Working Prophet

While Li Yu was discussing the matter of building a house, he also did not forget to solve the problem of eating.

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

This food could probably sustain them for a month, or even longer, but Li Yu still spent money to purchase a batch of grain from Black Rock City, mainly wheat and rye, plus kidney beans and peas. There are onions, which are also some of 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 can still be saved. In addition to the specialty carrots of Green Field, there are also barley and wheat, which are almost mature.

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

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

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

After Li Yu followed Miss Rabbit to her territory, although he seemed a bit unprofessional, he wandered around the green fields with his little maid Clara and a few young children every day.

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

Among them, agriculture was especially the focus of Li Yu's inspection.

Food production is the most important thing at any time and anywhere.

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

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

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

The level of agriculture on the continent of Bratis is so backward. The ratio of planting to harvest is as high as 1:4. This is actually the result of various conditions.

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

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

Li Yu had seen the plows used by farmers in Luye, and they were still similar to the scraping plows used by the ancient Romans.

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

Once the seeds are sown, the weeds will begin to compete with the seeds for nutrients in the soil.

Moreover, the number of such scraping plows was pitiful. There were often only one or two in a village, owned by the lord, which was far from being able to meet the farming needs of a village.

Li Yu took the right medicine and planned to introduce the share-type plow. This type of plow actually appeared very early in China, but it was introduced to Europe thousands of years later. It is still widely used around the world. Of course, many of them have been mounted on tractors. Finally.

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

The rubber wheels can be replaced by wooden wheels, and the plows and soil dividing blades are best made of iron. If not, you can even use wood. After all, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, many plows were made of pure wood, but the effect was less effective.

If you replace the plowshare with a chisel, you can also aerate the hard soil layer that has been cultivated too hard.

In addition, Li Yu, a seeder, is also preparing to buy one. The principle of this thing is also very simple. It is a wheelbarrow that can be pushed by hand, plus a rotating wooden baffle and funnel. As long as the seeds are added from above, the seeds can be evenly distributed. Sprinkling it on the land can improve efficiency a lot more than planting seeds bit by bit with your hands.

There are also sickles. The short-handled sickles used on the continent of Bratis can only cut half of the straw. If the handle can be lengthened, more straw can be cut. The straw can be used as fodder to feed livestock... …

For all of the above tools, Li Yu can easily find suitable models on Taobao.

Use it as a prototype, and then recruit blacksmiths to cooperate with the carpenters in the territory. As long as you try a few more times, you should be able to achieve mass production. In the future, if Li Yu finds other useful methods on Taobao and can use today's Bratis technology, The replica farm tools will also be moved here.

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

Most parts of Bratis Continent still use the two-field system, which means dividing the fields into two pieces. Only half of the land is planted every 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 land, cultivate on another empty land, and so on.

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

Of course, the shortcomings are also obvious. The fields are only half utilized, and half of them are empty every year.

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

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

Just a simple calculation can show that the efficiency of the three-field system has been greatly improved compared to the two-field system. The land utilization rate has increased from 50% to 66.7%, and each piece of land can harvest almost 30% more grain.

Unfortunately not everywhere is 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 Church of Silver Moon claims that this is the goddess teaching the people in this land not to be too greedy.

Li Yu knew that the nitrogen in the land had been exhausted.

The solution to this problem is also very simple. Every modern person who has completed nine years of compulsory education can easily tell the answer, that is - beans.

To be more precise, it is rhizobia that live in the roots of legumes. 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 100% 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.

If you want to achieve self-sufficiency, you must make good use of every piece of land.