The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 425 North America’s advantageous industries and main tasks.

Amid the anticipation and anxiety of American officials, the princes began their work of sorting out the administrative divisions of the Americas.

After the princes had the experience in Guangzhou, they did not think about finalizing the plan directly on their way to America this time, but made several research plans very conservatively.

First understand the local situation clearly before making any adjustment plans.

After all, they themselves knew that before they went to Guangdong, they only had a basic understanding of the Guangdong area, but before coming to America, they really knew very little about America.

The princes attended a simple welcome ceremony, completed the power transfer ceremony, and then visited and investigated everywhere accompanied by American scholars and ministers.

Look through local political and economic reports over the years, check various industrial, agricultural and population data, and visit specific industrial areas.

American officials felt that what the princes were doing now was very similar to what the provincial judges and censors did, which was to investigate everywhere.

Many officials began to worry whether these princes would commit some major crime to demonstrate their political achievements.

Fortunately, the princes are now only getting a general understanding of the situation and are not investigating certain things in a targeted manner.

The princes soon discovered with some surprise that the most developed industries in Taiping Prefecture and even in North America were already comparable to those in the Ming Dynasty.

The output of agricultural machinery in America is at the same order of magnitude as that in the Ming Dynasty, with annual tractor output exceeding 100,000.

There are currently four large agricultural machinery manufacturing plants in North America, located around Taiping Prefecture, Baihu Prefecture, New York Prefecture, and America Prefecture.
Among them, the factory in Baihu Prefecture specializes in the production of tractors and can be regarded as a branch of the Taiping Prefecture factory.

Among all the factories, Taiping Prefecture has the most complete surrounding supporting industrial chain, with all related industries ranging from steelmaking to engines to fuel and accessories.

In Taiping Prefecture's industrial chain, a complete range of common agricultural machinery can be produced from iron ore.

The reason why agricultural machinery production is so developed is naturally because there is huge actual demand locally.

The Great Plains of North America are dotted with farms in the process of being cleared, and the demand for agricultural machinery is almost unlimited.

Moreover, in the current distribution system of the Ming Dynasty, agricultural machinery, a basic production tool, does not need to pay too much attention to market benefits.

As long as there is demand and the factory can produce, the products produced can quickly flow to where they are needed.

There will not be a situation where users have actual demand but are unable to use the service because they do not have the funds to purchase it.

Whether the court directly allocates funds, makes installment payments through internal agreements, or even pays later by using the tools, the tools must first be sent to where they can be used.

It is precisely with the assistance of a large number of agricultural machinery that the development of the Great Plains of America can be accelerated.

However, by the end of the 28th year of Tiangong, the total cultivated land area in America was still significantly lower than that in Ming Dynasty.

After all, the Ming Dynasty's homeland has been continuously developed for three thousand years, it was the first to complete industrialization, and its population is also the most densely populated in the world.

Now all the places suitable for farming in the local area have been developed, and the current arable land area in use is approaching the 1.8 billion mu arable land red line set by Zhu Jianxuan in his previous life.

After all, the development time of the North American continent was too short, and the total population was only one-tenth of that of the mainland.

The total arable land area in North America currently stands at just over one billion acres.

However, the scale of cultivated land in the Ming Dynasty has basically reached its peak.

Although new arable land is being reclaimed in the Northeast, it is beginning to be abandoned in the Southeast and Southwest regions.

Because with the continuous advancement of industrialization, the degree of agricultural mechanization in relatively flat areas is constantly increasing, and the degree of commercialization of agriculture is also constantly increasing.

Especially in recent years, various foods produced in Southeast Asia, Australia, America, Linzhou, and Africa have begun to flow into the Ming Dynasty.

Because as cargo ships get bigger, ocean shipping costs continue to fall.

The world is basically unified, the safety of ships themselves is constantly improving, and the risks of ocean shipping are constantly decreasing.

Transporting food from America back to the Ming Dynasty has become a profitable business.

The prices of grain and food in Ming Dynasty continued to fall.

This was actually a situation where low grain prices hurt farmers, but the Ming court commanded by Zhu Jianxuan did not forcibly stop it.

Because agricultural production has long ceased to be the only way out for the lower-class people.

They can work in factories. If there are no factories in remote areas, they can also go to big cities in other places to make their own living.

There were originally a large number of terraced fields in the southeastern and southwestern regions of the Ming Dynasty.

They were all forcibly reclaimed in the past two hundred years or so in order to survive when the local population was over-expanded.

In fact, this kind of place is not suitable for farming, and most of it still relies on manual labor for farming, which is not suitable for the mechanized production methods of the industrial age.

Continuing to cultivate these lands using traditional manual labor will result in increasingly poor returns compared to mechanized farms.

Farmers' income is becoming increasingly weaker than that of factory workers.

Under the influence of such overall environment, these marginal secondary farmlands are gradually becoming abandoned.

However, most of the people in the Ming Dynasty are relatively hardworking. Even if they do not have the energy to cultivate their own land, they will usually plant various trees.

Therefore, many remote areas have begun to spontaneously return farmland to forest.

The area of ​​cultivated land in the Ming Dynasty in this world today should not exceed the total area of ​​cultivated land in the previous life.

The potential for arable land in the Americas is obviously huge. In the future, the arable land area will definitely exceed that of the Ming Dynasty, and the grain output will also have the opportunity to exceed that of the Ming Dynasty.

If we calculate the grain production after excluding local food consumption, the Americas have actually surpassed the Ming mainland.

Although the local grain output is the highest in the world, most of the grain is directly consumed as food because the local population is also the most densely populated in the world.

Related industries such as livestock feed, brewing materials, and industrial food have to consume most of their food supplies from overseas farms.

America is now the world's largest grain exporting region, and its annual grain exports have exceeded those of the South Seas region, which has been developed for more than a hundred years.

The reason is that the dry fields in North America are more suitable for mechanized farming, while most of the land in the Nanyang region is paddy fields.

At the same time, the heat in the Nanyang region is too high, the plant production cycle is relatively short, and the temperature difference between day and night is small, resulting in the poor taste of the food itself.

If you just want to fill your stomach, of course you won’t care about these issues.

But the people of the Ming Dynasty had passed the stage of filling their stomachs and had begun to generally pursue the taste of food.

The northeastern region of the Ming Dynasty and the northern part of the Great Plains of America both have a large temperature difference between day and night and lower temperatures in the middle, so the rice and wheat produced taste better.

A large amount of agricultural products from the overseas provinces of the Ming Dynasty are entering the domestic market of the Ming Dynasty in various ways.

In order to transport these huge amounts of agricultural products at the cheapest possible cost, inland waterway transportation is necessary.

Therefore, the inland shipbuilding industry in America is also extremely developed, and its current overall level and total output are second only to that of Ming Dynasty.

However, the shipbuilding industry in Africa and Linzhou is also developing rapidly, and the output of various inland and offshore ships has also increased year by year. America may not be able to maintain its advantage. On this basis, the most important long-term goal of the American Retention Department in recent years is to transform the routes of the lower reaches of the North American rivers.

In the middle reaches and above of the major rivers in North America, that is, the areas above Taiping Prefecture, the river channel condition is very close to the standard plain river form.

The winding river channel moves back and forth in the trough-shaped river channel formed by long-term erosion.

However, in the heavy oil and below areas, the overall runoff of the river directly doubled due to the sudden increase in water inflow from the largest tributary.

In addition, there are vast and flat plains below the middle reaches of the major rivers in North America, and the scale of the river valleys in the lower reaches of the major rivers in North America has also gotten out of control.

When floods occur in the lower reaches, the maximum width of the river can reach 130 kilometers, and in most areas the width exceeds 100 kilometers.

The lower reaches of the river directly turned from a river into a huge lake. This lake is not even particularly long and thin, and its shape is roughly like an S-shaped eggplant.

Twenty years ago, after surveying the lower reaches of the river, American officials instinctively suggested building embankments directly on both sides of the main river channel.

Directly control the lower reaches of the great American rivers and limit the width of the downstream flood zone to a few kilometers.

The area of ​​more than 100 kilometers wide outside the river embankment, which is where the river originally floods during the flood season, will become two extremely large river beaches.

The land on the riverbed is usually fertile and very suitable for cultivation into farmland.

These potential farmlands were the direct targets of officials in managing the river, and officials at the time thought this was a natural plan.

But when this plan was just put forward, it was directly rejected by the then American King Zhu Jianxuan.

Zhu Jianxuan directly did not allow the construction of river embankments to control the river channel, did not allow the majority of the flooded areas to be directly developed and converted into arable farmland.

Instead, they were required to develop from the periphery of the floodplain to the center, and to build dams and reclaim fields along the edge of the floodplain.

Building dams is also a long-term project, and reducing the floodplain of large rivers by silting up fields is an even longer-term project.

That is the task of a generation or even several generations.

After listening to the introduction of local officials, Zhu Jingkun and other princes went to observe the transformation on site out of curiosity.

The flood-prone area in the lower reaches of a large river can be regarded as a seasonal lake.

The lake is about 150 kilometers wide from east to west, a little over 600 kilometers long, and has an overall depth of about ten meters.

The specific approach taken by local officials and immigrants was to build a large number of cofferdams along the lake edges during the dry season to form cofferdam grids.

There is a half gate on the square cofferdam. When the flood season comes, the gate is opened to allow flood water to enter the cofferdam grid.

When the gates are closed before the end of the flood season, these cofferdam squares will become small lakes or small reservoirs.

The water in the newly formed cofferdam squares is relatively deep, and fish that have certain requirements for water depth can be raised there.

The water can be automatically replaced during the flood season every year, and the small reservoir will not become stagnant water.

This type of cofferdam grid reservoir will not be specially dredged, and the mud in the grid reservoir will increase, and the water will naturally become shallower and shallower.

When the soil becomes shallow enough, you can switch to planting water chestnuts and lotus roots.

When the water level continues to become shallower and rice can be directly planted, the cofferdam grid will become arable land.

In this way, the arable soil formed by pond siltation is more fertile.

The key is that the terrain height will be basically level with the banks on both sides of the river valley, and will not be under the river bank and be submerged by floods at any time.

It’s just that the pace of transformation of silted fields is too slow.

It is highly dependent on the amount of sediment transported into the main stream and tributaries of the rivers on both sides.

The vegetation in the original state of North America's major river basins is intact, so not much silt is washed downstream.

During their actual exploration and activities, North American officials and craftsmen discovered that the flood-prone areas in the lower reaches of the river were not flat.

There are also two faint longitudinal ridges inside the flood zone.

The craftsmen asked the emperor whether it was possible to build a cofferdam along the uplift, which would directly reduce the width of the flood zone by thirty to fifty kilometers.

The key is to save a lot of sand and stone materials used to build cofferdams.

The plan was approved by the emperor, and although North American officials were somewhat surprised, they also began to try to divide the flooded areas on a large scale.

Then, after more than ten years of construction, the longitudinal cofferdams on these two uplifts have been built.

The inner side of the cofferdam is still a flood zone of about 100 kilometers.

The cofferdam is dozens of kilometers wide on the outside and has been turned into grids of different sizes.

If you look down from the air on an airplane, it's like looking at a huge, broken mirror.

The squares have different sizes, different formation times, different current states, and different colors.

The princes boarded the passenger ship they came from at the central pier of Taiping Prefecture and officially went to visit the lower reaches of the North American River.

This pier in Taiping Prefecture is actually located on the banks of the Mei River (Ohio and), where environmental conditions are more suitable, rather than on the banks of a major North American river, where conditions are complicated.

Where the Mei River merges into the Dahe River, the runoff in the upper reaches of the Mei River is actually larger. If calculated based on the flow rate, the Mei River is the mainstream of the Dahe River.

Moreover, the banks of the Mei River are hilly, similar to the southeastern part of Shenzhou. The river water is clear and the river banks are solid, which is suitable for the construction of large buildings.

The urban area of ​​Taiping Prefecture is located on both sides of the Mei River before it merges into the Yellow River, and is basically built along the river bank.

The two sides of the main channel of the lower reaches of the Mei River, that is, the flood zone, are still in a tidal flat state.

The ship carrying the princes set sail from the dock in the city, sailing westward along the Mei River, and then turning south at the western edge of the city.

Here, the ships leave the Meihe River and the mature modern urban environment, and enter the tidal flats where the river water can flood at any time.

The annual temperature difference in the central part of North America is relatively large, and the winter precipitation is relatively large, especially in the northern part of the mainland. The water vapor from the Great Lakes can produce a convective snow effect.

The major rivers in North America flow from north to south, and the upper reaches are relatively cold and have abundant precipitation, so spring floods are likely to form after the winter ice and snow melt.

Spring floods and ice floods can be very dangerous and complex natural disasters in the north of the Ming Dynasty, but they are not a big problem in the Americas.

A large number of dams have now been built in the trough valleys of the middle and upper reaches of the American rivers, turning the valleys into long and narrow reservoirs.

Reservoirs can store water, weaken the impact of flood peaks, and allow water from upstream to flow slowly and evenly into the downstream river channel.

In spring, ice in the river will also be blocked by dams and will not be able to flow directly downstream along the river.

There is a wide flood discharge zone in the lower reaches of the river. There are no large-scale residential and cultivated areas in the flood zone, so the flood can flow freely.

(End of this chapter)