Iron Harvest: When Farming Becomes Conquest

As the chill of the early morning dispersed with the rising sun, Roman had also arrived at Sige Town.

The villagers had already been waiting in front of the common ground.

Roman had no intention of giving a lecture today.

Seeing the expressions of awe and submissive eyes of the residents, he knew they had succumbed.

The more ignorant they were, the more they needed strong measures to bind them, otherwise it would be easy to spoil things.

Roman dismounted from his horse and had Moor bring out a portion of this year's grain seeds.

He planned to plant spring wheat, continuing the planting traditions of Sige Town.

Each acre typically required about 15 to 20 jin of seeds, but Roman wanted to increase the sowing rate to over 30 jin.

Spring wheat had to be so, increasing the seeding amount, otherwise the yield would not be high.

In his past life, an acre of land could be cultivated with 50 jin of seeds, producing a thousand jin per acre, thanks to fertile farmland, plentiful fertilization, and suitable climate.

In this era, one shouldn't even think about it.

Roman leveled up "Planting" to level 2, unlocking a wealth of basic agricultural knowledge, and he knew the most common seed selection method involved soaking in saltwater.

But under the conditions of Sige Town, salt was a luxury, and it was impossible to use saltwater for selecting seeds—at least until he found a salt mine.

Therefore, Roman had no choice but to throw mud into a wooden barrel, integrating it into the water to achieve the same effect as saltwater, the drawback being the need for constant stirring.

After adjusting the mud-water ratio, he found two farmers to take turns stirring.

His method merely provided a standard template for others to follow his approach.

Because the seeds to be soaked were too many, relying on a single wooden barrel was far from enough, it would be best to build a huge water pool.

Yet this puzzling practice seemed quite astonishing to the onlookers.

Roman did not explain, and when Moor came over, cautiously asking why, he received this response from Roman.

"Don't ask why, you're not fit to know, you are just farm implements, and farm implements don't need to understand why their master swings them that way!"

Roman believed that before any results appeared, any explanation was superfluous.

Would he, as a lord, now go to the trouble of explaining to a group of medieval ignorant peasants what scientific farming was?

Roman's facial expression was quite calm, his crimson eyes very focused. Moor started to sweat again. He found he had no way to resist this seemingly serene but quite domineering lord.

...

Roman speculated based on the harvest data from Sige Town.

The total cultivated area of all residents of Sige Town and its villages last year was about over ten thousand acres, a size that made Roman stare blankly.

Just the preliminary calculations nearly burned out Roman's brain.

Many of these were scattered plots of land, separated by forest, grassland, hillsides, swamps, and other areas that could not be cultivated.

Of course, not all of those cultivated areas were actual farmlands, some were simply scattered with miscellaneous grain seeds.

In Roman's view, could the "cultivated land" perceived by the residents of Sige Town even be called farmland?

Don't insult farmland!

It was clearly large patches of wasteland!

Before the soil could be improved, it simply did not have real effective productive value.

Roman intended to allocate a fertile land area of 2,000 acres based on the real land mapping of "Breathing Story," just enough to correspond to the nearly two thousand population of Sige Town.

This was about a rectangular piece of land, 1.3 kilometers in length and 1 kilometer in width.

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This was a large-scale collective planting movement, with seeds alone weighing in at sixty thousand catties.

Then he mobilized everyone else to collect all the manure they could find from Sige Town and the surrounding area.

When Roman was estimating the cultivated land, he once believed that the land cultivated by the residents of Sige Town was very likely to have reached over thirty thousand acres; even forty thousand acres were not impossible.

Because the soil's fertility is limited, the land planted this year would go fallow the next year, waiting for a few years until the soil's fertility naturally recovered before cultivating again.

This was also why Sige Town needed to establish villages elsewhere, as the land was sparsely populated and too vast. Just traveling could take up much of the day. A single settlement couldn't accommodate a large population.

Otherwise, staying in one place year-round would overexploit the soil fertility, akin to having a Destruction Mushroom explode once, resulting in devastating consequences.

Roman planned to use manure to ferment fertilizer, to improve the soil by abandoning most of the wasteland and turning a small part of the virgin land into mature land.

In the future, the demand for fertilizer would be incredibly high, and even all the manure from the town might not be enough.

Therefore, Roman also had to collect rotting thatch, straw, dry grass, and silt—essentially anything that could decompose.

There were many ways to naturally ferment manure, the shortest took half a month.

The preparatory work for planting was extensive, or rather, farming itself was a tedious and lengthy affair.

At the very least, one couldn't even think about sowing until the manure was ready.

A workman must first sharpen his tools if he is to do his work well.

Roman planned to complete the preparations for spring plowing within the shortest 20 days and the longest 30 days.

Without his intervention, could the farmers of Sige Town manage to get ten thousand acres of land ready within a month?

Keep in mind, with the added variable of the lord's manor—that is, with the addition of an exploiter—the burden on the farmers of Sige Town grew heavier. If they didn't quickly increase the harvest by ten percent, under high taxes, people would starve this year.

And so, except for the farmers screening seeds, most of the laborers were rushed off to collect manure.

Roman didn't do much, but before he knew it, most of the morning had passed.

Roman looked at the sun and then called Moor over.

He said to Moor, "You need to find eighty farmwives, prepare sufficient rations for everyone, including the slaves. Each person should have half a pound of dry grain, three knuckle-thick slices of bread, a bowl of oatmeal porridge, and mixed vegetable soup, and a large amount of water boiled over fire. This is the lunch I will also eat; I don't allow anyone to shortchange this ration!"

Moor was immediately dumbfounded.

Are you even speaking human language?

Where will the rations come from?

What do you mean by 'the lunch you will also eat'?

If a noble lord like you eats this, then what do you expect me to eat?

What do you expect those farmers to eat?

Are you trying to start a rebellion?

Moor hesitated to speak, but under Roman's gaze, he had no choice but to nod.

Despite the constant hunger, the farmers of Sige Town were not lacking in rations.

As the Agricultural Officer, Moor would sell the surplus grain every year; otherwise, there wouldn't be money to buy oxen for plowing. Do you think one can achieve primitive accumulation solely through agriculture without cutting someone else's leeks?

Roman wouldn't inquire about this matter, and Moor dared not mention it.

This was their tacit understanding; previous accounts were to be written off.

Being too fat wasn't a good thing for Moor; it was time for him to lose some weight, otherwise, Roman would have to manually help him slim down, reducing him by the amount of a pig's head worth of meat in one go.

He had roughly calculated; counting both adult men and women, there were about twelve hundred labor force-capable farmers and slaves, a number that excluded children under fifteen and the immobile elderly.

Roman made a gesture with his hands and continued, "From now on, there will be such a meal every noon, and no one is allowed to go home. If there are children or old people at home who cannot walk, bring them out to eat, and then leave the children to the care of those eighty farmwives who cook. This will be the daily routine from now on, and you need to inform everyone as soon as possible."

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