got Fuli Grassland, which made Dai Yan and Zhao Xue very happy!

When he leased this grassland in Chu before, Dai Yan found that the Fuli grass here was an extremely good grass. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 info This place is located in the south, and the grass and trees flourish in spring and summer every year, which is better than the grasslands in the north, which is the best place to develop animal husbandry!

Dai Yan knew that this small grassland continued to later generations. The Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi once wrote the famous "Farewell to the Ancient Grass": Leaving the grass on the plain, one year old and one withered. Wildfires burn inexhaustibly, and spring breezes blow and regenerate. One of the scenes of the ancient grassland is in this Fuli grassland!

And this can become a two-Huai horse farm for future generations, which is obviously extremely suitable as a grazing ground!

Having obtained the exclusive right to graze here, Dai Yan immediately discussed with Zhao Xue and asked her to introduce high-quality horse breeds from Zhao State and graze here!

Zhao is a big country in the world in animal husbandry, and the development of its animal husbandry is obviously not comparable to a pure agricultural country like the Song State! And Zhao Xue itself has a large area of grassland as a food town on the northern grassland of the Zhao Dynasty, in which a large number of cattle, sheep, horses, etc. are fed. In the past, because Dai Yan did not have a suitable pasture in his hands, he let the livestock on Zhao Xue's food town stay in the north. However, now that he has a suitable site, those excellent livestock of Zhao Xue, of course Dai Yan will not allow them to continue to stay in Zhao Kingdom!

Therefore, as soon as he and Zhao Xue combined, they began a long livestock migration plan. In the Daibei grassland, a batch of livestock migrates every month, and 5,000 livestock are migrated at a time. And the number of horses in each migration must not be less than 2,000 of the migrating livestock!

After half a year, more than 10,000 horses were brought to Zhao. Coupled with the horses that Dai Yan has successively obtained through the tea and horse trade over the years, as well as the horses that Zhao Xue married before, there are more than 20,000 horses in the entire Fuli grassland.

Of the more than 20,000 horse breeds, only about one-third are suitable for war horses. If one cavalry is equipped with two horses, then so many horses can train more than 3,000 cavalry.

If according to the results of Zhao Xue's previous battle with the Qin army with cavalry on the Qin-Zhao border, 3,000 cavalry can make dumplings for 10,000 Qin army soldiers, then there will definitely be no problem in beating more than 20,000 Chu soldiers and Song soldiers!

Dai Yan now has neither the intention of rebellion, nor the intention of fighting with the Chu State. And he trained cavalry, but he just wanted to protect himself in this era!

Like he now occupies the richest city in the world, there must be a lot of people with red eyes! His home country, Song, was extremely weak, and it was impossible for him to rely on his brother-in-law, Zhao Houyong, all the time. Of all the things that can be relied on, only one's own strength is the most reliable!

Therefore, he attaches great importance to the training of cavalry, and he is not at ease to let others be responsible, so he has to let his wife Zhao Xue be responsible for it herself!

In order to cooperate with the training of cavalry, he even personally organized horse races in Taoqiu, and later invented such a strange sport as polo. Under the cover of these lively things, Zhao Xue's behavior of training cavalry is more like a game behavior.

And Dai Yan's emphasis on the grassland is not only reflected in the fact that the grassland can be used to raise horses and cultivate cavalry. He also wanted to use the Fuli grassland to develop excellent animal husbandry.

Animal husbandry is one of the most environmentally damaging industries outside of industry. And the profits it produces may not be very rich, but Dai Yan insists on doing so, not because he values the profits of animal husbandry, but because he wants to build an economic system as complete as possible in his territory!

The more types of economies an economy has, the more relaxed it will be to respond to difficult situations.

The historical steppe empire, which may have caused a large number of livestock to die due to a snowstorm, and then the collapse of the entire empire, is the disadvantage of this single economy!

In addition to raising a large number of horses on the Fuli grassland, Dai Yan also chose two special livestock, cattle and sheep, to be raised.

Let's not talk about the importance of cattle. At present, both Fengyi and Taoqiu have enough iron for intensive farming. And to develop such agriculture, cattle are also extremely important!

Even though the Mohists had invented the more advanced curved plough and replaced the wooden ploughshare with iron tools, the land would not have been ploughed out without oxen!

Dai Yan also tried to replace them with horses and donkeys, but their strength and endurance were far from being comparable to that of oxen, and the land that could be ploughed in one day was not half that of an ox in a day!

And when it comes to consumption, cattle are much more economical than horses and donkeys! Cows can eat almost any common weed without fear of digestion. In this era, the cultivated land was actually a very small proportion of the land, and there was a vast land between the towns, which was overgrown with weeds for cattle.

The cattle raised by Dai Yan on the Fuli grassland are more used as breeding centers. He drew on Zhao's advanced animal husbandry experience and selected a large number of excellent breeding cattle for breeding. And the obtained calves, once they are cultivated and matured in the Fuli grassland, they will be quickly taken away from the grassland, and finally sold to all parts of the Song Kingdom!

With this kind of high-quality ploughing cattle, plus the entire Song kingdom had heard of the high-quality farming tools used in Fengyi and Taoqiu. Originally, the nobles in various parts of the Song Kingdom only bought some iron tools such as hoes and sickles to assist agricultural production. After the Fuli grassland was able to provide enough cattle, they began to purchase high-quality quyuan plows from Taoqiu!

After Dai Yan got such news, he reacted very quickly, and immediately stopped the sale of raw cattle, but combined it with Quyuan plough and sold it. Dai Yan not only combined these two things, but also selected some experts in cultivating land from the farmers of Fengyi, and went to various parts of the Song Kingdom to demonstrate to the nobles and common people of the Song Kingdom this excellent agriculture!

In this way, Dai Yan is not only selling products such as cattle and quyuan plows, but more like selling a service. Selling a service that is deeply cultivated and developed agriculture. And the nobles of the Song Kingdom in such a service, some nobles who were open-minded and quick to respond followed in Dai Yan's footsteps and replaced most of the millet planted on their land with wheat!

If in this era, any nobleman encounters such a "master stealer" and a person who steals technology, it will definitely cut off his contact! However, Dai Yan didn't care about this at all, for those open-minded nobles, if they took the initiative to exchange the grain grown on their land for wheat, Dai Yan would also take the initiative to teach them the technology, and open the business of Taoqiu to them, so that the wheat grown by these nobles would immediately make a lot of money!

This made Dai Yan more and more popular among the nobles of the Song Kingdom, after all, it was not easy to meet a virtuous son who was willing to take them to make money!

The large-scale breeding of cattle has improved the agriculture of the entire Song Kingdom, and the shock caused by sheep raising is far less great than that of cattle raising.

Dai Yan raised sheep, in fact, he actually wanted to get enough wool to solve another resource bottleneck faced by the development of Taoqiu: fiber.

As one of the four major resources that limit urban development, fiber has always been a matter of great concern to Dai Yan.

In Dai Yan's mind, wool can be used as an important raw material for the textile industry, and can be used to make textiles such as wool, velvet, blankets, and felt. However, when Dai Yan tried, he realized that his idea was too naïve.

It is the sheep that are really suitable for weaving. In this era, whether it is the sheep of the Song Kingdom, or the sheep introduced from the Zhao Kingdom, there are more goats and rock sheep, etc., even if there are a small number of sheep, the amount of wool obtained is too small in Dai Yan's eyes, and it cannot be used as a fiber raw material in the textile industry at present.

However, this failure did not discourage Dai Yan. He knew very well that if he wanted to get qualified sheep, he couldn't do it! Because humans have intelligence and can determine the direction of evolution of animals, this is human selection!

The livestock obtained in later generations is much worse than that of ordinary wild animals, which is the impact of human selection on the evolution of animals! The crops obtained in later generations, such as rice, wheat, livestock, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, chickens, ducks, etc., if they are placed in the natural environment, they will soon be destroyed by natural enemies! However, in the end, they all survived with the continuation of human civilization, and these creatures obtained by artificial selection were determined by human beings in the direction of their evolution!

In Dai Yan's view, perhaps the evolution of sheep is too. As long as he can consistently select the sheep with more hair in the flock to breed, after many generations, he will definitely be able to get qualified wool. In this way, the problem of fiber is solved!

After the Fuli grassland had the foundation of animal husbandry, Dai Yan was inspired to start breeding another animal on a large scale in order to improve the living standards of the entire Taoqiu and Fengyi, which is the pig.

In this era, people don't have many pigs. Because pigs are fierce and aggressive, whether they are free-range or free-range, they will compete with each other and consume a lot of energy, and the pork they get is actually not much.

On the other hand, pork in this era was not very tasty. After Dai Yan made fried meat with bamboo shoots, he quickly discovered this problem and found the reason why the pork was not delicious.

All this because the pigs that people were feeding at this time were not castrated. If the pig is not castrated, the sex hormones secreted by the pig will affect the texture of the pork. The sex hormones secreted by the pigs without castration will also make the pig's personality become irritable and aggressive, which will consume a large amount of food digested by the pig during feeding, affecting the growth of the pig.

To solve this problem, it is only necessary to castrate the pigs.

If there is any ancient Chinese technology that is the most ancient and modern, it is definitely castration technology!

Because this technology is directly applied to people, in the service of the supreme ruler!

However, if people think that castration is a simple technique, it is too much to underestimate it! Later, when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebelled, they chose children to be castrated many times, but all of them died due to inflammation. And the two most powerful castration families in my Qing Dynasty, whether it is the Bi family in the Accounting Division Hutong of Nanchang Street, or the knife Liu in the square brick Hutong outside Di'anmen, they are all officials with six pins, which are two levels higher than my seven-pin county order in the Qing Dynasty!

And the technique of castration, but put in the medical book written by Hua Tuo, the most powerful doctor in the Han Dynasty, it is definitely not a simple technique!

Fortunately, for today's Song Kingdom, there is no shortage of such technology. The Song State itself has been established for nearly 700 years, plus the Shang Dynasty has been established for more than 600 years, and the technology of castration in the court can be said to have a long history.

And today's Warring States period is not like the great unified dynasty of later generations, and the monarchs of various countries did not mandate that feudal monarchs could not use eunuchs. Therefore, Dai Yan only mentioned it to his brother Zixi slightly, and Zixi sent an excellent knife maker to assist Dai Yan.

As soon as these knife makers arrived at Dai Yan's side, they found that it was not a human being who wanted to be castrated at all, but a group of pigs, which was also extremely embarrassing. However, although their status is also very important now, they are not strong enough to become a six-rank official like the one in my Qing Dynasty. Whatever Dai Yan asked them to do, they didn't dare to refuse!

And the castration of this era is really different from that of later generations. It says that it is cut, but it really only cuts off two eggs, and it is not at all like in later generations to cut off the whole root!

And they are also very interested in the protection of wounds. In this day and age, it was easy for wounds to become infected with tetanus, but the knife makers just took some unique herbs, squeezed out the liquid on them, and then stitched the wounds together, and the pigs were completely fine.

Dai Yan was very interested in this unique herb, thinking that it might be used in the treatment of human wounds, but these herbs were the unique secret techniques of these knife makers, and no matter how much he paid for them, he could not let them reveal the secret techniques!

And these geldings are indeed much better to feed than pigs that have not been castrated. For these pigs, Dai Yan bought wheat bran from Taoqiu and Fengyi on a large scale, and used this wheat bran to add some other leaves to feed the pigs, so that the pigs he raised grew rapidly.

For the management of the pig farm, Dai Yan only kept a small number of breeding pigs for breeding, and the other pigs were all castrated, which made the scale of the pig farm he built expand rapidly! Soon after, the pig farm on the Fuli grassland was able to provide a large amount of pork for Fengyi and Taoqiu!

This made the common people of Taoqiu and Fengyi taste cheap pork for the first time! Meat Eater, thus no longer as a proper name for rulers in Taoqiu and Fengyi!

And the experience of the gelding, Dai Yan applied it to the war horse! Dai Yan knew that when the cavalry launched an attack, what they were most afraid of was that the war horse he was riding would suddenly come into heat and have an accident. Now with the technology of castration, this problem is solved, and the use of war horses has become stable.

This is also equivalent to improving the combat effectiveness of the cavalry in disguise!