Traveling through the sword to engage in military industry.

Chapter 87 Gathering Grain

"If we want good crops, we need to plow deep and fertilize the land. Lao Li, we have to find a way to get some fertilizer next." Ren Zhong said with a smile.

"Old Li knows this. We can collect as much pig manure, cow manure and horse manure as possible. Then we will have fertilizer, right?" Li Yunlong said. He really has experience in this area.

"No, if you put it this way, it will stink wherever you put it. Not only will the crops not be fertilized, but people will be suffocated to death." Ren Zhong shook his head. This is a traditional method in the countryside, but not only is the working condition poor, it also greatly wastes fertilizer.

"Brother Ren, if you have any good ideas, please tell us and we will do it." Li Yunlong said with a wry smile. His brain was very useful in fighting wars and many Whampoa graduates could not catch up with him. But when it came to science, Old Li was dumbfounded.

Ren Zhong did not bully Lao Li for his lack of education and directly came up with his own plan.

One is to ferment dry manure to produce organic fertilizer, and the other is to process wet manure into biogas.

By collecting dry horse manure, cow manure, chicken manure, pig manure and other ordinary livestock and poultry manure, plus various straw, weeds, fallen leaves and other scraps and domestic garbage, after biological fermentation catalyzed by fertilizer fermentation agent, excellent organic fertilizer can be obtained. 1 kilogram of this fertilizer fermentation aid can catalyze the production of one ton of organic fertilizer. The effect of planting topdressing can be said to be the best fertilizer that Ren Zhong can get at present.

At present, Ren Zhong is unable to develop complete sets of equipment to produce other types of fertilizers.

Another channel is to build biogas digesters. After using the biogasification principle to treat wet garbage such as human feces, not only can biogas be produced to burn for cooking and boiling water, but the biogas residue and liquid can also be used as fertilizer to irrigate crops.

These are the two most important sources of fertilizer for growing food in the base area.

Li Yunlong did not say a word. According to Ren Zhong's request, he led his men to start building the fermentation tank and the biogas tank. Ren Zhong took out the complete construction drawings, which were basically traditional civil engineering work. For Li Yunlong, an engineering enthusiast, these were not a big deal!
In Yangcun, the independent regiment now has more than a hundred horses and seven or eight hundred people stationed there. The amount of feces and urine produced by these people alone is quite considerable.

Ren Zhong had already been planning for these things that would cause serious environmental pollution if not dealt with. He found the most commonly used biogas digester from the main plane to process human feces and built a real water toilet.

Bamboo tubes are used to bring in mountain spring water for flushing. After the biogas pool is built, bamboo tube pipes are also used as the main pipeline to connect the biogas pool in Yangcun to the kitchen.

Now Yangcun can produce pig iron by itself. It is not difficult to make a model and cast a batch of gas stoves according to the appearance of current gas stoves.

The rotary valve was a bit technically difficult, so Xu Jiucheng and Gao Kaiming worked together for several days. They used casting and manual processing to successfully make a rotary valve with good airtightness, which saved the precious weight of the goods and had to be imported from the main plane.

There is strength in numbers. Under the leadership of Li Yunlong, this small project was quickly completed. According to Ren Zhong's estimation, after the biogas produced by the treatment of feces in Yangcun is utilized by the independent regiment, the entire regiment will not be able to use it up for boiling water and cooking, which saves the independent regiment's consumption of firewood and coal.

The excess biogas is sent to the baking warehouse and used in the long-term heating and baking process for processing raw materials for the production of some explosives.

Seeing that the human and animal feces in the village were used directly without being processed, and that their fertility and sanitary conditions were poor, Ren Zhong intended to promote the practical technology of biogasification to change the living environment of several nearby mountain villages. After completing the Yangcun Independent Regiment's feces biogas project, he continued to let Li Yunlong lead the independent regiment to build a simple public toilet in the most crowded places in the nearby mountain villages, and according to local conditions, they brought mountain springs or used small water wheels to bring water from mountain streams, so that everyone could wash away the waste after defecation.

Behind the public toilet, a standardized biogas digester was also dug to complete the biogasification process of the collected feces.

The biogas produced is introduced to nearby households for daily burning.

Of course, when construction began, no one knew how to use these things, and Ren Zhong did not explain. Anyway, the local people were very conscious, and they believed whatever Li Yunlong and the others said. Everyone was very curious about these newly built public toilets.

Since there are water tanks to store water for flushing, the public toilets are cleaner than at home. The utilization rate of these public toilets built by Ren Zhong is quite high, providing sufficient raw materials for biogasification.

But that's all there is to this kind of biogas digester. In this era, the scale of animal husbandry is very small, and many families cannot even feed themselves. Only a minority of people raise pigs, and even if they raise cattle and sheep, they are free-range. Compared to Ren Zhong's main plane where there are hundreds of pigs raised everywhere, the animal husbandry in this world is almost negligible. Therefore, even for someone like Li Yunlong, it is very common to not have a meal of pork for several years.

However, this is also the limitation of production capacity. Ren Zhong has no intention of developing pig farming to improve the lives of Li Yunlong and others at this stage. Now is not the time to engage in large-scale production. On the one hand, the overall environment is quite dangerous. The strength of the Japanese has an absolute upper hand. The Japanese may raid at any time. Even if the breeding is successful, it may become the spoils of the Japanese raid. It is impossible to drive hundreds of pigs to hide in the mountains and plains when a war breaks out.

On the other hand, there is not enough manpower and resources to produce so much pig feed and cattle feed.

In the base area, there are only a few biogas digesters set up for demonstration. It is still a long way to go before every household can use them.

For Ren Zhong, the small-scale application of biogas is just a small supplement to solve the current rural environmental sanitation problem, and it is not worth promoting on a large scale in this era.

In fact, even in the main plane, it is not realistic to promote biogas in every household in rural areas. Most families do not have so much organic waste to produce a biogas digester that is enough to sustain the family's fuel.

It will take at least 20 days for biogas fermentation to show results, so there is no rush after it is completed.

After screening, Ren Zhong chose the planting plan for the Yangcun area, which was to cultivate high-yield hybrid corn with intensive cultivation. The seeds were naturally high-quality hybrid corn varieties obtained from the main plane. According to the mature cultivation methods in the same area of ​​the main plane, the yield per mu could reach at least 700 kilograms. For a few fertile lands that were carefully cultivated, the yield could reach one ton per mu.

It has high yield, relatively low workload, strong adaptability to land, and is acceptable when ground into cornmeal and eaten as staple food, so it is a natural choice.

So after returning to the main plane, Ren Zhong went directly to wholesale several tons of high-quality corn seeds and had them delivered to a small courtyard in the suburbs. When Ren Zhong placed the order, he specified that they be packaged into standard bags of 30 kilograms.

With this kind of time travel, Ren Zhong can bring two sacks back to the world of Bright Sword.

In the world of Bright Sword, a new cave was found near Zhaojia Village as a seed receiving warehouse. Now that Yangcun has horses, Ren Zhong can ride his horse back and forth in an hour.

According to Ren Zhong's plan, after accumulating ten bags every five days, he would ask someone to take them back.

On the one hand, this time period is just right to conceal the truth, and on the other hand, this amount is enough to sow 75 acres of land, and Li Yunlong and his team are not able to cultivate the land much faster now.

However, Ren Zhong has already asked Zhang Dabiao's troops who have developed deep into Heyuan to start large-scale land reclamation work, and to carry out organic fermentation and biogas fermentation to accumulate organic fertilizer in various fortress villages according to the Yangcun model. Once the seeds are in place, they will become the main force of large-scale production.

According to the information Ren Zhong found, a major counterattack will be launched this year at the end of August, and farming now is just in time to complete the harvest of a crop of corn before then.

For the independent regiment, there would be enough surplus food to fight a tough battle with the Japanese in the following year.

By that time, these were strategic materials that could not be purchased even with a large amount of money.

If Ren Zhong's ability was not limited and he could not get more seeds from the main plane to meet the needs of larger-scale planting, Ren Zhong would have been unable to resist going to the brigade commander to at least carry out large-scale planting in the Taiyue Military Region.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to save seeds of hybrid corn. With Ren Zhong's ability to sell goods next year, the planting area that can be supported is also limited. Unless a group of breeding experts are found, Ren Zhong can copy the ready-made knowledge of hybrid corn, hybrid wheat and hybrid rice in the main plane and let them breed on a large scale.

However, this cannot be achieved in a short period of time. It will take at least three years and multiple seasons of iteration to obtain excellent varieties.

Second update, keep asking for it!

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(End of this chapter)