"The region of Southern Patagonia, north of the Strait of Magellan, is a very desolate and barren place. According to statistics, about 73% of the land here is poor. At the end of December 1649, Li Dayan, who was tracking the living conditions of the newly arrived Ming immigrants, crouched on his suitcase and took the time to write his own interview: "What could be more miserable than these gravel, sparse wastelands?" I noticed that the inhabitants of these areas were so anxious to find fuel for cooking and heating that they even chopped the reeds and burned whatever they caught, until some gangue came from the Black Mountain Coal Mine. There is only fertile land here with ravines and damp river banks, and the cattle are a wretched ......."

It is the rural situation on the outskirts of Hungnam Port that Lai is describing. There is no doubt that the land here is extremely barren, and apart from the relatively fertile land on the banks of the river, the rest of the place is full of large deserts. The desert is covered with sparse bushes and weeds, all of which are a sign that farming here will be a recipe for bloodshed.

Recently, the Southern Railway Company has carried out an operation to improve the soil and irrigation facilities in the vicinity, and has included them in the work plan for 1650, and has prepared a special allocation of up to 250,000 yuan. The Southern Railway Company believes that if the limited rainfall of the year (less than 300 mm) and the water of the nearby Xingnan River are fully utilized in such a relatively arid inland saline-alkali irrigation poor area, and if the permanent irrigation facilities for masonry and cement are built, and water-saving irrigation agriculture is vigorously promoted, the land may not be able to build a self-sufficient food production system.

Of course, when developing agriculture in this area, it is also necessary to pay attention to the local environmental tolerance. Excessive demand on soil will only lead to lower groundwater levels, degradation of vegetation, soil salinization, and desertification. The role of the sand barrier in the Hungnam River basin will also become smaller and smaller. Then it caused wind disasters in the spring and drought in the summer. Eventually, the local ecosystem collapsed. Therefore, it is imperative for the Southern Railway Company to increase the awareness of water conservation among the residents here, control the amount of irrigation water, and build a water-saving irrigation system in the vast reclamation area.

In the middle of last year, the Southern Railway Company took advantage of the gap between local construction and organized manpower to build four artificial reservoirs in the lower reaches of the Xingnan River. The outlet of the reservoir is equipped with a device to hold back the floodwater, on the one hand, you can wait for the spring when the water of the Xingnan River is relatively abundant. The huge amount of flood water washed down upstream is channeled into the reservoir (the storage capacity is not very large, with an average of more than 200,000 cubic meters each) to prevent the precious freshwater resources from flowing into the sea in vain. Because once the evaporation increases in the summer, the river level drops rapidly, and the rain is almost non-existent, everyone will have to sit on wax.

In addition, the reservoir's water storage device can also greatly reduce the "pollution" of the river water in winter when the tide level of the open sea rises and the sea water backs up in large quantities, causing the salinity of the Hungnam River to increase rapidly. In addition to this, these reservoirs have brought a surprise to the people who have settled here on the east coast - that is, the sludge that has accumulated in the reservoirs.

As we all know, the Hungnam River is a very seasonal river, and it almost dries up during the dry season. However, during the flood season, the fierce ice and snow melt will cause a huge spring flood in a short period of time. This menacing flood washed down the soil, decaying plants and animals, human and animal feces, and other nutrient-rich materials in the middle and upper reaches of the river - this is how the shallows and sandbars that can be found everywhere at the mouth of the Hungnam River are formed. The raging river water also cuts the nearby gravel (a typical component of grey brown desert soil) into fine soil particles, which all help to improve soil texture.

After a flood period in the artificial reservoir built last year, everyone was pleased to find that the bottom of the reservoir had been silted up with a thickness of 5-8 centimeters. These layers are rich in nutrients, and the soil particles are much finer than the Gobi gravel soil at the bottom of the reservoir, which can be used to cover the upper layer of the gravel soil to improve the soil texture and make it suitable for sowing crops.

Thinking from this point of view, a student soldier from the Corps Fort of the Southern Railway Company pointed out that we can completely transform some brown desert soil texture into reservoirs, and then flood the turbid flood water washed down upstream during the spring flood to the top, and after a few years, this brown desert soil that is not suitable for cultivation will inevitably be covered with a layer of fine particles of loess rich in nutrients, which is a large piece of fertile land. And because these brown desert soils are very thick gravel layers, the leakage will stop after a certain amount of siltation, and then eventually flow to other nearby places, and also replenish the groundwater here, so that some deep-rooted plants can have sufficient water to grow, avoid desertification, and improve the soil quality.

After full demonstration and research, including the staff of the Ministry of Agriculture who came from the local area, they agreed that this policy was feasible, so this construction was quickly adopted by the Southern Railway Company and included in the plan to be put into practice. And this young soldier who proposed a valuable proposal also received a huge bonus of up to 500 yuan, and he would also be given priority by his superiors when he was promoted, and it was a good talk in the company's system for a while.

Of course, these newly irrigated lands could not be planted with wheat, rice, and other crops in the past few years. In the first few years, alfalfa, a nitrogen-fixing "green manure" crop, had to be planted in large quantities to provide fodder for livestock and improve soil texture. After a few years of persistence, the soil composition of this flooded land will be greatly improved, not only the nitrogen will be greatly increased, but also the phosphorus content will be greatly improved - the huge root system of the alfalfa will produce a large amount of organic acids, which is very important to convert the extremely high content of calcium-fixed phosphorus in the soil here into a fast-available phosphorus that can be quickly absorbed by plants.

Due to the special climate, barren land and other factors in southern Patagonia, the crops grown on the arable land on both sides of the Hindnan River are also very different from those of the mainland. According to the construction of Jin Kola, vice president of the Southern Railway Company, these lands should be adapted to local conditions and cannot be generalized. Corn, sorghum (drought-tolerant, barren-tolerant, deep-rooted crops), soybeans, alfalfa, rape, sugar beet can be planted, alfalfa can increase nitrogen in the soil (can also increase a small amount of phosphorus), soybeans can increase nitrogen in the soil, rape beet and so on can increase phosphorus, these types should be rotated with cereals to ensure that the fertility in the soil will not dissipate quickly, guide the land to become thinner and thinner, and finally run out of nutrients and return to desertification.

In addition, the most important agricultural infrastructure in the Hungnam River basin is probably the construction of masonry and cement irrigation canals, which are effective in preventing irrigation water leakage, and if covered with wooden planks, it can also prevent some evaporation, which is absolutely indispensable in the area.

"The Southern Railway Company has carried out epic environmental transformation activities here......" Li Dayan, who bought a 1,000-yuan bond from the Southern Railway Company, thought about it and decided to add some material to his documentary interview and boast about the Southern Railway Company: "After the arrival of this group of new immigrants, under the arrangement of the Southern Railway Company, together with nearly 2,000 old settlers here, a large area of dense field irrigation system will be built along the banks of the Xingnan River." Different from the extensive irrigation method of local flood irrigation, the Xingnan River area mainly adopts the trickle ditch irrigation, and even adopts the measure of pipeline drip irrigation in some areas, so as to improve the utilization rate of fresh water in every possible way, so as to achieve precise irrigation and scientific irrigation. ”

Of course, the construction of irrigation canals is an astonishing project, and with the number of residents around Xingnan Port, it is not possible to complete it overnight. In addition, the financial situation of the Southern Railway Company is tight, and the promised investment of 250,000 yuan does not know when it will be allocated. Taking 10,000 steps back, even if these materials are complete, there are still a large number of infrastructure projects to be completed at the Xingnan Port Terminal, not to mention the two-ocean railway, which has already begun construction, which is a huge pit to attract labor.

Therefore, in order to complete these infrastructure projects, it is necessary to rely on the efforts of the officers and soldiers of the Southern Railway Guard, that is, to see how many Crandis slave laborers they can capture from the La Plata area. In addition, it is also necessary to look at South Africa, where the local army of South Africa, under the command of Chang Kaisheng, has set up a bandit suppression headquarters at Fort Gouda, and is ready to send a large army to the small Karoo plateau to "suppress bandits" in order to capture more black slaves and send them to the southern Patagonia area for the Southern Railway Company to drive -- this matter was only facilitated by the unanimous greeting of several veterans of the War Department.

However, can the failure of water conservancy facilities stump our wise and hard-working Ming immigrants? From the first day of settlement, these Ming immigrants began the process of transforming the land allocated to them, they got up early and stayed late, ran long distances to the riverbed to dig up the soft and fertile silt (the nearby riverbed silt had been dug up by the first comers), and then picked it back into their own fields, and the initiative was many times stronger than that of the Italian and Livonian settlers.

While carrying silt and fertilizing the fields, they also went along the Hungnam Highway to find sandbanks with abundant water and grass, from where they cut large bales of hay and came back. In order to get their hands on the hay, they often have to walk on the edge of the desert for days, overcoming hunger and thirst to bring back much-needed fodder for their livestock. And under the care of the alarm, the Andalusian black cattle assigned to them quickly recovered from their bony state. According to Lai's observations, although the livestock raised by the Ming people were fed for a short time, they were often better than those raised by the relatively free and loose Italian immigrants, and the fat and strong ones made the European immigrants look red-faced and embarrassed to be lazy when doing daily farm work.

There is no doubt that these "colonists" from the eastern part of the Ming Dynasty were very disappointed with the barrenness and desolation of the land under their feet. But instead of despair, they are ready to build this desolate land into a beautiful desert oasis little by little, with their full enthusiasm. (To be continued......)