Chapter 119 Autumn Harvest
The arrival of this batch of slaves not only filled the labor gap in Sige Town, but also supported a recruitment.
Roman generously recruited 200 people this time. The total number of troops in Sige Town was increased to 600.
This ratio is very high.
The total population of Sige Town is only 4,500.
These soldiers are completely off-duty and consume a lot of resources. They do not perform any production tasks.
But Roman has to support them.
Three meals a day, all meat, eggs and milk are supplied!
Eggs and milk are only a few coins, and one copper coin can buy 70, 80 or 90 kilograms.
As soon as those caravans arrived in Sige Town, Roman bought them all!
As long as they can eat, they can eat as much as they can!
Their only indicator is to undergo various cruel training every day to improve their physical fitness!
Even during the rest period, they have to carry out literacy education.
Those who perform well will receive certain rewards from Roman, such as gold, silver and copper coins, living treatment, and even be received by him in person.
Those who can't keep up with the progress of learning have to accept corporal punishment training.
The intensity of those trainings is very high and very scary.
If an ordinary person is treated like this, they can't stick to it and will easily collapse.
But the army and the military camp have a special atmosphere, which produces a magical attraction. Talented people can't escape from here. It's like a melting pot, which subtly removes some bad habits and shortcomings in their bones, flows out of their bodies, and makes them pure and strong.
This is not enough, and ideological education and military training are also required. They must be tempered by various means and finally forged into a qualified piece of steel.
Tempering makes steel!
Roman kept repeating in his heart when recruiting new soldiers.
...
It's autumn now. The temperature has dropped.
Roman realized belatedly that it was time to prepare winter clothes for those idiots.
The golden wind brings coolness and the forests are dyed with colors. It's the harvest season.
The merchant ships coming to Sige Town are also loaded with heavy goods of all kinds.
Such as fresh turnips, pumpkins, radishes, grapes, figs, pomegranates and other fruits and vegetables;
Livestock cubs, they are born at the wrong time, ordinary families cannot afford to raise so many young animals in winter, so they can only sell them;
There are also a lot of grains and cereals harvested in autumn;
Some merchants heard that the town of Sger bought slaves at high prices, so they bought four or five slaves from other places and transported them here to sell to the local lords...
Roman levied very low commercial taxes, and used this to establish long-term trade relations with merchants.
The effect is obvious.
All the merchants who came here became "repeat customers" here, and regarded this place as a second "free city-state".
Without the constraints of commercial taxes, merchants can make more profits by transporting goods to Sger Town.
The land output of Sger Town this year is enough to feed more than 4,000 people.
On the one hand, Roman prohibited Sger Town from selling grain to the outside, and on the other hand, he bought all the goods brought by merchants.
These vegetables are very cheap, even ordinary farmers can afford to buy and eat them, and Sige Town is currently in short supply of various non-staple foods - Roman didn't grow any - the ten acres of vegetable fields in the Origin Manor are not counted.
Fruits and vegetables became working meals on the spot.
Grain was stored and processed to become working meals.
And young animals should be raised well to become working meals in the future.
Roman's attitude towards food is to store as much as possible on the one hand and eat as much as he can on the other.
Those are small merchant ships, doing some small business.
This one took away 200 kilograms of salt, and that one took away 500 kilograms of salt, which can also digest part of the output of Sige Town.
Occasionally, a large-scale caravan came to this remote place with a growing reputation.
But that's all.
The real large caravan couldn't reach Sige Town.
Merchant ships like Morey's were the limit.
He only stayed here for two days. Merchants travel all year round. This is their fate. It is normal to pass by their homes three times without entering. He quickly left with tens of thousands of kilograms of salt and two hundred barrels of maltose.
He has made a lot of money now, but it is impossible for him to buy a large merchant ship.
Because the larger the merchant ship, the deeper the draft, which makes it inconvenient to sail inland. Once it enters the Silver Dragon Canyon, the reef will break the bottom of the ship. Only smaller ships can pass through, and even then they have to sail carefully.
Roman knows the limitations of Sige Town, so he is not in a hurry.
The Silver Dragon Canyon is just a small threshold.
His future goal is to build this place into an eternal city.
Become the center of this land!
…
On the sixth day after Morey left.
The grassland ushered in the yellowing.
The change of seasons is slow, but also very abrupt.
It moves forward slowly, so that you don’t realize it is approaching, until you realize that the season has entered a deeper stage at some point.
Roman will not make this mistake.
After the pig farm was completed, he focused most of his attention on the vast bean field.
After five months of growth, the green stems turned yellow, the hairy bean pods swelled and dehydrated, and the leaves slowly turned yellow and fell off...
Until a big hand shook the withered plant.
Then he heard a sound inside the bean pod, but it didn't explode...
Roman knew.
The autumn harvest has arrived!
...
When he made silage, he ordered people to harvest 500 acres of green beans in advance.
The remaining 5,500 acres of land also needed to be harvested.
The farmers who had seen the wheat yield were no longer shocked by the bumper soybean harvest, but now there were slaves who came to Sige Town after the summer harvest.
At this time when the sun has not yet risen and the dew has not yet evaporated.
These slaves who had just arrived in Sige Town stared at the farmland in front of them. Those who could participate in the harvest were basically experienced laborers with common sense of farming and had never thought of such a thing.
The soybeans were densely planted, the soybeans were swollen and full, the bean leaves were withered, the whole bean plant was bare, quite crowded, like countless skinny dead branches stuck in the ground, hanging heavy shriveled bean pods, pointing diagonally to the sky.
Roman generously gave the joy of the harvest to his subjects and slaves.
He mobilized nearly 2,000 people for this autumn harvest. Only students, soldiers, craftsmen, and cooks did not participate in it - they each carried their own burdens to maintain the current or future operation of Sige Town.
The rest of the work stopped, and those who boiled salt, mined, and smelted iron were also called over.
Farming never dislikes too many people.
Because of Morey, there is enough labor in Sige Town now.
Roman still personally participated in this autumn harvest.
He held a sickle and bent forward, with the sickle blade close to the ground, leaving no bean stubble and keeping the soybean nodules in the ground.
He notified everyone to harvest in this way.
The soybean root system fixes nitrogen, and there is also residual nitrogen in the nodules. Pulling up the roots is a waste, so only the bean plants above the surface need to be harvested and the nodules can be rotted in the soil.
The bean stalks are hard, not flexible wheat stalks.
It is difficult to harvest with a sickle, and the planting is dense. An adult cannot harvest one acre of bean field in a day.
Holding a sickle, he was busy from morning to noon, and from noon to afternoon.
The whole process lasted for three days.
Finally, in the evening of the fourth day, all the soybean fields were harvested and transported to the threshing ground.
Hundreds of animals pulled stone rollers and walked around the huge threshing ground.
Soybean threshing is much simpler than wheat threshing.
This autumn harvest also became unusually simple.
Bean stalks can be used as feed and were directly pulled to the livestock shed.
After cleaning the bean stalks, only plump and swollen soybeans were left on the threshing floor.
The soybeans, which were shining in the sun, were like yellow pearls, covering most of the threshing floor.
The soybeans were very dry and could be stored directly. They only needed to be ventilated later.
Three more days passed, and after all the storage work was completed, the soybean production record fell into Roman's hands.
Five thousand five hundred acres of land, a total of nearly one million kilograms were harvested.
