Chapter 164 Meat

Mwanza fish processing factory.

Workers are pouring the fresh fish they just purchased into wooden barrels and sending them to the workshop for further processing.

This is a factory built purely on manpower, and its main product is dried salted fish.

Dried salted fish can be stored for a long time and is easy to transport. It can even be carried as military rations.

In this era when preservation technology is still immature, East Africa can only produce this traditional product at its current level.

Cans are feasible to a certain extent, but the cost is too high. Cans require materials such as metal or glass as carriers, and East Africa does not have the production capacity for these two things. It can only be considered after the subsequent iron and glass factories are completed.

And this is only the first step. After all, with materials, machines and other processes need to be considered.

In this era, any metal, even bones, are important materials and must be recycled in many places in Europe. It is impossible for East Africa to have deep pockets to provide cans to immigrants.

It costs money to produce, and it costs money to recycle the materials. After recycling, it has to be sterilized or remanufactured, which is really uneconomical.

If you want to make a profit, you still have to sell it in Europe, but competition in Europe itself is very fierce, and cans are not accepted by the public and are only popular among the military.

The armies of various countries have stable canned food suppliers. Now Ernst can't get involved. Unless during a war, military supplies are in short supply, and the army has the opportunity to purchase large-scale supplies.

The main agricultural products currently sold by the Hechingen Consortium in Europe are primary agricultural products such as flour and logs.

In this era, it is basically a fantasy to rely on machines to process fish meat. Just processing the fish scales in the first step is a problem. Therefore, the dried salted fish produced in the East African colonies is completely manual without any machine involvement.

Every day, the Mwanza fish processing plant receives a large batch of fresh freshwater fish caught that day from fishermen.

Workers in aquatic products processing plants first use tools to remove fish scales and other debris, and then workers in the next process will disembowel the fish, remove the internal organs and gills, then rinse the surface with water, put the fish in a large tank, and use Salted and finally hung on poles to dry.

The processing method is simple and unpretentious, but the scale is relatively large, so the production capacity is considerable. The Mwanza Aquatic Products Processing Factory currently has more than 500 workers. It is the largest salted fish processing factory in East Africa. Its products are mainly supplied to the inland and arid areas of East Africa. .

After the consumption of wild animals was banned in the East African colonies, alternative meat sources became even more important.

In East Africa, the government carried out unilateral slaughter of wild animals and enclosure of land, resulting in a sharp reduction in the range of animal activities and the elimination of a large number of wild animals.

East African immigrants need protein and supplements to engage in manual labor. There are three solutions. One is to develop aquatic products in East Africa, the other is to raise livestock, and the third is to plant soybeans.

Among the three, aquatic products are readily available. East Africa has a vast water area, especially with numerous lakes. Whether it is fresh water or salt water, the fishery resources are relatively abundant.

Livestock takes time to breed, and the scale is not large. After all, most of them are imported. It takes more than ten years to breed and grow, and it is basically impossible to count on it.

Soybeans are the most easily available plant protein. They are also widely planted in East African colonies. They are mainly used for crop rotation. The root nodules of soybeans have the function of fixing nitrogen. They are usually rotated with wheat. The tropical plateau is also very suitable for soybean cultivation, but it wants to completely replace it. Meat is also unlikely.

Therefore, East African immigrants mainly rely on the rich fishery resources in East Africa for their protein supplement. Fish is inherently safer to eat than other wild animals on the East African grasslands.

After the preliminary pickling process, it can effectively kill bacteria and parasites in the body.

In Mwanza and other places, a large amount of fish meat is harvested. After workers manually remove the scales and internal organs, it is salted and dried. The dried fish can be stored in East Africa for several months.

In coastal, lakeside, and riverine areas, residents can obtain fresh fish. In areas lacking water and fishery resources, they can only eat pickled and dried fish.

Of course, eating fish alone will definitely not solve the problem. Animal husbandry (aquaculture) is the real way out for the future.

The East African grassland itself is a natural pasture. Although it is not of high quality, the area is definitely large enough. The uneven distribution of precipitation time is the biggest factor restricting the development of animal husbandry in East Africa. At the same time, cattle and horses and other livestock will not be able to be used in the next hundred years or so. substitute.

Of course, East Africa cannot only have large livestock such as cattle and horses. Poultry such as chickens, ducks, and geese certainly play an important role.

However, large-scale breeding of chickens, ducks and geese is not easier than large-scale livestock such as cattle and horses. Free-range and domestic breeding are safer and less prone to plague. Therefore, poultry breeding in East Africa mainly relies on immigrants themselves.

There is also a specialty poultry in East Africa, the guinea fowl, which is also promoted by the East African government.

This thing was brought to Europe by the Ottoman Empire and was called "Turkey Chicken". The meat is of good quality.

The most important thing is that as a rare local species in Africa, it has much stronger disease resistance, and guinea fowl will chirp when it sees fire, so it can be used to prevent fires.

This was very important for the East African colonies, especially during the dry season, when the weather was dry and fires could easily occur.

Poultry farming occupies an important position in East Africa, but it is mainly carried out by immigrants, and the grains it requires also need to be provided by immigrants themselves.

Therefore, the scale of breeding is limited to families. The more they raise, the more they eat, although East Africa does have a lot of wasteland to grow feed.

However, each immigrant needed to complete the tasks in the fields arranged by the East African colonies before they had time to take care of the wasteland they developed.

The fields allocated to each immigrant in the East African colonies were not small plots, but more than ten acres. Even if slaves were used, it was very laborious to complete.

Therefore, after completing the fields owned by the Hechingen Consortium, the immigrants basically have no extra energy to open up wasteland.

Moreover, immigrants have no property rights in the land opened up, and the East African colonial government can take it back at any time. That is to say, the most indispensable thing in the East African colonies now is land, so immigrants are allowed to develop it on their own.

However, if immigrants want to develop wasteland, they can basically only rely on the women at home. The work assigned to women in East Africa is relatively light, so they can squeeze out time to add extra income to the family.

The raising of poultry and the care of vegetable plots are basically done by the women and children of the family.

Talking about aquatic product processing plants, there are currently such factories near the larger lakes and seas in East Africa, providing meat supplements for the entire East Africa.

According to the principle of proximity, we are responsible for the meat supply in this region, and when combined with other meat sources allowed in East Africa, we can basically meet the meat needs of East African immigrants.