Work Prophet
Chapter 95 - 11: Agricultural Revolution

Chapter 95: Chapter 11: Agricultural Revolution

Li Yu, while overseeing the construction of houses, also didn’t forget to solve the problem of food.

The lizard people brought out dried meat and wild vegetables from the marshes, plus the grain and some poultry they had looted from a few villages.

This food could probably sustain them for about a month, or even a bit longer, but Li Yu still spent money to purchase another batch of food from Black Stone City, primarily wheat and rye, along with kidney beans, peas, and onions, which were also the most common foods on the dining tables of the common folk in the Red Lion Empire.

Additionally, there were many farms on these two pieces of land, and it was almost the harvest season.

Although some of them had been ruined by the lizard people, there were still parts that could be salvaged, including the carrots, a specialty of Green Field, as well as barley and wheat, which were also nearly ripe.

Li Yu certainly didn’t want to waste them.

For a while he and Ireya had partnered up to sell pepper, which made them quite a bit of money, but now in just a few days, he had already spent most of that money.

And this was just a small part of the initial investments.

After Li Yu followed Miss Rabbit to her territory, although he appeared somewhat irresponsible, spending his days wandering around Green Field with the little maid Clara and a few children who hadn’t yet grown up.

But it was precisely this valuable experience of on-the-ground research that gave him a deeper understanding of the land.

Agriculture, in particular, was a key focus of Li Yu’s inspection.

Food production is always the most important aspect, no matter the time or place.

If you have played survival games, then you should understand that in the early stages of the game, most of your time will be spent on the seemingly simple task of collecting food to feed yourself.

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

If you can get the land to produce more food, then you can free up more people from farming to do other jobs.

The agricultural level on the Bratis Continent was so backward, and the seed-to-harvest ratio achieving a miraculous 1:4 was actually the result of various conditions working together.

Setting aside the temporarily immutable factors like geographic climate and the inherent differences between species of crops (for example, Asian rice is naturally much higher yielding than European wheat).

The first major issue was with the tools.

Li Yu had seen the plows used by the farmers of Green Field, which were still similar to the scratch plows used by the Ancient Romans.

This type of plow was made of wood, had a blade and a metal coulter, and could be pulled by humans or animals, but it could only plow the surface soil. It could not truly turn the soil, loosen the soil, or clear away the roots of weeds that were buried deeper.

This way, when seeds were sown, weeds would begin to compete with the seeds for nutrients in the soil.

Moreover, even such scratch plows were few and far between, often there would only be one or two in a village, owned by the Lord, and far from meeting the villagers’ needs for tilling the land.

Li Yu planned to introduce the moldboard plow, which actually appeared in China very early on but took thousands of years to spread to Europe and is still widely used worldwide today, though many are now attached to tractors.

Its structure is not complex, including the plowshare, the moldboard, the plow beam, and a small wheel for adjusting the height.

Instead of rubber wheels, wooden wheels could be used, and the best plowshares and moldboards should be made of iron. If not available, even wood could be used, as many plows during the Spring and Autumn period were entirely wooden, albeit less effective.

If the plowshare were replaced with a chisel, it could even aerate the hard soil layers that became compacted due to frequent tilling.

Li Yu also planned to introduce a seeding machine, whose principle was quite simple—it was a hand-pushed single-wheel cart with a rotating wooden panel and a funnel. By simply adding seeds from the top, it could evenly scatter them across the land, significantly more efficient than manual sowing.

There were also sickles. On the Bratis Continent, the short-handled sickles in use could only harvest half of the straw. If the handle were lengthened, more straw could be cut, which could be used as fodder for feeding livestock......

All these tools could easily be found by Li Yu on Taobao with the right models.

Using them as prototypes and recruiting blacksmiths to collaborate with local carpenters, with several attempts, mass production could likely be achieved. If Li Yu found other useful agricultural tools on Taobao that could be replicated with the current technological means of Bratis, he would bring them over as well.

Aside from the backwardness in tool production, the lack of soil fertility was also a major factor.

In most regions of the Bratis Continent today, the prevailing practice was the two-field system, which divided the land into two parts. Each year only half was cultivated, leaving the other half fallow. The following year, the fields swapped roles, with the previously cultivated land left fallow and vice versa, continuing this cycle.

The reason for this practice was to allow the land to rest and recover its fertility.

Of course, the drawback was also obvious: only half of the land was utilized, and each year half remained idle.

Only a few regions with very fertile soil practiced the three-field system.

This system was similar to the two-field system, but the land was divided into three parts, with each part lying fallow for a year while the other two were cultivated.

A simple calculation revealed that the three-field system’s efficiency was significantly better than the two-field system, bringing land utilization up from 50% to 66.7%, increasing the yield by nearly 30% per plot.

Unfortunately, not all areas had fertile soil.

For example, the region where Miss Rabbit resided, Green Field, could only adopt a two-field rotational pattern. Forcing a shift to the three-field system might yield abundant harvests for the first two years, but the yields would progressively worsen and eventually become unviable for cultivation.

The Silver Moon Church claimed that this was the goddess teaching the people of this land not to be overly greedy.

But Li Yu knew it was because the nitrogen in the soil had been depleted.

And the solution to this problem was simple enough for anyone who had completed at least nine years of modern education to figure out—it was "beans."

More precisely, it was the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live in the roots of leguminous plants, a special kind of bacteria that could return nitrogen from the air back to the soil.

By utilizing this trait, not only could land that was originally only viable under the two-field system be upgraded to the three-field system, but it could also be further developed into a four-field rotation system.

And in this four-field system, it was not about planting three years and resting for one but planting crops all four years, switching to different leguminous crops annually to bring the land’s utility rate to one hundred percent.

This was a necessary strategy for Li Yu, as compared to the land he had acquired, the number of lizard people was significantly higher—almost twice as many as the previous inhabitants of this land.

To achieve self-sufficiency, every patch of land had to be fully utilized.