"Shifang shop has arrived!" With a crisp, short whistle, Captain Ventura opened his throat and shouted.

As soon as he finished speaking, a group of Ming immigrants dressed in cotton clothes and wrapped in sweat towels on their heads swarmed over. Each of them held a large bag in his hand and watched in awe at the grain, sorghum, corn and soybeans piled up in the open in the cabin. The patrol officers in charge of maintaining order were lazy, and they saw that they held batons in their hands, blasted back some of the people who were too crowded forward, and then stood there calmly, waiting for orders from their superiors.

"Okay, come one by one, and only those who call their names can come. Anyone who squeezes and disrupts order will be disqualified from seed allocation. A middle-aged patrol officer with a missing arm walked over and said. He appeared to be a senior police officer, and as he waved, two young patrolmen immediately trotted over to remove a small barricade to reveal an opening for two or three people, and then began roll call with a roster.

This is Shifangdian, a settlement that formed spontaneously during the westward expansion of the people of the East Coast. Located on the north bank of what would become the Yakui River, west of Triunfo, east of Riopardo, and south of Valiverdi, it was originally a lumberyard where a small number of Irish, Italians, introduced by labour brokers, cut wood in the hope of working for five years to obtain East Bank citizenship and then be allocated land and houses.

Later, as the number of loggers increased, the government converted the simple wharf along the river bank to allow it to moor river steamboats that transported supplies back and forth along the river. After the opening of the fixed route of the inland steamboat, the Ping'an County Government, which is entrusted here, sent people to collect local materials here. Several imposing two-story houses were built out of stone. both as a governing body. It also serves as a storehouse and functions as a store (selling daily necessities to lumberjacks to collect money), so it is affectionately called "stone shop" by local lumberjacks.

By May and June of this year, the number of lumberjacks in Shifangdian had reached more than 600, and a considerable part of the land along the river bank had been cleared, so the Executive Committee simply decided to upgrade the lumberyard to a settlement. and notify the Department of Immigration to include it in the new immigration allocation plan. As for the original lumber yard, of course, it will continue to be retained, on the one hand, so that these foreigners who were attracted by the East Coast Homestead Law will not lose their jobs, and on the other hand, it is necessary to reserve land for the development of the town in the future. After all, in this primitive and wild place, there is only forest except for the big river, and if you want to have arable land that can support all the residents, there is only one way to ask for land from the forest?

Soon, the Ministry of Immigration sent the last batch of more than 400 Ming immigrants (mostly men) here; Half a month later, more than 200 men and women from Livonia also settled here with their own parcels; At the beginning of this month (October), three hundred Polish slave girls were also sent to the docks. So far. The population of the new settlement of Shifangdian has swelled to nearly 1,000 (not counting the stateless lumberjacks), and it is not too small.

October 5th. Shifangdian Township was included in the trusteeship scope of the upcoming Dingxi County (formally established on January 1, 1650, with jurisdiction over five township-level administrative units of Dingxi Township, Pingxi Township, Rat Township, Taquali Township and Northern Botanical Garden, and the administrative office is Dingxi Township).

In addition, they coordinated the transportation capacity and pulled out a ship to deliver some supplies and improved seeds here, which is why Captain Ventura's "Yiyun 007" came to Shifangdian. After this ship, there will be ships coming in the next two days to bring a batch of fertilizer to Shifangdian Township. According to the latest requirements of the Ministry of Agriculture on the East Coast, fertiliser is required on cultivated land throughout the country, and predatory planting without fertilisation may result in fines. As soon as this regulation was issued, the prices of animal fertilizer, human manure, soybean cakes, sesame oil blanks, black beans, fried suzi, pig blood, stove ash, ponds, marshes and river sludge rose across the board, and farmers everywhere rushed to buy these fertilizers. As a newly developed territory, Shifangdian Township naturally has to follow the national policy, so the Dingxi County Government painfully squeezed out a part of its quota and transported it to Shifangdian to sell to local farmers on credit.

In addition to fertilizer, there is also a batch of good seeds that have just been cultivated in the Northern Botanical Garden. These seeds have been cultivated in the garden in recent years, and after trial planting in other places, the yield was found to be good, so they began to be promoted in the Yazi Lake Basin, which is an important agricultural area.

When it comes to improving the old agricultural and animal husbandry varieties and multiplying the excellent varieties, the Northern Botanical Garden has made great efforts in recent years. They set up numerous fields and nurseries to simulate various soil environments, such as the absence of certain elements or different salinization processes. At the same time, they are also responsible for cross-breeding and domesticating foreign crops, and on the whole the work is going well, and has produced a lot of results, which is worthy of their current monthly expenditure of more than 15,000 yuan.

Among the seeds improved in the Northern Botanical Garden, the most important ones were the improvement of cereals and soybeans. Among them, wheat with the largest sown area in the east coast and the most economically relevant for farmers is the most important. In 1647, the agricultural technicians of the Northern Botanical Garden used the method of separating the original pure line to breed the excellent wheat seed "Dadouhuang 47", which not only increased the yield by 20% compared with the previous one, but also tasted better and was loved by everyone. Later, with the goal of further improving quality and increasing yield, while taking into account the cultivation of disease-resistant varieties, they have successively carried out a number of practical researches, but there are no latest results yet.

As for rice, the investment is slightly smaller, but it is not without results. Some of the farmers who came from North Korea with a group of people had been conducting research for more than ten years before the establishment of the Northern Botanical Garden, and had cultivated a kind of "thin land rent 48" (meaning that their harvest was more) seeds with full seeds, which received a good response after being popularized and planted in Xihu County. In addition, there are corn seeds "big spike yellow" and "small spike yellow", sorghum seeds "little yellow grain", "big yellow husk", "big black shell", upland rice seeds "bird does not know", "dingxi no mang", barley seeds "fumin" and other cereal seeds, which are planted on a small scale among the people, and their reputation is not obvious, but they have also made the yield of farmers increase steadily.

As for the cultivation of soybean seeds, which are of special significance to the economy of the East Coast, the people of the East Coast have devoted endless efforts. For example, they brought the Northeast soybean seeds (the variety has been degraded in recent years, but it is still a good seed) as the original seed, separated the pure line, and selected the excellent variety "Huang Baozhu". "Huang Baozhu" belongs to the medium-ripe species, the grain is large, the color is gorgeous, the yield is increased by three to four percent compared with the original, and the oil content is also increased by about 3% compared with the original variety, and the economic value is very high.

In the past two years, the former soybean breeding station, which has all been relocated to the Northern Botanical Garden, has found some new excellent varieties in actual promotion, such as the moisture-tolerant varieties and high oil content planted in the Danuma Township of Yihe Region (later named "Mancang Gold"), such as the drought-tolerant varieties planted in Canyon Town (later named "Mancang Huang"), and then the varieties suitable for making soy sauce, soy sauce and soy products (later named "Mandihuang"), and of course, the varieties suitable for planting in cold areas in the south (short growth period) (later named " gram frost 47") and a series of other seeds.

According to the current statistics collected by the Ministry of Agriculture from counties and townships, the proportion of farmers switching to new soybean seeds is increasing, and after years of promotion, the sown area has accounted for 45% of the total area, which has produced huge economic benefits. With the gradual increase in the demand for seeds in various places, the Northern Botanical Garden is also constantly recruiting troops and expanding its territory, preparing to select suitable places in the country to establish nurseries and original seed nurseries for the production of improved soybean and other seed seeds. In the first half of this month, the garden obtained the consent of the Ministry of Agriculture to set up an enterprise called "North Seed Company", and put all the assets such as nurseries and original seed gardens in various places, and then specialized in the production and sales of improved seeds, so as to benefit the vast number of farmers in China.

Straight to the point. After the seeds were distributed, the local residents returned home with the seeds. They now have almost nothing, and even their daily rations need government relief, otherwise they will not be able to survive the first year, and even the second year I am afraid that they will have to ask the Northwest Reclamation Bank for a loan to survive, and life is not easy. But if you look closely at their facial expressions, you can see that they are in a good state of mind, and this is because they still have hope for life. The cultivated land under their feet was their own, and now they had good seeds from the top and down, and these Ming immigrants from the East felt that with their industrious hands, at most two or three years, the business would improve. Then spend money to marry a daughter-in-law, have another litter of babies, and then redeem some land, and this root is firmly rooted.

And after occupying Shifangdian Township in the middle and upper reaches of the Yakuyi River in this way, the East Bank government is clearly not satisfied, and they still feel that the land development in their country is not fast enough. Therefore, they demanded that the foreign brokers active in the East Coast "trick and kidnap" more honest farmers from the Old World to come to the East Coast, and let them go to the wild areas of the West to cut wood, cultivate the land, and fight the barbarians. After these places were almost cleared, the Ming immigrants from the east had almost arrived, and then they would migrate and build in these newly developed areas on a large scale, turning them into their own familiar land, and at the same time, extending the territorial borders actually controlled by the East Bank Republic to the inland areas step by step. (To be continued......)