After spring, the pasture on the farm is the milk production season, and the milk supply is quite abundant, but due to the lack of quality and preservation methods, most of the milk and goat's milk are wasted. Dairy products are much richer in nutrients and higher in calories than food crops, making them an excellent food source.

Preservation and transportation are the biggest concerns, and making cheese is labor-intensive.

Cheese is the most common dairy product that is easy to store for a long time, but nowadays there is no place to buy rennet, so you can only use the acid method to make cheese. However, when making cheese with acid, fresh milk is first skimmed, then fermented to make yogurt, and then dehydrated and extruded. This takes a lot of time and labor. The milk fat that separates is ghee, which is also one of the most nutritious dairy products.

Skimming fresh milk is one of the most labor-intensive processes. On the grasslands, "ghee" is generally the work of women, but the tools used are very primitive: a ghee bucket made of thick wooden planks, a large wooden basin, and a wooden stick with a partition on the head. The diameter of the ghee barrel is about two feet, and the thickness of the barrel is the same from top to bottom, about half a person's height.

Ghee is actually a process of constantly making the perforated partition make the slightly fermented emulsion oscillate up and down, so as to achieve the purpose of separating the oil, this labor process is very hard, and it takes thousands of hammers to be considered basically completed.

If this kind of oscillation and stirring work is done by machinery, the efficiency will be increased by dozens of times.

Li Qi brought a few ghee cans from the pasture and gave them to the craftsmen to start experimenting with a degreaser powered by a water turbine.

As the craftsmen were studying the ghee buckets, Li Qi remembered another type of dairy product, condensed milk, which is relatively simple to make, except that it requires a centrifuge – similar to the drying bucket of a washing machine. The sterilized fresh milk is dehydrated, more than half of the water is shaken off, and then sealed. Of course, if the condensed milk is marinated with sugar, the shelf life will be longer.

Although glass cans and bottles cannot be manufactured at present, white iron sheets can be used as sealing utensils to make iron canned containers. The problem is that sugar is now an absolute luxury in the Northland, and the condensed milk that Li Jiqi wants to make is hoping to turn it into an ordinary food commodity.

Many of the pastoral tribes of the Fan tribe under the Jin army came from the Hezhong region under the jurisdiction of the Anxi Protectorate of the Western Tang Dynasty, and these tribes brought some fresh plant seeds from the Hezhong region of Central Asia. For example, grapes, melons, watermelons, carrots, onions, etc., and even beets, commonly known as thick leaf vegetables.

Several of them were sugary beets, but after tasting them, Li Qi was extremely disappointed, and this beet tasted slightly sweeter than radish. It is better to use it to make sugar, than to learn the Uighur method of boiling sugar from melons.

Li Qi picked some "thick leafy vegetables" with high sugar content, and found a plot of land in the south of the manor to try to plant them.

What if you can crossbreed high-sugar sugar beets?

In this era, due to years of war, the population has dropped sharply, and there is an extreme shortage of young and strong labor in various places.

Population is the basic condition for gaining a foothold in this world.

Compared with Li Siyuan in Luoyang, Li Qi has always believed that the Khitan is his biggest disaster. The Zhenwu army guarding Yunzhou made An Jinquan obviously agree with this, so he was not interested in Li Qi's proposal to strengthen control over the five prefectures of Youzhou and Shanbei in order to prevent the Khitans from continuing to expand westward.

So after the spring sowing, Li Qi decided to go to Yunzhou in person.

It is necessary to curb the trend of Khitan expansion to the west, otherwise it will be even more difficult to deal with when the other party's general trend has been achieved!

A luxurious caravan was quickly organized, and it was indeed worthy of its name, and more than 40 four-wheeled carriages alone were worth more than 20,000 yuan, which was equivalent to a year's rent and financial income in Yangqu County. When everything before departure was ready, it was already the second watch, Li Jiqi did not rest, but sat under the dim oil lamp and carefully thought about the itinerary and arrangements behind.

The power of the Khitans had expanded to Youzhou and northern Yunzhou, and in fact, at the same time as Li Cunqiao destroyed the Liang, Yelu Abaoji had also conquered the grassland tribes in northern Yunzhou.

However, because Abaoji is dead, Yelu Deguang succeeded to the throne with his second son, and after changing the name of the country to Da Liao, its internal situation is not stable, so the grassland tribes in the north of Yunzhou are in a state of swaying at both ends.

It was already dangerous to go east from Yunzhou, so the trade route he chose to build was from Yunzhou to the north, from the route of Shifeng Town-Jining-Suiyuan, to the Hetao area first. His idea was to build a city and reclaim the army, first control the grassland tribes in this area, and in later generations, he was more depressed that Jining, the originally beautiful name, did not know which bastard changed the name of the Mengwu place.

The Sixteen Prefectures of Youyun are the eternal pain of the Song Dynasty in the history of the previous life, that is, the loss of this natural barrier, and the history of hundreds of years of humiliation and peace, almost exhausted the blood of the Chinese people in the Central Plains. A group of farmers who have no ability to resist farming are always surrounded by a strong robber, who will run to their homes from time to time to rob their goods, livestock and food, and even their wives and children, and the court is powerless to protect them. One can imagine how disappointed they are in their hearts with such a country.

There is a sorrow called despair, and after despair, people actually become very numb, and thus lose their blood and courage...... Those who have the courage have already been slaughtered by the aliens, and they will not survive.

Li Qi finally drew a curved route north of Yunzhou, which was almost in line with the railway lines of later generations. He decided to use this trade route to connect the steppe tribes here in order to jointly resist the invasion and annexation of the Khitans. Of course, it is impossible to open up business roads overnight, and this is a long-term process of development and construction. The Li family was originally born in the grassland, at least now these grassland tribes are still nominally subordinate to the Li clan of Jinyang, and the Fan Department under the jurisdiction of the Jin army has always had trade contacts with the north, and they are more familiar with these tribes in the north.

The Khitan leader Yelu Abaoji has also been fighting in the south and north for many years, working hard to expand his territory. After quelling two internal turmoil, a large number of Han people represented by Han Yanhui, Han Zhigu, and Kang Moji were promoted and appointed to the center of power.

With the inspiration and help of these Hanchens, Yelu Abaoji began to learn to build cities and develop agricultural land, transforming the Khitans from a pure nomadic tribe into a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral grassland people. The development of agriculture has enabled nomadic tribes to have a stable source of food and to be more resilient to natural disasters.

It was because of this that the Khitan tribe became stronger and more prosperous.

After years of continuous conquest, by the time Abaoji was founded, it had successively annexed the five surnamed Xibu, the Xia Department and the seven departments of Murowei, with more than 300,000 troops. Its territorial scope is bordered by the Bohai Sea in the east, the Song Desert in the west, Youzhou in the south, and the Huangshui in the north, which is thousands of miles longitudinal and horizontal, and is already very vast and powerful.

After decades of expansion in the Abaoji era, the newly renamed Liao State has actually become the most powerful country in northern China, and the new ruler Yelu Deguang is even more ambitious and wants to enter the Central Plains.

To the west and north of Yunzhou, there are also scattered dozens of grassland tribes of large and small such as Turkic, Qiang, Zhubu, Hui, Tuyuhun, Dilie, and Huanggasi, and most of them were annexed by the Khitan, plus a lot of Han people, which constituted the main part of the Liao nation in the future.

Li Qi's aim was to prevent the emerging Liao State from continuing to annex and conquer these weak steppe tribes west of Yunzhou.