully tame them, which may take several months.

Roman drew a detailed map of this grassland on paper and marked the approximate location of the wild horses.

The increasingly cool weather allowed Roman to complete this survey work more comfortably.

The wild grass on this grassland is lush, like an endless green ocean, and the long grass leaves are undulating like waves.

Unfortunately, it is too far away.

The tentacles of Sige Town cannot reach here.

Roman returned to the Origin Manor and gave the distribution map of wild horses to Seth, asking him to make a plan to catch them all. Then he went to the farm to check the progress of the construction.

The construction team worked very quickly. Under the leadership of more than 30 masons, the chicken coop has taken shape.

These masons had all experienced the construction of brick houses before, so they could quickly get started with similar buildings.

After all, there is really no threshold for wall building, and Roman did not build a complicated building.

The chicken coop has a simple structure and good ventilation. Wooden hollow chicken cages are placed inside, and there is a dung plate underneath.

The purpose is to reduce the floor space, save feed and prevent epidemics.

But eggs cannot be put in one basket.

Roman divided the chicken coop into different areas from the inside to avoid being wiped out by a certain epidemic.

The laying hens will be specially selected and raised separately for incubation and breeding.

In the future, those laying hens will lay and hatch eggs continuously, providing Roman's apostles and subjects with a partial source of protein - the other part comes from goat milk and cow milk.

Dairy products such as butter and cheese are indispensable.

Each farm covers an area of ​​at least ten acres - mainly because the walls are very long to prevent them from running around, and it will be completed in more than a month.

Roman has filled everyone's schedule.

Meanwhile, Ruto was in charge of iron smelting at the blast furnace, and the output was very stable.

Shallow coal mines and open-pit iron mines were extremely easy to mine, and more than ten tons of output could be mined every day.

It was just that more and more coal and iron ore were mined, and they were piled up, so there was no time to burn them for iron smelting.

But the output limit of a blast furnace was here, and it could not smelt all the iron ore unless a second blast furnace was built.

And Ruto had already done his best to supervise a blast furnace.

Even so, in the past half month, the steel produced in Sige Town has successfully equaled the amount of steel purchased previously, and a total of more than 10,000 kilograms of steel was sent to the iron shed.

Those fine scimitars, spears, daggers, and armors cast by hydraulic hammers are constantly leaving the iron shed and sent to the barracks, handed over to the soldiers, so that they can adapt to the feel of wielding steel weapons.

Now that there are wild horses, they should be able to use silage feed to tame their wildness and cultivate obedience in winter.

Next year, his soldiers will be able to experience the pleasure of riding on horseback.

There is no fifth update today.