Rebirth of Bayi Fishing and Hunting in the Northwest

Chapter 278 Farm work is not easy at this time

We went home for lunch at noon, and in the afternoon the three of us went to help the Gu family harvest the sunflowers - Gu Boyuan's family had only four acres of land, half of which was corn and the other half was sunflowers. Gu Boyuan and the Li family finished the work in less than two hours.

"The old man is right. There really is strength in numbers." Gu Boyuan sighed, "If I do it myself, it will take at least two days."

"That's right, more people means easier work, fewer people means tasting more delicious bread." Li Jianguo said with a smile, "Each has its own advantages."

Li Long thought, you can't imagine it now, but in forty years, a cooperative with thousands of acres of land can be managed by just a few people. Of course, even if I tell you now, you won't believe it.

It was a cool evening, and the family was eating watermelon under the shed. Li Qiang accidentally broke his clay pistol, so Li Long asked him to find Li Juan's used exercise book and tear the paper to fold the pistol.

Because the children at that time had read the comic books Landmine Warfare and Tunnel Warfare, they thought that the 20-round long magazine was more impressive, so they folded five small bags and then strung them together with chopsticks. Each of the five small bags used two pieces of paper, and two more pieces of paper were needed to put them together, but when they were folded together, they still looked a bit like a bag.

After folding it, Li Qiang happily took it to play with - Li Long said that this was a reward for his good academic performance.

Li Juan just watched from the side without being too envious. The girl was grown up and not interested in guns and the like. So Li Long folded a simple "East, West, South, and North" for her, taught her how to play, and let her play with her classmates during breaks at school.

The principle of this thing is very simple, but in this age of entertainment scarcity, it is really attractive.

The next day after breakfast, Li Juan took Li Qiang to school. Li Qiang was very excited and ran out with a paper gun. Li Long hurriedly shouted:

"Don't play during class, or the teacher will catch you and scold you."

At this time, the teachers here basically don’t beat the children anymore, but scolding and swearing are common. Parents usually don’t care, and the children’s psychology is not that fragile. Sometimes they dare not tell their parents after being scolded by the teacher, because they are afraid of being “hurt again”.

In the eyes of parents, only naughty children will be scolded by teachers.

"Uncle, I get it!" Li Qiang said loudly, then he ran away shouting "Ah--" at the top of his voice, with his schoolbag dangling behind him.

"Qiangqiang, slow down! If you run again, I will hit you!" Li Juan shouted at Li Qiang from behind and quickly chased after him. Fortunately, they turned to the main road. Li Long could still hear Li Qiang's voice at the gate.

It's normal for children to be eager to show off a good toy to their friends. As children, there aren't many things they can compare with.

Li Jianguo harnessed the horse carriage, Liang Yuemei cooked food and fed the pigs, and Li Long went to the threshing floor with a few clubs.

Sunflower threshing can only be done manually, and it cannot even be threshed like wheat because there are too few of them. And this cannot wait, because soon the team's sunflowers and other crops will also need to be harvested, and this work counts as work points. Li Long did not plan to participate, but the wheat field must be vacated as soon as possible.

This job is relatively easy. You just need to sit on or next to the sunflower pile with a stick and knock the sunflower disc. Through vibration and reaction force, you can knock the sunflower seeds off. After knocking them clean, throw the disc aside and move on to the next one.

It's repetitive work.

After the sunflower seeds are knocked, they need to be winnowed to remove the sunflower tails, which mainly include shrunken seeds and impurities that fall from the flower disk. These are usually fed to cattle and sheep. They can also be fed to pigs, but pigs don't like to eat them.

As for the sunflower disk, it is purely used to feed cattle and sheep. Of course, animals like roe deer, horses, and donkeys also eat it, so it must not be wasted.

Li Long knocked three flower plates here, and then Li Jianguo and Liang Yuemei came over. It was relatively comfortable to knock in the morning, because the sun was not so strong. People came to work in the wheat field one after another. Because they were not far away, they chatted while knocking and cracked melon seeds in their mouths - usually they would crack the young ones.

Li Long looked at the flower plate and thought about how in his previous life, forty years later, such large flower plates appeared in supermarkets, costing ten yuan each. When he was shopping in the supermarket at that time, he thought it was a dream. How could this thing be sold so expensively?
However, in that era, except for agricultural products, the prices of almost everything increased.

For example, wheat costs three yuan per kilogram, but bran is sold for two yuan and eighty yuan - if you raise pigs at home, you have to buy bran, one kilogram is equivalent to one kilogram of wheat!

When corn is harvested, the price per kilogram is between 2.1 and 2.5 yuan, depending on the moisture content. But for pig farming, the price of piglet feed is only 3 yuan per kilogram. It's up to you to buy it or not!
Of course, having said that, the sunflower heads sold for ten yuan in the supermarket would be expensive if you bought them from farmers for fifty cents or one yuan.

After all, there are thousands of trees in one acre of land, so even if they only cost 50 cents per bushel, the farmers will still make a lot of money and be very happy.

He remembered that in his previous life, he had made money only three times as a farmer. One time, the price of cotton suddenly rose from six yuan in previous years to eleven yuan. At that time, most of the cotton farmers in the village became rich, and some even bought cars.

At that time, Li Long's family only planted 20 acres of cotton, but they really didn't make any profit.

The second time was when an agricultural product group came to the village to sign a contract with farmers to grow millet. At that time, the agreed contract fee for one mu of land was 4,500 yuan. At that time, the team had already implemented drip irrigation, and the cost of planting one mu of land was about 2,000 yuan. At 4,500 yuan, it was definitely profitable, and most people in the village signed the contract.

Of course, the contract also stipulates that the yield of millet must reach 800 kilograms per mu. If it does not reach this level, it will be downgraded. If it exceeds this level, it will continue to be collected at 4 yuan per kilogram.

Li Long and his team members did not know how these people calculated the yield, and thought that 800 kilograms was a suitable yield. They actually underestimated the yield of drip irrigation farmland. But the old farmer who used to grow millet in his hometown knew it clearly.

As a result, at the end of this year, the group almost went bankrupt because of paying too much - the yield per mu was over 1,200 kilograms!
The crops grown in the millet industry have made a fortune. At this time, people have already started using WeChat and checking their Moments. Those who like to have fun in the winter can go skiing, travel, and see ice sculptures. From late autumn to early spring, they can roast lamb from time to time.

Of course, a new batch of cars were added to the village.

Originally, the group was going to sign a three-year contract with the farmers in the village, but in the second year they started to raise the production standards in the contract, and in the end the deal fell through.

The third time was still cotton. The price of cotton once again rose from the base price of five or six yuan to ten yuan. At this time, every household basically had fifty or sixty acres of cotton. Some households contracted more, with hundreds or even thousands of acres. The villagers made a lot of money.

However, when the money was collected in the fall, there were people who set traps for the purpose. Some people could not resist the temptation and gambled away the money they had worked hard for a year in one night.

At that time, Li Qiang had already passed the college entrance examination and left. Many people in the village who were of similar age or older than him but did not pass the exam and went out to farm, several of them cut off their fingers or abandoned their families and disappeared, leaving behind a lot of mess.

Later, the higher authorities took action and directly planted cotton on 40% of the farmland, leaving the remaining 60% idle. This was called rotation cropping.

In the second year of the rotation policy, 60% of the land was planted with wheat, which ensured that the country would have its own rice bowl.

Before this, almost all the land was planted with cotton. Even though the price of cotton dropped to 2.8 yuan in the first year and the cost of picking the second crop manually was 3 yuan, which was a huge loss, every household still planted cotton in the second year - they wanted to take a gamble.

Li Long recalled and looked at his neighbor who was laughing and knocking on the flower tray. He felt that the poorer he was, the easier it was to be satisfied. Now he had his own two mu of land and could decide most of the things he received. He was really content.

A popsicle seller rode over on a bicycle in the distance. Li Long shouted at him and the popsicle seller hurried over. "Three cream ones." Li Long took out the money.

With his wealth, it's okay for him to buy popsicles for everyone else in the wheat field, but there's no need to show off at this time. He has made a lot of money with the team this year, so he shouldn't show off at this time.

Sure enough, after the purchase here, several other families also paid for popsicles, but they basically bought ordinary ones.

Others didn't have any objection because Li Long didn't buy them popsicles. At that time, most people were still quite simple and very concerned about their reputation.

It was almost noon, so Liang Yuemei went back to cook. The sun was shining directly on Li Long's head. He felt sweat coming out from the hairline, but seeing that there was still a lot of work to be done, he thought he should just hold on.

"Xiaolong, take the bag, put the sunflower heads in it, and put it on the carriage. When you are done, lead the carriage back."

Li Jianguo knew that Li Long didn't like doing farm work, so he assigned him a new task.

Li Long didn't act pretentiously. He stood up, brushed off the sunflower residue on his body, and went to fill the flower plate.

When they got home, Liang Yuemei had already cooked the dishes and was preparing to cook noodles, while Li Long helped to light the fire.

Continue in the afternoon.

It took two days to knock all the sunflowers, and the next step was to collect the people in the team.

Li Long then withdrew from the battle and went fishing with Tao Daqiang.

We don't need these work points, let others earn them.

After catching fish for a week, the team harvested the sunflowers and bagged them. The flower disks were distributed to each family. Then Li Long followed Li Jianguo to harvest corn.

Breaking corn cobs is a bit like harvesting sunflowers. You can break them first and then cut the stalks, or you can break them and cut the stalks at the same time. This time, the corn I broke back was not placed in the wheat field, but piled up at home.

Bags of corn were piled under the shed in the yard, and the next step was the bigger job.

At that time, there was no machine for threshing corn kernels, so threshing was done manually. Basically, it was done day and night. Use a screwdriver to scrape off two rows of corn kernels from the corn cob, leaving a long row of gaps, and then rub the corn kernels off with your hands.

Usually at the end of the day, the thick part of the palm, also known as the thenar eminence, will be rubbed red or even torn.

But seeing the corn kernels piled up, most of which were their own food, the farmers were filled with joy.

No matter how tired I am, I am happy.

Five or six years later, small hand-operated threshing machines were available, and later, tractor-driven threshers were available—and combine harvesters could only harvest wheat at that time. It took several generations of improvements before corn and sunflowers could be harvested, and later, cotton pickers became popular, and the twenty-year-long cotton picking army began to decline.

Li Long worked very hard at home for three days, and then took Daqiang to Gu Boyuan's house to work for two days. He finished processing the corn from both families. After that, he no longer planned to do any other farm work.

The spare room at home was no longer a spare room, as it was filled with corn, sunflowers, and wheat. The wheat was distributed to each family by the team, and each family had to grind it into flour. Of course, some people grind out many bags directly to save trouble, but most families just grind one or two bags and then grind them after they are eaten. The same goes for sunflowers. Wheat is easy to store, but flour is not.

That night, the pot was filled with some common farm items.

If it were put on the table in the previous life, this would be called a bumper harvest for the farmers.

There are some tender corns that grow when you break the corn. Every time you break the corn, you can get a few. Some look tender, but they feel a bit old after being cooked. The verification method is also simple. It can't just look tender, you have to pinch it with your hands. If you can gently squeeze out juice, it is really tender.

There are also potatoes that have just been dug from the private vegetable garden. The big ones are kept for cooking, and the smaller ones are not easy to cut, so they are simply boiled.

In fact, children prefer to cook potato eggs under the stove. It is also a good idea to put a few under the stove in winter.

In addition to corn and potatoes, there are also edamame, which is actually soybeans. It is called edamame because there is a layer of hair on the pods.

Finally, there are soybeans. Actually, they are broad beans. However, in Li Long's village, soybeans are called yellow beans and broad beans are called soybeans. It was not until a long time later, when students came back from school, that the names were differentiated. Then some people in the village suddenly realized that they had been calling them wrong for so many years; some people thought that this should not be the case, as broad beans are obviously bigger than soybeans!

An unclear lawsuit.

It is inevitable that the flavors will mix when these things are cooked together, but fortunately, most people have the skins, so they don’t really care.

The space in the house was small and a bit stuffy, so we just went out to the yard, got out a big plate, and ate there while chatting.

Li Long thought this was good. In the last few years of his previous life, it was hard to find someone to chat with. After sitting together and chatting for a few minutes, they would start browsing their phones, watching their own short videos. The sound was very loud, very noisy, and very boring.

"Xiaolong, now that you have finished your housework, will you go fishing tomorrow?" Li Jianguo asked.

"Wait two more days. It will be the Mid-Autumn Festival in two days. Wait until the Mid-Autumn Festival to start fishing. Then sell the fish and buy some mooncakes."

The Mid-Autumn Festival here is not so particular, such as worshiping the moon, just eating moon cakes together as a family. Li Long doesn't like to eat that thing, it's too sweet and too hard, and eating jujube paste occasionally is ok.

I don’t know if there is only Wu Ren now.

"Okay." Li Jianguo nodded. "Take a rest for two days before going. I heard someone in the team say that if you don't catch fish these days and your father is not around, the people who catch and sell fish can earn a few more dollars a day."

"Hehe, let them be happy for a few more days."

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(End of this chapter)