12 December 1647, Port Santa Fe.

Two Malay sailors silently carried boxes of canned food ashore, and some soldiers of the 6th Company, who were resting on the docks, immediately surrounded them.

"Grass, it's canned old cured meat again, Lao Tzu wants to eat canned spinach and cod." An army private scolded directly on the dock, with a few blisters at the corners of his mouth, and it seemed that the internal fire was relatively strong. It can be seen that it is not easy to fight on the front line, the mental pressure is high, the environmental conditions are bad, and the food is extremely average or even bad, and it is indeed normal to be in a hurry.

"The canned whale meat with green onions and sauce last time was not bad, why is it not there this time?" A corporal stood in the crowd with his arms crossed and looked straight ahead, "Did you let those white shirts embezzle?" Fuck, they know to hide behind us and pull us back. ”

"Hey, there's more canned yellow peaches, it's not bad." A supplementary soldier, who was obviously a recent enlister, said happily: "There are also soybean beef, yes, and it is good again." ”

Captain Ventura sat on the deck with his legs crossed, sipping yerba mate comfortably while smiling at the rest of the East Coast soldiers on the shore. They are all good young men, and they have been fighting for the land under the sun for the country for more than a year without regrets. In the past year or so, the family's wheat has been planted and harvested, the children have grown a year older, and the style of his hometown has changed a lot, and now he only hopes that these young men can safely return to their hometown with their spoils to reunite with their relatives.

The dull sound of artillery was still ringing on the battlefield in the distance. It was mostly the artillery of the people on the east coast, because their opponents, the Spaniards, suffered heavy losses in their artillery and could not be supplied at all. At present, only two or three doors that have just arrived are being installed on the façade. The offensive and defensive battles between the two sides in Santa Fe have been going on for months. The strength of the Spaniards in this area has also increased to more than 3,500 men (two kilograms of randis + 1,500 Lima legionnaires). On the east bank, the defensive forces consisted of two infantry companies, two artillery companies, four cavalry companies, a militia brigade, and part of the Gaucio Volunteer Army, with a total strength of about 2,500 troops.

At present, except for the cavalry troops, which have all been scattered to suppress the Clandi rebellion and maintain the security of the city and its suburbs, the rest of the infantry and artillery are all deployed inside and outside the city, and are engaged in more and more boring offensive and defensive battles with the Spaniards. The Spaniards could not attack outside the city, and the people on the east coast did not have enough superior forces to push the Spaniards back for the time being.

However, Captain Jiang Zhiqing, who was in charge of the Santa Fe theater, was not in a hurry, and time was on the side of the people on the east coast, who had their backs to the pier of the Paraná River, and it was more convenient to transport supplies - well. Because of the recent repatriation of large numbers of ships, the transportation of supplies was not as convenient as before—much less than the Spaniards had relied solely on mules and horses to transport large quantities of supplies from Córdoba. If it weren't for the fact that the Spaniards had more than 100,000 Crandi slaves in Córdoba, Turkmenistan, Jujuy and other places, as well as the Paraguay region in the north from time to time to rush some emergency supplies to them, these three or four thousand Spanish soldiers would not have been able to hold out until now, and would have been dragged to death by the long supply lines.

Recently, after Jiang Zhiqing saw that the Spaniards attacking Santa Fe were plagued and supplies were inconvenient, he had already moved to completely defeat the Spaniards outside Santa Fe, but this was not possible until the two militia brigades that had returned to the mainland to rest and do farm work were assembled for the second time. At that time, the East Coasters would have an absolute superiority in numbers, and the Spaniards, exhausted by long and fruitless offensive and defensive battles and epidemics, should be able to defeat them with a single blow. Straight to Córdoba.

But just because they can't fight back against the Spaniards doesn't mean they have nothing to do. It's not. While Captain Ventura was sipping yerba mate comfortably, a group of soldiers from the country drove a mooing group of black bulls. The cattle were collected in nearby villages, and their original owners, harassed by the rioting Clandi, either fled with their families to the western region of La Plata or to the people of the East Coast to register for overseas development. They're fed up with the chaos and the endless carnage, and they just want to live quietly in a place with fertile land, even if it's from scratch.

Of course, there were also quite a few of the livestock that came from the enemy property of the Spanish "spies" who had been executed. The Spaniards and the East Coasters have committed thousands of troops to fight for Santa Fe, a hub between the inside and outside, in a series of battles that last six months. There were originally a considerable number of white Spanish residents in Santa Fe, and naturally many of these people secretly communicated with the Spanish army because of religious factors or because of the exorbitant conquest of the people on the east coast. Captain Jiang Zhiqing ordered that more than 10 of the most heinous criminals be immediately executed, and that all the others should be sent back to their homeland, some of whom would spend their miserable lives in the Changshan Iron Mine Forced Labor Camp, and some of whom would be used as materials for human experiments in the Ping'an County Medical Research Institute.

Once the cattle were transported to the wharves, they were ferried to the south bank of the Salado River by small river steamboats, where they were driven south to Buenos Aires by the men who had already set out for them, and their safety was taken care of by some of the cavalry units that had been temporarily transferred.

After these black cattle are driven to Buenos Aires, they usually have to be raised for two or three months, because most of these cattle who have traveled long distances are now skinny and cannot move forward again without adequate nutritional supplements. The fattened cattle were reloaded at the port of Buenos Aires and transported to the port of Mall (Colonia) on the other side, where they were driven back to the towns and villages by cattle herders to be sold—cheap cattle had always been one of the war dividends promised by the government to the farmers.

According to conservative estimates, the 700,000 mu of wheat fields sown in the East Bank Republic of China last year will need about 280,000 to 300,000 adult cattle to provide manure according to the calculation of the three-crop rotation system, otherwise the yield of wheat per mu will not reach the level of more than 120 catties at all, and if it is not managed well, it may not even reach 100 catties, which is definitely not a joke.

And how many cows are there in the country now? More than 110,000 heads! This figure was only reached after a while ago after grabbing more than 60,000 cattle from La Plata, and it was not even half of it before, so it is no wonder that the average yield of wheat per mu on the east coast is only seventy or eighty catties, which is too little fertilizer and not enough soil resources. Don't look at the east coast has a good climate, abundant precipitation, and the land is very fertile, but energy is conserved, and there are so many nutrients in the ground, you will grow a little less grain. If the land is not replenished with nutrients from time to time, it is inevitable that the yield will decline year by year.

Therefore, the large herd of cattle in the La Plata area is one of the most valuable assets of the people of the East Coast, because it is an indispensable part of the "modernization" of agriculture on the East Coast. As the land area on the east coast expands year by year, the demand for livestock is also increasing rapidly, and the shortage of hundreds of thousands of cattle is not easy to solve in normal times, because even if you can pay a huge amount of money (it may take 5 million to 10 million yuan) to buy cattle, the Spaniards will not necessarily sell it to you. Most of the people who sell them to you are steers, because it is difficult for them to sit idly by and watch the people of the East Coast, who also own large grasslands, also develop their livestock farming.

But now that it's the time of the war, it's much easier to solve. For example, what the people of the East Coast are doing at present, consciously or unconsciously, is to condone the revenge of the free-spirited Crandi slaves against the Spanish slave owners, and to buy a large amount of property that originally belonged to the Spanish colonists at a low price, or sometimes to pick it up for nothing, because some slave owners unfortunately lost their entire families.

This was the case with the many La Plata families that maintained close commercial ties with the people of the East Coast. Except for the eight or nine big merchants, ranchers, and ranchers led by the Rodriguez family, who were strong and had a certain number of private soldiers to protect themselves, the other small Spanish businessmen and ranchers who were weak and weak fell into blood mold. Elsewhere it is not known that in the first half month of this month, 49 white Spanish farm and ranch operators were murdered in Santa Fe (including the suburbs). Although Captain Jiang Zhiqing, commander-in-chief of the Santa Fe Theater on the East Coast, quickly sent people to capture a group of stupid Crandi criminals who openly sold stolen goods (cattle) in the livestock market, the dead Spaniards could not be resurrected, and these "ownerless things" naturally became the property of the East Coast people themselves.

In addition to cattle, the people of the East Coast are also trying to dig into the roots of Spanish rule in La Plata. For example, they planted a lot of pasture in the wheat fields of the Spaniards to supply the horses that accompanied the army or the cattle that passed by. For example, they cut down all the large hardwoods suitable for shipbuilding and shipped them back to the country so that they would not be used by the Spaniards in the future; For example, they are doing everything they can to keep the white colonists of La Plata draining - whether it's to go to the overseas colonies on the east bank or to go back to the western half of La Plata, in short, not to show up in the Paraná River Valley.

It is believed that by the end of the war, the Spanish colonization efforts throughout La Plata will be set back by ten or even decades. The decline in the number of white colonists, the desolation of the land, the deterioration of the law and order, and the destruction of colonial facilities will undoubtedly haunt Spanish officials who are determined to rebuild the colony of La Plata. If La Plata needs to be restored to its former prosperity - at least to support the Kingdom of Spain to deploy an elite army of several thousand men in the region, I am afraid that the Spanish king will need to emigrate 20,000 or 30,000 people from the mainland, and at the same time spend millions of pesos in the upfront investment of five to ten years of painstaking construction, but is it possible?

Once the roots of the Spaniards de La Plata are dug up by the people of the East Coast, there will probably be no chance of recovery! (To be continued......)