Will the kemonomimi encounter Alien Ranch Story?

The high-adaptability wheat varieties grown by Lao Xia were completely sold out, and the adaptable rice varieties were even pre-ordered for seed production three years from now. The characteristic of these two crops is that they are not picky about the land, but the disadvantage is that the yield is low. However, compared with local crops, it is not much lower.

The Great Yan court clearly understood the calculation of reducing production by about 10% while expanding arable land by at least 30%. The only country that was probably furious was the Eastern Kingdom.

What was once a barren wasteland could soon become a piece of land that the Great Yan Dynasty longed for to cultivate, which means that the tributary alliance between the Great Yan and the Eastern Kingdom will soon undergo a huge change.

Meanwhile, in order to make things difficult for Ursus, especially Kosiche, Lao Xia sold a lot of good stuff suitable for planting and cultivating in mountainous hills and frozen fields, especially tower furnaces.

Although it requires imported tower heat pipes and consumes Originium, it can provide basic soil insulation for several hectares of surrounding permafrost land by laying closed irrigation canals, turning the permafrost into arable land.

Combined with inexpensive and easy-to-use greenhouse materials, insulation boards made of aerogel and graphene sheets, and ordinary polymer films suitable for use in areas with less extreme climates, it is possible to make the four seasons seem like nothing at all.

Moreover, these things are lightweight and easy to disassemble, making them ideal for quickly planting a batch of crops and then packing up and leaving immediately when a natural disaster strikes.

As a result, these products sold out immediately, and the local merchants simply couldn't compete with Da Yan, nor did the nobles of Victoria and Kazimierz have the financial resources to compete with Da Yan.

After all, they're spending the emperor's treasury, not their own money. Their purpose in buying these items is to achieve merit and promotion, so they quickly raise the purchase price to a level that no one else can compete with.

This can be considered the second wildfire that Lao Xia ignited. If he doesn't feed the Great Flame well, his output may not be able to ignite the flame for a long time.

Because the Great Yan, Ursus, and Sargon are all food black holes, especially the Great Yan.

If you sell something else, he might completely ignore you, but if you dare to dump grain on the market, he'll get excited. That's why Old Xia isn't planning to grow wheat in Kazdel.

Because in that case, the nobles will be able to hoard goods and make a fortune, while the poor will suffer terribly, which would be putting the cart before the horse.

However, the Great Yan had no interest in planting wheat and crabapples. Only by truly striking the Kazdel people could the scenario described earlier be achieved, causing a collapse in grain prices and leading the Kazdel nobles in the midst of civil war to push themselves to the guillotine.

Moreover, the initial ignition was done with green wheat, and after two harvests, the new varieties of Da Yan were almost fully planted. It was estimated that in four years, the Sarkaz nobles of Kazdel would personally send themselves to the guillotine.

Old Xia's individual planting area cannot compare to that promoted by the national power of Da Yan. Once Da Yan enters the market, he will no longer plant grain products on a large scale, further impacting local farmers—he is not here to wipe them out.

Instead, they will reduce food crops and, while ensuring that the basic food supply rate is not restricted, begin to cultivate cash crops on a large scale. Cash crops are Old Xia's specialty. Which agricultural planet grows only food crops? Even the Soul Eaters are a limited resource!

Cash crops are the true soul and core of the industry of agricultural colonies and agricultural planets!

This way, his massive fruit processing, beverage manufacturing, food flavoring and additive manufacturing facilities can work at full capacity!

Chapter Sixty-Three: This melon is super sweet!

Chapter 63

In desert farming, water is the most important element. It must be said that the Sarkaz people, or the northern Sarkaz people, have virtually no farming skills; they can't even dig the simplest furrows neatly, since their green wheat doesn't require such a complicated planting method.

Moreover, Lao Xia is conducting an experiment to improve green wheat, planning to combine some traits of Star Alliance millet with local green wheat. Both are close relatives of foxtail grass, so it should be successful.

If all else fails, the only option is to simply knock out the toxic genetic component and then obtain high-yield transgenic green wheat for widespread planting through hybridization and direct gene trait splicing.

However, spiny grass does not need to be improved or planted, as it can be directly replaced by desert pasture grasses.

Similarly, the same applies to the crabapple. Old Xia only made simple modifications to the crabapple, and it is expected to leave the breeding experimental chamber first.

Moreover, he also plans to plant sweet potatoes directly, because compared with crabapples, sweet potatoes cannot be considered a high-quality food. The reason why he does not plant wheat on a large scale and sell it is because, relative to local crops, these are considered high-quality foods.

High-quality grain naturally commands a higher price. Regardless of the price at which Lao Xia sells it, local nobles will buy up the wheat on the market and then resell it at a higher price to more distant places.

This means that local crop prices will not be greatly affected by price fluctuations, and nobles will not treat this high-end commodity as military rations, but rather as an investment product, rather than hoarding it as military rations. The purchase and sale will be relatively balanced, so it will not increase the burden on serfs, requiring them to sell grain to pay money or increase the collection of inferior grains such as green wheat.

Most importantly, Lao Xia could only reduce production costs, but not transportation costs. At least he couldn't help the nobles reduce transportation costs. This meant that it was entirely feasible for the local nobles to buy grain from Lao Xia at low prices, then transport the high-quality grain abroad and exchange it for inferior grain to feed their army.

This completely contradicted Lao Xia's plan. He became someone who fueled the civil war in Kazdel, without making any money or gaining any benefit for himself. He was just a scapegoat for the nobles, highlighting his self-destructive and altruistic actions.

The problem is that once the nobles discover this way to make money, they use this trade to snowball their wealth, turning the high-quality grain they buy from Lao Xia at low prices into inferior grain to support their army, and conscripting serfs and displaced people in large numbers.

However, if Lao Xia raises prices, that wouldn't be the case either. If prices are raised, and the other party's funds are basically stable, it means that the purchase volume will decrease. Then who will get his tens of thousands of tons of grain produced? Even if it's given away for free, the surrounding nobles will have ways to swindle it away.

Essentially, once this thing becomes a commodity, or even a financial product, or a store of value, Lao Xia's plan will be doomed. Therefore, he must ensure that the quality of the grain crops here is not high, but the yield must be large enough.

The low quality means that even if he sells it at a very low price after adding the shipping cost, there is no room for middlemen to make a profit, and there will be no phenomenon of nobles maliciously buying up grain and then reselling it.

Large production volumes would cause the already low prices of grain in the market to plummet. In order to simply stop the losses, nobles would naturally demand that serfs pay money directly, because it would be more cost-effective for the serfs to pay money and then purchase grain in the market.

With more food and less money in the hands of the nobles, they will naturally try to expand their armies, which will also intensify the fighting in Kazdel.

With war and famine raging, just a tiny spark can set the entire land of Kazdel ablaze like a wildfire.

Similarly, the inferior quality of the grain also prevented unscrupulous merchants from hoarding and speculating, which created conditions for Lao Xia to follow the wildfire, gather refugees and displaced people, and rebuild his organization and production.

This entire plan cannot be called a conspiracy, but rather an open strategy based on two characteristics of food. This open strategy was also discussed by Kal'tsit and Talulah. Because the little tiger grew up in a wealthy family, he really couldn't understand many things at the bottom, but he also conducted serious research and deduction in terms of business.

It's now fully formed, and Lao Xia feels that Kal'tsit has recently had a breakthrough, as her supplementary suggestions are all spot on.

For example, the way production was organized, the de facto army was formed according to the characteristics and customs of the Sarkaz, and how to organize these people, dividing them into several classes and parts, separating and reorganizing them.

First, there was the Sarkaz warrior class. After Kal'tsit's reminder, Old Xia didn't throw them back into the labor force, but instead incorporated them into the guard force of Kazdel Farm, where they trained together with the mercenaries he brought.

The performance of these people these days has also proven that they are really not cut out for farm work. Rather than incorporating them into the labor force and having them work half a day every day and then have to redo the work, which would only add to the trouble, it would be better to simply make them part of the army and military force.

Furthermore, Kal'tsit pointed out that these Sarkaz warriors were half civilians and half soldiers, and therefore unsuitable for farm work.

However, he was adept at herding, scouting, and exploration, which made him a perfect fit for protecting the well-drilling team that Lao Xia had hired from Longmen.

Furthermore, Kazdel will expand its livestock industry, and these people will quickly become herders.

Furthermore, it was suggested that Lao Xia directly convert those disabled or unqualified retired warriors into herdsmen and reserves, which would not only prevent them from causing trouble everywhere, but also give them a visible future for retirement, thus eliminating their worries.

Secondly, there are the Sarkaz serfs. These people can't be expected to do anything other than farm work. They are the easiest people for Old Xia to assign. They are currently digging ditches and laying pipes in the desert all day long. It's monotonous and boring, but it's just right for these serfs.

They were best at this kind of monotonous, tedious, unskilled, and inflexible repetitive work. A group of people worked like ants on the gray desert, with furrows of different colors behind them. Following the advice from Rhodes Island, Old Xia did not provide these serfs with mechanized labor methods.

The last tier is the artisan tier. Most of these people have some skills, and some are even unlicensed sorcerers. These need to be further subdivided and assigned to different groups based on their abilities and specialties.

After this division and grouping, the oasis reclamation work has become well-organized, and a unique sense of order has emerged with the ditches and drip irrigation pipes that continue to spread outward from the oasis.

As for the skilled workers transferred from Lungmen and Ursus, they have been responsible for two things these days. The first is the vehicle team, which is responsible for driving the vehicles out to clear out the rock crabs and various dangerous animals and Originium insects, and for clearing out the gravel and chaotic lands—this would be too slow and troublesome to do by manpower.

The second thing is to focus all our efforts on sweet potato seedling cultivation. Sweet potatoes are drought-resistant and prefer warm temperatures, and early-maturing varieties even require three layers of film for insulation.

However, in northern Kazdel, there is no need to lay mulch. During the day, you only need to open the top of the greenhouse for ventilation to avoid burning the seedlings with high temperatures. At night, you can cover the top again. The insulation layer of aerogel and graphene sheets is enough to ensure that the bed temperature is between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius.

Drip irrigation pipes are laid on both sides of the seedbed to ensure that the soil is neither too dry nor too wet. Once the seedlings reach a height of about 20 centimeters, they can be cut and transplanted into the field.

Moreover, sweet potatoes, despite their high yield, actually require a lot of care. So, after entering the fields, the initial tasks of laying fertilizer strips and pruning the entire plant required skilled workers like Lao Xia to teach the local serfs step by step—their original sand pears weren't this troublesome.

However, crabapples have a slightly higher water requirement. Originally, the biggest task for serfs was to carry water for irrigation. The amount of water could not be too much or too little; too much would cause them to rot, and too little would cause them to die. It was a serious physical job.

Due to the desert environment, it is not suitable to dig open ditches and canals. Water can only be drawn by hand and covered with wooden lids to prevent excessive evaporation.

Therefore, before the invention of drip irrigation, farming in the desert was almost a pipe dream.

As for the saline-alkali dryland rice that Lao Xia planted on the outermost edge, that's even more of a celestial species. However, the yield of that kind of rice is extremely...low...

It tastes terrible, almost inedible.

The metallic and toxic components are mainly concentrated in the husks and straw. Simply burning them yields a large amount of inorganic salt ash, which can be used to formulate fertilizers or other chemicals.

As for Lao Xia, he grows something that requires even more careful tending: watermelons. After three days of constant temperature germination, they are now ready to be planted. Watermelon fields have high requirements, so he chose locations around oasis water sources, dug irrigation and drainage ditches, and carried out very thorough deep plowing. Now it's time to start planting the watermelons.

Watermelons have rather peculiar requirements; they need dry air and moist soil. The Kazdel desert is simply the perfect place to grow watermelons. All it needs is enough irrigation water, and the air here is so dry that it feels like you're breathing fire.

The large temperature difference between day and night is conducive to the accumulation of sugar in watermelons. The long hours of sunshine during the day, as well as the high accumulated temperature and light intensity, are also very suitable for the growth of leaves and vines of plants such as watermelons and sweet potatoes.

As for the water issue, Lao Xia dug wells all over the desert precisely to meet the demand for this stuff.

Besides watermelons, corn, a drought-resistant and infertile crop, is also grown. However, the corn is not sold directly but used to make corn syrup and livestock feed.

Simply dumping the green wheat wouldn't achieve the maximum damage, since the Sarkaz also have nomadic and settled pastoral habits. If things really deteriorate to a certain point, they might just abandon farming and go back to nomadic life—which is why Old Xia chose this place.

If it were a Kazimierz system with a fully agricultural production model, it could ensure the wildfires burned quickly enough, but it couldn't guarantee that its cleanup and recovery efforts could keep pace with the fire's speed.

Therefore, animal husbandry is necessary, not only for the large-scale export of grain, but also for the large-scale export of fruits such as watermelons and various meats.

Basically, if in the first production season a year later, if we can't halve the prices of all the major food products in the Longmen International Market and send all those competitors who dare to challenge the Xia Group in the food market to the rooftop, then Old Xia can go back and tear up his graduation certificate.

This requires no business skills or entrepreneurial talent; all you need to do is dump the product on the ground. Compared to products with exquisite packaging, pure taste, perfect cuts, and even processed and cooked with spices, where do other manufacturers' shoddy products get this kind of competitiveness? Especially since this thing is so cheap it's like they're selling it at a loss.

As time passed, several waves of reinforcements arrived from Lungmen, bringing fertilizer and machinery. The survivors and prisoners in the oasis had mostly become accustomed to life under the rule of this unfamiliar tribe. Furthermore, due to the escalating civil war in Kazdel, many refugees began to appear in the surrounding area, and were then all divided and absorbed by Old Xia.

Now, the area around the oasis is a very neatly planted area. The terrain here is even flatter than Ursus, and like Kazimierz, it is a large plain, but unfortunately, it is a desert plain.

The mountains in the south block moisture, resulting in a significant difference in rainfall between the north and south, ultimately leading to a temperate desert climate. This is due to two main factors: distance from the ocean and topographical obstruction.

Each planting area is a neat rectangle, dotted with green spots—sweet potatoes and crabapples that have just sprouted. Three small water pumps stand by the oasis lake, sending lake water into huge distribution pipes, which are then pressurized and sent to various drip irrigation arrays to conserve water for the farmland.

To prevent excessive evaporation from depleting the oasis and consuming too much water, Lao Xia built greenhouses for each field. He opened them for ventilation in the morning and evening to prevent the seedlings from burning, and sealed them at noon to prevent rapid evaporation under direct sunlight.

This undoubtedly requires a large amount of polymer raw materials. Fortunately, Kazdel has relatively abundant oil resources. Oil is not a non-renewable resource, or more accurately, it is.

From a natural perspective, two to three centuries would be enough for the oil field to be refilled.

If this process is extended to more than 10 centuries, new oil fields may even be formed due to the deposition of plant and biological activity.

Of course, from the perspective of human civilization, this is the same as plastic pollution, which is only a blink of an eye for the earth, and there is no time for humans to wait.

Kazdel not only has oil, but also natural gas, and even natural gas wells. The presence of natural gas wells means the presence of helium, and the presence of helium means that, with the right equipment, it is possible to fractionate trace amounts of helium-3 and helium-4.

Unfortunately, Lao Xia didn't have the level of fractionation equipment. After building a simple gas extraction station around the gas spring, he brought the natural gas to the farm, which saved the locals from cutting down the oasis trees for fuel.

Northern Kazdel is rich in oil, natural gas, coal, and even copper and iron ore.

However, for the Terrans, chemical energy is not the resource they urgently need; food is.

So Kazdel's poverty is normal; if this were on Earth, it would probably be the second Middle Eastern tycoon.

“There used to be a lot of heteromorphic iron here. Unfortunately, it was all mined out by those people.” The guide pointed to the abandoned mobile mining facilities in the distance and said, “In the past, many people from the north and west came here to mine heteromorphic iron and source rock. But once the mine was dry, these companies all ran away. Look, that’s what Columbia Mining left behind.”

Kazdel is rich in Originium particles, but has very little Originium ore. It's like the Martian landscape, where the ground is covered in iron oxide soil, but there isn't much iron ore that can be smelted.

If you want to smelt the soil of Kazdel into Originium blocks, there are only two ways. The first way is electrolysis, where Originium will crystallize in the anode mud.

However, not only is the wastewater from electrolysis toxic, but the electricity cost is also greater than the energy provided by the Originium you electrolyze—it's not worth it.

The second method is like Lao Xia's: water washing filtration. Leaving aside whether Terra even has nanofiltration membranes of this caliber, even if they had the equipment and technology from the ancient ruins to produce nanofiltration membranes—

This requires consuming a large amount of water and neutralizing agents to halogenate the silt, then filtering out a small amount of source rock particles, and finally turning the source rock particles into source rock blocks.

Energy consumption might be lower, but the labor and equipment costs are astronomical, not to mention the huge amount of water consumed in the desert to do this... Wouldn't it be more profitable for me to just sell the water directly?

"Yes, the soil does contain a lot of impurities, but that's just right for me."

The guide was hired from a nearby tribe. I didn't quite understand why these people, who were carrying guns and sophisticated weapons and looked like elite royal warriors, were interested in mud and these excavated ruins.

However, this did not stop him from taking the two bags of green wheat flour that the other party had brought out and doing his best to lead them around all the ruins and abandoned facilities in the surrounding area. Except for the tribe's water source and grazing land, they had been to all of them.

"The clay composition..." Old Xia sifted through the mud and sand in his hands, "It's high-speed rail clay. It feels like a waste not to build a kiln and fire it."

After he finished speaking, he circled this area on the PNIS map and marked it as an "unsuitable for reclamation" area, but added a note next to it that it was "high-speed rail clay production area".