Iron Harvest: When Farming Becomes Conquest
Chapter 131 - 3: Autumn Harvest

Chapter 131: Chapter 3: Autumn Harvest

The arrival of this batch of slaves not only filled the labor gap in Sige Town but also supported a military recruitment drive.

Roman generously recruited 200 people, raising the total number of Sige Town’s army to 600.

This ratio was quite high.

The total population of Sige Town was only 4,500.

These soldiers were fully professional, consuming a significant amount of resources. They were not involved in any productive tasks.

But Roman had to support them.

Three meals a day, supplying them with meat, eggs, and milk!

Eggs and milk were only a few copper coins, one coin could buy seventy, eighty, or ninety jin.

As soon as the merchant caravans arrived in Sige Town, Roman bought all they had!

As long as it was edible, he bought as much as they could eat!

Their only target was to endure various cruel training exercises every day to improve their physical fitness!

Even during rest periods, they had to undergo literacy education.

Those who performed well would receive certain rewards from Roman, such as gold, silver, and copper coins, better living conditions, or even a personal audience with him.

Those who couldn’t keep up with the learning pace had to undergo physical punishment training.

The intensity of that training was incredibly high, and terrifying.

Ordinary people couldn’t endure such treatment; it was easy for them to break.

But there was a special atmosphere in the military and the barracks that created a mystical pull; potential talents couldn’t escape from here. It was like a great melting pot, subtly removing their inherent bad habits and flaws, dripping out of their bodies, making them pure and strong.

Still, that wasn’t enough; they also needed ideological education and military training, tempered and refined by various means to ultimately forge them into qualified steel.

Tempered into steel!

As Roman recruited new soldiers, he constantly murmured this in his heart.

...

Now it was autumn. The temperature had dropped.

Roman belatedly realized that it was time to prepare winter clothing for those fools.

With a refreshing breeze and forests tinged with color, it was harvest season.

Merchant ships arriving at Sige Town were also laden with heavy various goods.

Such as fresh turnips, pumpkins, radishes, grapes, figs, pomegranates, and other fruits and vegetables;

Livestock younglings, born out of season and too numerous for ordinary families to raise in winter, could only be sold off;

There was also a large amount of grain and miscellaneous grains harvested in the autumn;

Some merchants, having heard that Sige Town offered high prices for slaves, transported the four or five slaves they bought elsewhere to sell to the local lord...

Roman levied very low business taxes, thereby establishing long-term trade relationships with merchants.

The effects were clear to see.

All merchants coming here became "return customers," considering this place a second "Free City."

With no commercial tax constraints, merchants found it more profitable to transport their goods to Sige Town.

This year’s land output of Sige Town was enough to feed over four thousand people.

On one hand, Roman prohibited Sige Town from selling grain outside, while on the other, he bought up all the goods brought by the merchants.

These vegetables were very cheap, affordable for even common farmers to buy and eat, and Sige Town was currently in dire need of various side dishes—which was precisely what Roman hadn’t planted—excluding the ten-acre vegetable plot at Origin Manor.

Fruits and vegetables immediately became work meals.

Grains were stored and processed into work meals.

And the young livestock also had to be well-fed, to become future work meals.

Roman’s attitude towards food was to hoard as much grain as possible while also liberally allowing consumption.

Those were all small merchant ships, conducting small businesses.

One took away two hundred jin of salt, another took away five hundred jin, managing to digest some of Sige Town’s output.

Occasionally, larger caravans arrived at this increasingly noisy and remote place.

But that was all.

The really large caravans couldn’t reach Sige Town.

A merchant ship like Morry’s was the limit.

He stayed here for only two days; as merchants were nomadic by fate, it was normal for them to pass by their own homes without entering. He quickly left with tens of thousands of jin of salt and two hundred barrels of maltose.

He had made a lot of money, but it was impossible for him to buy large merchant ships.

Because the bigger the merchant ship, the deeper the draft, which made inland navigation inconvenient, and once it entered the Silver Dragon Canyon, the hidden reefs could break the hull, with only smaller ships able to navigate, and even so, they would have to proceed with caution.

Roman knew the limitations of Sige Town, but he wasn’t in a rush.

The Silver Dragon Canyon was just a small threshold.

His future goal was to turn this place into the Eternal City.

To become the center of this land!

...

Six days after Morry left.

The grasslands welcomed the yellowing of decay.

The change of seasons was slow, but sudden.

It moved neither swiftly nor sluggishly, making you unaware of its approach until you suddenly realized the season had entered a deeper phase.

Roman wouldn’t make that mistake.

After the pig farm was finished, he turned most of his attention to the vast fields of soybeans.

After five months of growth, the lush stems yellowed, the fuzzy pods swelled and dehydrated, the leaves slowly withered and fell...

Until a large hand shook those yellowed plants.

And then came the sound of something moving inside the pods but without bursting...

Roman knew.

The time for the autumn harvest had arrived!

...

When he was making silage, he had ordered the reaping of five hundred mu of green beans in advance.

The remaining five thousand five hundred mu of land also urgently needed harvesting.

The farmers who had witnessed the yield of wheat were no longer surprised by the rich soybean harvest, but now here were slaves who had come to Sige Town after the summer harvest.

At this time when the sun had not yet risen, and the dew had not yet evaporated.

These slaves, new to Sige Town, stared foolishly at the farmland before them—most of those who could participate in the reaping had Planting Experience, knew the basics of farming, and had never thought of such things.

The soybeans were planted densely, the beans were plump and full, the leaves withered away, the whole plant was bare, quite crowded, like countless spindly dry branches planted in the ground, hanging heavy shriveled pods, slanting towards the sky.

Roman generously shared the joy of the bountiful harvest with his subjects and slaves.

This autumn harvest, he mobilized nearly 2,000 people. Only the students, warriors, craftsmen, and cooks did not participate—they each carried heavy responsibilities, sustaining the current or future operations of Sige Town.

All other work stopped, those who made salt, mined, forged iron, were also called over.

Because farming never complains of too many hands.

Thanks to Morry, Sige Town now had ample labor.

Roman still personally participated in this autumn harvest.

He held a sickle in hand, bending forward as he walked, the blade grazing the ground, leaving no bean stubble behind, preserving the nodules of the soybean roots in the soil.

He informed everyone that they should harvest in this manner.

Soybean root systems fixed nitrogen, and the nodules also contained residual nitrogen, so uprooting them was a waste; it was only necessary to harvest the soybean stalks above ground and let the nodules rot in the land.

The soybean stalks were hard, not flexible like wheat straws.

The sickle struggled to reap, and the dense planting meant an adult could harvest no more than one mu of the soy field per day.

With sickles in hand, they worked from morning to noon, and from noon to afternoon.

The whole process took three days.

Finally, on the evening of the fourth day, all the soybean fields were reaped, and the crops were transported to the threshing ground.

Hundreds of animals pulled stone rollers, walking back and forth over the vast threshing ground.

Threshing soybeans was much simpler than threshing wheat.

This harvest became unusually straightforward.

The soybean stalks, usable as fodder, were directly taken to the livestock pens,

After clearing the stalks, only the plump and swollen soybeans remained on the ground of the threshing area.

Those sunlit soybeans, shining slightly, spread like yellow pearls covering most of the threshing ground.

The soybeans were very dry and could be stored directly; they only needed to be kept ventilated afterwards.

Three more days passed, and after all storage work was finished, the yield records for these soybeans were placed into Roman’s hands.

From five thousand five hundred mu of land, nearly a million jin had been harvested.