Li Zhi decided to build a pig farm outside the city of Fanjiazhuang. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

Originally, there were many wealthy households in Gyeongseong and Cheon0jin, and there was a huge demand for meat, and there were a large number of farmers in the vicinity of Gyeonggi who raised pigs and sheep to supply these rich households, and the price of pork and mutton was relatively stable. Although Fanjiazhuang used to consume more than 2,000 catties of meat every day, compared to the large number of powerful people in the capital, these consumption was not too much.

The capital has a population of more than one million, and there are at least more than 100,000 officials and nobles who drink and meat every day, and the number of pigs and sheep consumed is huge. Correspondingly, the number of farmers in the vicinity of Gyeonggi who supplied pigs and mutton to these gentry and nobles was also huge.

If the pigs near Fanjiazhuang are sold out, the pig dealers will definitely come to the vicinity of the capital to transport the pigs. Fanjiazhuang is only more than 100 miles away from the capital, and the cost of hiring a carriage to transport four pigs to Fanjiazhuang is only one or two hundred yuan. If the price of meat in Fanjiazhuang is higher than that in the capital, the pig dealers can transport the pigs from the vicinity of the capital to Fanjiazhuang in two days to make money.

Therefore, before the Tatars entered the customs and plundered in the ninth year of Chongzhen, the meat price of Fanjiazhuang was very stable, and it had been in the range of more than 50 wen a catty. Li Zhi supplied each worker or soldier with six taels of meat a day, and only needed five or six taels of silver a month.

But after Chongzhen's nine-year military disaster, the situation has changed.

After the Tatars broke through the pass, they plundered all the pigs and sheep in the villages near Gyeonggi and transported them back to Liaodong.

In this case, Gyeonggi's food and meat supply is insufficient. The price of meat has skyrocketed along with the price of rice, and it has risen to more than 100 yuan a pound in the past few months, so that many rich people cannot afford to eat meat. In order to control expenditures, Li Zhi also changed the three meals of meat for workers and soldiers to one meal of meat. Only when the price of meat drops will Li Zhi resume serving meat for three meals.

But the fact that he won the battle and defended Fanjiazhuang, but he couldn't afford to eat meat, made Li Zhi very unhappy. Today, Fanjiazhuang has 10,000 peasants arable land, which can produce about 90,000 stone of grain a year, which is enough to feed 30,000 people. Fanjiazhuang will soon be able to self-sufficiency in grain. Li Zhi decided to build another pig farm so that he could be self-sufficient in meat.

If you can feed yourself in meat, you will not be affected by natural disasters and man-made disasters during the Chongzhen period, and you will not be unable to eat meat in Fanjiazhuang because of disasters in other places.

Li Zhi asked the masons who had repaired the peasants' houses to choose a plot of land outside the city wall in the south of the city and began to build a large pig farm.

After recruiting new soap workers and 4,000 soldiers, Li Zhi's command had 11,500 people who had to eat meat every day, and these people had to consume more than 4,000 catties of meat every day.

However, Li Zhi's courage is greater, and he expects his career to expand in the future, so he estimated an advance amount, and finally decided to raise 30,000 heads.

This is a big project, with five pigs in a pen, six pigs in a pig shed to count, but also need to build a thousand pig sheds. Based on the calculation that one swineherd feeds 200 pigs, Li Zhi needs to hire 150 swineherds. The hired swineherd must be an experienced ******, and Li Zhi also gave two or two months of money and three meals with meat.

Although Li Zhi's salary is very high, because of the centralized breeding, many jobs can be operated in a centralized manner to form a scale effect, and the final labor cost is similar to that of free-range farmers.

In this era, there was no feed, and the pigs were fed bran, rice bran and hogweed, and occasionally broken rice. Hogweed is a wild grass such as purslane, camellia, and seven cabbage, which can be hired by farmers and even children to pick in the wild during the off-season, so as to increase the income of farmers, or allow children to earn some pocket money.

Construction of the pigsty began on December 6 and is expected to be completed by the end of the Chinese New Year. Li Zhi also asked 100 family members and officials to go out to buy piglets, first purchasing a batch of 1,700 piglets to raise, and then adding 1,700 piglets every month. In this way, after a year and a half, each batch of piglets will gradually grow up and be slaughtered in batches.

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After asking the officials to buy piglets, Li Zhi returned to the gun workshop and began to try to make granular black powder.

The gunpowder used in modern rifle bullets is all granular gunpowder. Granular gunpowder is able to achieve a higher muzzle velocity after the bullet is discharged at the same chamber pressure. The Mini Rifle that uses granular black powder will be greatly increased in power.

In order to fight against the Qing army with multiple layers of armor, it was important to increase the power of the Minnie rifle.

Not only that, granular gunpowder burns more fully because of the large air attack between the gunpowder particles. There is less residue after the combustion of granular gunpowder, which is beneficial for the rifleman to clean the chamber. Cleaning the chamber of the gun is made easy, and the rate of fire of the musket can be increased.

Li Zhi took ten rifles and used black powder, put the gunpowder on the wooden grinding plate and repeatedly crushed it until the black powder was rolled into white and gray. Then Li Zhi took a little soba noodles with good water, added some water to the soba noodles with synthetic mud, and then thinned them a little. Then he poured all the buckwheat noodles on top of ten parts of ground black powder, and the black powder and soba noodles were combined into a white-gray ball.

Then Li Zhi asked the blacksmith to make a porous iron plate, scrape the gunpowder dough with the holes in the iron plate, scrape off the gunpowder particles one by one, and put them into a basin. The particles of different sizes are then screened out with a sieve prepared in advance, leaving only the particles of uniform size.

After screening, half of the particles are different in size and need to be kneaded into balls and scraped into grains. The remaining half of the gunpowder particles were about the same size. Li Zhi divided the particles into five parts and dried them in the sun to obtain a kind of granule gunpowder.

Li Zhi didn't know how big the gunpowder particles were for his Minnie rifle. So he made ten kinds of black powder with different particle sizes, made five parts of each, and then took them to the shooting range to test them one by one.

After drying the black powder, Li Zhi used different granular gunpowder to shoot the target.

Most granular gunpowder has a mediocre effect, and some particles are too large or even inferior to powdered gunpowder. But there were several small particles of gunpowder that showed themselves well and pierced through two layers of Qing armor at ninety meters. One of them, in particular, pierced through two layers of Qing army armor on a hundred meters.

Li Zhi returned to the musket workshop, used the best-performing granular gunpowder as a template, fine-tuned the particle size around the size of the template, and finally made ten kinds of granular black powder with slightly different sizes, and did the target test again.

Li Zhi was pleasantly surprised by the effect of this experiment:

The best granular black powder pierced through two layers of Qing army armor at a height of 120 meters, and also penetrated three layers of Qing army armor at 80 meters.

The performance of this new type of granular gunpowder meant that Li Zhi could fire on the Qing cavalry before the most elite Qing troops could shoot arrows. Li Zhi immediately asked the gunsmiths who prepared the gunpowder to produce this granular gunpowder in the future.

Seeing the performance of the new gunpowder, Li Xing and several other senior officers were very excited.

"Big brother! Where did you get so many new ideas? That's amazing! ”

Zheng Kaicheng said: "Adults are constantly inventing new things, which is admirable! ”

Zhong Feng excitedly grabbed the granule gunpowder and looked left and right, and said, "My lord is too powerful, and I am not afraid to encounter the Tartar cavalry breakthrough now." ”

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