When he returned to the Ning family's mansion in the evening, Chi Fei took the initiative to discuss things with his father-in-law.

"What do you say? Do you want to engage in border trade with the Hu people? After listening to Chi Fei's suggestion, Ning Zhiyuan asked in surprise.

Chi Fei said solemnly: "Yes, father-in-law." Although the imperial court strictly forbade trade with the Hu people before, the so-called one time and another.

Now that we in the northwest have become self-reliant and no longer have to obey the orders of the puppet dynasty, we can completely change our strategy according to our own needs.

Although the Hu people do not grow food, they have a large number of cattle, sheep and horses.

We can trade with them in exchange for their livestock.

As long as a large number of livestock can be exchanged, even if it cannot meet the needs of the whole army, at least part of the pressure on military rations can be relieved. ”

"Your idea is good, but do you know what the Hu people want most?"

"Salt, iron, grain, tea, cloth and other daily necessities."

Ning Zhiyuan smiled bitterly: "None of the things you said can be produced in the northwest except for grain.

Even if we don't have much food, self-sufficiency is still a problem, and where can we exchange surplus grain for livestock.

Now that you know, what else do you think we can do with those Hu people? ”

"Salt, I believe that the Hu people are more short of salt than we are. We can trade with them with salt. ”

"You mean the plan you said earlier? After laying Jiujiang, use the seaside salt field to make salt? ”

"Yes."

"It's not that your plan is bad, but it's a pity that the far water can't save the near fire.

Even in a seaside salt factory, it is impossible to produce large quantities of salt in a short period of time. ”

What Ning Zhiyuan said was the truth.

There are two main methods of salt production in this era, one is the seawater frying salt method, and the other is the well and mine extraction method.

The seawater frying salt method is to continuously pour seawater into the pan and decoction, and after frying to a certain extent, you can obtain natural sea salt.

However, the salinity of ordinary seawater is very low, and the salinity of seawater just brought from the sea is generally only 3.5%, that is, the salt content of seawater is about 3.5 grams per 100 grams.

Therefore, in the process of decoction, it is necessary to continuously add new seawater, and after repeated decoction, a higher concentration of brine is gradually formed.

By repeatedly adding seawater and then decoction repeatedly, a certain amount of coarse salt can be obtained.

The shaft and mine extraction method refers to digging holes in natural salt mining areas to mine brine, and then filtering the natural brine mined and pouring it into a pot to decoction into salt.

The method is similar to that of seawater decoction, except that the salt content of natural brine is usually much higher than that of seawater due to the relationship between years of sedimentation, so the decoction time will be relatively shortened.

Either way, it's basically inseparable from the decoction step.

Salt production by decoction is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also has a limited output.

Large-scale salt production requires a lot of time and a lot of manpower and material resources, and it is by no means a matter of months.

In some salt wells in the southwest, the surrounding trees were cut down due to salt frying, which not only caused environmental damage, but also caused the salt wells to stop production due to lack of fuel, which has long been common.

It is precisely because large-scale salt production is so troublesome, time-consuming and labor-intensive, that Ning Zhiyuan has decided that once Jiujiang is conquered, he will immediately use the private property of the Ning family to buy a large amount of grain from the surrounding small countries to solve the urgent need.

After the current difficulties, we will think about how to develop.

Regarding the matter of salt production in this era, Chi Fei had already inquired clearly, otherwise he would not have deliberately discussed this matter with his father-in-law.

Chi Fei took a deep breath and said, "Father-in-law, my son-in-law knows a method that can make salt in large quantities.

However, this method has many restrictive conditions, and it needs to meet various factors including climate, sunshine and other factors before it can be implemented.

But once successful, you can easily get tens of thousands of catties of white salt without spending a lot of manpower and material resources. ”

When Ning Zhiyuan heard this, the whole person stood up suddenly, and then looked at him in disbelief and asked, "Is this true?" ”

"Where does the son-in-law dare to deceive his father-in-law, it is naturally true. It's just that whether this method can be implemented in Jiujiang will only be known if it has been tried locally. ”

Ning Zhiyuan looked at the little son-in-law in front of him blankly, and after a while, for the first time, a happy smile appeared on his face that he had never had since he returned to the northwest for so long, and said very excitedly: "I have a good son-in-law, God help me." If this method is feasible, I will give you a dividend of 10% every year. ”

Chi Fei didn't dare to accept it, and hurriedly pushed it back.

What are you kidding, the annual dividend of selling salt in the entire Jiujiang is not a matter of tens of thousands of taels, but a profit of hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of taels per minute.

This silver is too hot, where does he dare to accept it.

And now the eight characters have not been skimmed, it is still a question of whether it will succeed, and it is still too early to talk about this.

But Ning Zhiyuan was on the rise, where could he listen to his words, he just walked around the study excitedly, and looked at the location of Jiujiang Mansion on the map from time to time, looking like a hungry cat seeing fresh fish.

It doesn't take a lot of manpower and material resources to easily get tens of thousands of catties of white salt, which sounds like a fantasy.

If it was someone else who said this to him, he would not believe it, and would only think that the other person was a liar.

But Ning Zhiyuan still knows a lot about this little son-in-law who often has amazing ideas.

If he wasn't sure, he wouldn't have said such a thing.

When he was fighting the plague in the northwest, the little son-in-law repeatedly said that he was not sure at all, but he still let him do it.

Now that he looks like he has a lot of success in his heart, Ning Zhiyuan feels that this matter is likely to be successful.

In any case, this Jiujiang must be obtained as soon as possible, so that the little son-in-law can carry out the salt production experiment locally.

As long as the miraculous salt-making method he mentioned is completed, most of the money and grain problems in the northwest will be solved in the future. The more Ning Zhiyuan thought about it, the more excited he became.

……………………

After coming out of his father-in-law's study, Chi Fei thought about what had just happened as he walked.

The salt-making method he proposed to his father-in-law is actually the modern salt-making method.

When he wrote an online article, he had deliberately checked this information to know what the various salt production methods in ancient and modern times were all about.

In his world, the method of frying in a sea salt pan was a long-standing method of salt production, and even in the Ming and Ming dynasties, many salt farms used this method to make salt.

Some people may ask why the ancients were so stupid that they would only use the method of frying salt, which is laborious and costly, to make salt, instead of using the simple method of drying salt to obtain salt.

In fact, this is a misunderstanding, the ancients were not so stupid, the reason why they have been using such a backward salt making method, in addition to being limited by many objective conditions, in fact, the main reason is related to the imperial court at that time wanted to control private salt.

First of all, the salt frying method requires stoves, firewood, and places to spread the fried salt, which are not available to ordinary stove households, and must be allocated at the expense of the government.

As far as the main utensils for frying salt are concerned, each pot weighs about 140 catties.

With the imperial court's strict control over iron, the stove households simply could not afford to purchase such a bulky and bulky stove.

The stoves used by the stove households to fry salt can only be supplied by a special casting bureau, and the stove households are not allowed to cast them privately.

By supervising the salt cooking stoves, the government can greatly reduce the number of private salt made by the people.

Then, through the supporting systems such as "group frying method", "fire method", and "book calendar", private salt can be eliminated from the source.

Therefore, although the court of the Ming and Qing dynasties had already invented the method of drying salt, the court at that time never wanted to promote this method, and the reason for this is this.

Although such a system can prevent ordinary people from making salt privately, it cannot prevent powerful salt lords from making private salt, so the problem of the overflow of illegal salt in the Ming and Qing dynasties has been repeatedly banned.

In addition to the imperial court's deliberate implementation of the salt frying method in order to control private salt, in terms of objective conditions, if you want to implement the salt drying method on a large scale, it is not easy to meet various strict requirements such as climate, light, and temperature.

It is only in areas with a mild climate, abundant sunshine and large areas of flat beaches that it is possible to produce salt in large quantities by the salt pan method.

It is not easy to find a place that meets these conditions, and it can even be said that it is one in a million.

Song Yingxing, a scholar of the Ming Dynasty, wrote "Tiangong Kaiwu Xian Fifth", which recorded: "Haifeng has a person who leads seawater directly into the pond to dry, and when it is condensed, it sweeps the food without manpower. Same as salt solution. But when the salt is formed, it is very different from not borrowing the south wind. ”

The "Haifeng" in this record is the "Wudi County" in Shandong Province.

The name "Wudi" was first seen in "Spring and Autumn Left Biography. In the early Ming Dynasty, he changed his name to "Haifeng" because he avoided the Ming Dynasty's ancestor "Zhu Di".

In 1914, the name of Wudi was restored. Among them, "Jieyan" refers to the salt produced by the Jiechi of Jiezhou, Shanxi. The quality of "Jieyan" ranked first in China at that time, and it belonged to "tribute salt".

In other words, in the Ming Dynasty, the only place where the salt drying method could be implemented was Haifeng, and the salt decoction method was still commonly used in other places.

In addition to these objective conditions, there is another subjective reason that seriously restricts the improvement and popularization of the salt drying method.

That is, salt mill owners have long been accustomed to using the salt frying method handed down from their ancestors, and they do not trust and accept the new salt production method that needs to be greatly renovated to implement the salt farm, so it is difficult to promote it.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi, an official, once gave the emperor the salt drying law and asked for it to be promoted, but both the imperial court and the salt farms in various places reacted mediocrely, and finally it was over.

It was not until the twenty-seventh year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty (1901) that the salt people came up with the method of using ditches to change frying to drying, which completely ended the history of frying salt.

Therefore, the ancients were not stupid, but were affected by the imperial court policies at that time and many conditions that prevented them from improving the salt production method.

The reason why Chi Fei specially asked Deng Yuanming to introduce him to people who were familiar with Jiujiang was to find out whether Jiujiang had the natural climatic conditions for drying salt.

After talking with the subordinate who was born in Jiujiang, Chi Fei learned that this place in Jiujiang has little rain and dry all year round, and the sunshine is sufficient.

As for the location, you have to really go to the local area to see to know.

If the local area is not suitable for the implementation of the salt field method, Chi Fei still has a trick, that is, to implement the ditch beach salt drying method of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty.

Although this method is far less productive than the salt pan method, it does not require a lot of manpower, material resources and time like the salt frying method, and the yield is much higher than that of the salt frying method, so it is also a good backup method.

Chi Fei knows very well that he is just an ordinary person, and he is also an ordinary person who does not understand engineering.

He couldn't even forget how many elements there were in the periodic table, let alone memorize them.

He never thought of making things that could only be produced by modern industries, such as making glass and steel, because it was too far beyond his knowledge structure.

The only thing he could do was to make simple and feasible things such as soap and salt.

These techniques, while important, are not complicated.

As long as you have watched the video or materials, and after a certain amount of experimentation, even ordinary people can easily copy it.

He is now extremely glad that he checked a lot of information and watched a lot of related videos when he wrote the online article, which gave him a certain understanding and confidence in salt making.

The northwestern side is so hard and barren that there is almost nothing, and if you don't find a way to create high-yield projects, you simply can't feed so many soldiers and civilians.

Only by surviving first can we talk about development, and there is a long way to go.