A farming master in Stardew Valley

Chapter 303 Land and Farming
The chicks became fatter and their feathers gradually became fuller, changing almost every day. This made Leon certain that it wouldn't be long before he could not only feed them every day but also pick up some eggs.

The cave was functioning steadily and the mushrooms were still growing vigorously, but the fruit bats had given up and the ground was empty with no trace of fruit.

After finishing his daily farm work, Leon did not forget to add the iron ore he got from the mine yesterday into the furnace. Burning the iron ingots sooner would allow him to find Clint to upgrade his pickaxe sooner. Otherwise, it would be too difficult to use the most basic pickaxe to knock down the stones deep in the mine.

After waiting for the furnace to start smelting the iron ore, Leon went to make breakfast. After eating, he returned to the house and called Guts, but the busy tone on the phone made him realize that Guts was not in the Stardrop Salon. So he hung up the phone, took out his bicycle and headed towards Pelican Town.

If the mountain didn't come towards me, I would go towards it. Since Gus wasn't in the store, if I wanted to find him, I had to go to town.

The first stop Leon chose was Pierre's grocery store. Because Guts didn't like the things in Joja's supermarket, he usually bought the ingredients needed for the Stardrop Bar from Pierre's house in the morning.

But here, Leon did not see Guts.

So Leon went to Harvey's clinic next door again.

Here, Leon saw Maru, so he asked Maru if Guts had been there.

But Maru just shook his head and said that he had never seen Guts, so Leon had to look for him in another place.

This time the location was Guts' Stardrop Salon, and as soon as he arrived at the door of the bar, Leon saw the notice that Guts had deliberately hung outside the closed door.

"Due to personal matters, the Stardrop Bar is temporarily closed today."

"Oh, is Gus out?" After seeing this announcement, Leon understood why he couldn't find Gus on the way.

Then Leon turned and walked towards Lewis's house. He didn't go to ask Lewis where Gus was, but Gus was out for something, so if he wanted to contact someone from the Far Travel Chamber of Commerce, Lewis should be able to provide the contact information.

Today, Lewis did not go out to inspect the businesses in Pelican Town, but was dealing with weeds in the private garden around his home. Seeing Leon coming, Lewis stood up and greeted Leon.

“Good morning, Leon, are you hanging out after work, or do you have something to talk to me about?”

"Good morning, Lewis. I'd like to ask you for the contact information of the Far Travel Chamber of Commerce. I want to consult them on some issues." After greeting Lewis, Lyon stated his purpose.

"The contact information of the Far Traveling Chamber of Commerce? Haha, no problem, but I can't remember it very well, so I have to go look for the phone book in the house."

Lewis immediately took off his gardening gloves, then took Leon into the house, and then began to rummage through his desk for a while, and finally found a thick phone book.

"Pelican Town has a lot of trade cooperation with the Far Traveling Merchants Guild, so I have written down the contact information of many of their merchants. Since each merchant has his or her own business focus, could you please tell me what type of merchant you are looking for?"

Lewis, wearing reading glasses, carefully flipped through the phone book and did not forget to ask Leon.

"Regarding agricultural machinery, I'd like to inquire about the situation and price of the next agricultural tractor," Lyon explained.

Upon hearing this, Lewis stopped looking through the phone book. At this moment, he took off his reading glasses with a look of surprise and looked at Lyon and said, "You want to buy a tractor? Are you sure?" "What's wrong?" Lyon looked at Lewis in confusion, not quite understanding why he reacted so strongly.

And Lewis looked at Leon's expression and understood that Leon might not know why he had such a big reaction. After putting down the phone book in his hand, Lewis pulled Leon to sit down and answered earnestly.

"Leon, I don't know much about the secrets of Red Star Farm, but I can tell you one thing for sure: if you want to grow high-quality crops stably, then don't even consider adding agricultural machinery to your farm!"

"Why?" Leon was even more confused after hearing this.

"Because of tradition," Lewis replied seriously.

"You may find this strange, or think I'm a stickler, but it's true."

Having said that, Lewis began to rummage through the filing cabinet behind his desk. After a long time, he found a somewhat yellowed report that was obviously quite old, and handed it to Leon.

"This is a report left by your grandfather. It can answer all your questions."

Lewis handed the report in his hand to Lyon. After Lyon picked it up, he saw the title of the report.

Research Report on Stardew Valley Land and Farming Models

With doubts and curiosity, Leon opened it.

The report didn't contain much content, only about four pages, so it didn't take Lyon long to read it from beginning to end, but the content of the report opened his eyes.

The core argument of the report is the experiment on traditional planting models and scientific planting.

In this report belonging to Grandpa, Grandpa used two farms as the control group, namely the Red Star Farm inherited by Leon and another farm he opened in Stardew Valley, each planted with 200 stalks of parsnip.

Among them, Red Star Farm adopts the traditional planting model, which means that farmers dig the soil one by one, sow seeds, water the crops with a spray bottle every day, and finally harvest them with a sickle and their hands.

Another unnamed farm uses modern planting methods, which means using agricultural machinery to complete land reclamation, sowing, watering and harvesting, and the entire process is left to machines.

The end result was that under the traditional planting model of Red Star Farm, 200 parsnip seeds produced 80 high-quality crops, while the unnamed farm did not produce a single high-quality crop.

This was only the first set of control experiments. Afterwards, my grandfather also planted melons in the summer and yams in the autumn. In the three sets of experiments, the manual planting model of Red Star Farm all produced high-quality crops, while the other farm with mechanized planting did not produce even a single high-quality crop.

At the same time, for the sake of rigor and to make sure that this experiment had nothing to do with soil quality, my grandfather carried out traditional planting methods on the unnamed farm the following year, while mechanized planting was carried out on the Red Star Farm.

(End of this chapter)