At the same time, in addition to the ladies who were on duty at the kitchen farm to help and teach the children, a total of 41 people were led by Lao Wang and boarded the five tractor trailers waiting there outside the cave gate.

The tractor convoy was accompanied by two excavators, and after the team swept out of the cave gate, it crossed the railway from the east side of the farm, bypassed the small hillside, and headed north through the blackened fields of the fire to the open land outside the main entrance of the Red Mansion, and from there officially began a large-scale reclamation operation to the east......

It is a region of 16 degrees south latitude, far from the equatorial zone, but the temperature is still not low, at the bottom of the box-shaped bay surrounded by land on three sides, the island and coastal land have always been the monsoon climate zone of the interaction between the sea and the continental climate, forming its unique summer rainy season and winter dry season.

In June, the sun shines far away from the southern hemisphere and close to the Tropic of Capricorn, and the southern hemisphere begins to enter the early winter season, the weather is gradually cooler, the air is gradually dry, and the dry southwest wind from the interior of the Australian continent begins to dominate the sky here.

A flock of rose terns emerge in the air on the western part of the island, following a migration path that has been around for thousands of years, in search of insects on land.

However, unlike previous years, not only are insects much rarer than usual, but the land is noisy, and after a long period of time in mid-air, the terns are driven by the smoke and fire that permeates the ground to fly to the eastern coastline of the island, where mangrove insects and shallow fish and shrimp still feed the birds' offspring.

Obviously, it has been a long time since the last burning, and in the open land to the east of the Red Mansion, the grass has stubbornly drilled out of the ground in many places, adding a little green to the land that has just been burned by the fire, but the land here is still a little scorched from the green, standing on the ground and looking at it from a distance, the ground seems to be smeared with black and green oil paint.

At this time, five 28-horsepower tractors were spitting black smoke and moving side by side, each tractor was dragging a light steel deep plough, about 25 centimeters of soil was turned upside down for the first time in thousands of years, so that these dark red clods of earth were exposed in the warm sunlight.

Another excavator dragged a trenching plough to create a straight gully in the ground, followed by a group of men working with shovels to tidy it up, and another excavator and a group of men digging a trench near a tributary on the south bank of the Moon River as they built a planned main water diversion canal.

At this time, the old ** heart was full of standing on the ground to inspect all this, his heart was still a little excited, this is a feeling that he rarely felt in his life and has not been seen for a long time, after half a year, his agricultural career in the new world finally began in full swing.

According to Lao Wang's agricultural plan, about 2,500 mu of land will be reclaimed within three years, and the area of the first phase of reclamation will reach 700 mu.

The 2,500 acres of land are located on a large gently sloping wilderness outside the gate of the Red Mansion, which starts from the south bank of a major tributary of the Moon River in the north and extends to the coastline, and is an irregular rectangular plot of land about one kilometer in the east-west direction and one and a half kilometers in the north-south direction.

This land will be divided into 1,000 acres of land for food crops and 1,000 acres of land for cash crops, as well as about 500 acres of forest land.

The three distinct functional areas will be separated by main canals, with the grain and cash crops growing wheat, corn, sweet potatoes, potatoes, soybeans, sugar cane, sugar beet and sisal, while the woodland will be planted entirely with a fast-growing bamboo for the initial use of timber for the initial infrastructure.

At this moment, Lao Wang, who is in a somewhat anxious mood, plans to make all preparations for the sowing of these crops during the three to four months of the dry season this year.

However, later, because of everyone's continuous complaints, Lao Wang was forced to revise the reclamation plan again and again, and the area continued to shrink, and in the end, this year's reclamation area shrank from 700 acres to only 200 acres of crop land and 300 acres of bamboo forest.

Of course, everyone's reason is because of their own physical concerns, everyone knows that reclamation is just the beginning, and the subsequent crop planting and field management is the most tiring work, which will definitely make everyone very, very tired.

So when Lao Wang put forward the original reclamation area, everyone immediately complained, don't say anything about 700 acres of land, it is the 60 acres of vegetable garden in front of you, which has taught everyone what is called field work, what is the hard work of facing the loess with your back to the sky, and agriculture without mechanization is simply not done by people!

In short, whoever likes to do it, who does it, who is tired to death.

There are also many people who said on the spot that it is indeed difficult to accept such hard work, even with the help of construction machinery!

There is no way, in the face of everyone's crazy complaints, Lao Wang's reclamation plan was forced to be revised again and again in the midst of everyone's complaints and opposition, and the development area was reduced, resulting in the final plan: to complete the reclamation of 1,000 acres in three years.

In the first year, only 300 acres of bamboo forests and 200 acres of crops were cultivated.

In the second year, we will look at the situation and reclaim 300 acres of land, up to 500 acres.

As for the third year, everyone is clamoring that we should have a workforce by then, right? So, then no more discussion!

There is no way, no matter how ambitious Lao Wang is, in the face of everyone's successive complaints, he can only accept such an arrangement in the end.

In fact, if you want to talk about hard work, compared with reclamation and farming, the field team led by Hou Xianglin and Cao Limei is much harder.

Due to the man-made burning of the land a while ago and the subsequent wildfires quickly spread to many places in the west of the island, there are still many places where the exploration team passed through the charred grass roots and grass ashes after the previous fire, but the burned area is irregular, with the deepening of the exploration, the burned ground and the unburned ground are in a dog-tooth situation.

However, everyone also found that although these places were not burned thoroughly, the effect was still very obvious, and the mosquitoes and moths in the air and snakes, insects, rats and ants on the ground felt a lot less.

Seeing such a situation, and recalling the embarrassment of being attacked by mosquitoes and running in all directions only a few months ago, everyone's emotions gradually rose---- through hard work, defeated the opponent, achieved the goal, the joy and pride from the heart is the unprecedented life experience of this group of ordinary people from the old world.

However, Hou Xianglin knew in his heart that the large number of mosquitoes may not be the result of a recent fire, but the dry season has arrived.

Insects are very sensitive to the change of seasons, and in terms of season, they should have entered the dormant period of insects, so what the results of burning a while ago were, in fact, can only be really tested when the next rainy season comes.

It is precisely because of this that Hou Xianglin led the burning team equipped with bulldozers, meticulously opened up a widened isolation zone along the surveying and mapping trend map determined by Cao Limei, and then instructed the burning team members to set fire to both sides of the isolation zone.