My Apprenticeship to Uncle Jiu: I Was a Warlord in the Republic of China

Spent the day at home with my family.

The next day, Jiang Li took seven or eight members of the village protection team and drove to Tengteng Town.

When he saw Jiang Daniu, he immediately said to Jiang Li, "Brother, do you know that we harvested 300 acres of potatoes before, which yielded 230,000 kilograms. Unfortunately, it's hard to store them. Now we are eating them every day and are almost sick of them."

Jiang Li smiled and said, "Why don't you make these potatoes into potato starch? Wouldn't it be possible to store them for a long time?"

After some explanation, Jiang Daniu said, "It's good to get fine flour this way, but what should we do with the remaining potato scraps? It would be a pity if it was wasted."

Jiang Li smiled and said, "How can it be wasted? We can make it into dishes, such as potato dregs cakes, potato dregs steamed buns, potato dregs snacks, and potato and vegetable meatballs."

"As long as we don't crush all 200,000 kilograms of potatoes in a short period of time, then none of these potatoes will be wasted."

Of course, in addition to keeping the seeds, we have to distribute it to the villagers according to their working days. We can’t let them suffer any loss. The rest can be made into potato starch.”

Jiang Daniu said, "Don't worry, brother. I have already divided it among them. We only have about 20,000 kilograms now. But the tax you set is a little too low."

"All miscellaneous taxes are exempted, and only 20% agricultural tax and 20% commercial tax are required. With such low taxes, I'm afraid that after paying them, we won't be able to support the security team in this town, right?"

Jiang Li shook his head and said, "It's not a small amount. How much money can be made from the agricultural tax? The key lies in business. Now our store provides food, clothing, housing and transportation in the town. As long as the townspeople have food after the harvest, business will flourish, and that's where we can make money."

Then Jiang Li changed the subject and said, "I told my father-in-law before to send a few people to open a shop to sell salt, oil and cloth. Have they come?"

Jiang Daniu laughed and said, "They have been here for a long time, but although there are nearly 900 people in the town now, most of them don't have much money, so their business is very bleak."

Jiang Li smiled and said, "There's nothing we can do about it. We'll have to wait a few days for the crops in the fields to mature. After they've divided the crops, they'll have money. Then their business will naturally pick up."

So in the next few days, the whole town was busy with the harvest. The rice, corn and pumpkin were all ripe. After being harvested one by one, the only crops left in the fields were the sweet potatoes, which took the longest time to grow.

Seeing everyone so happy, Jiang Li simply settled all the harvests in public according to the working days, and finally distributed three acres of land to each person as private property.

These few acres of land are indeed not much, but Jiang Li promised that he could reclaim the wasteland by himself after reporting it. At that time, the newly reclaimed land will belong to the individual and will be tax-free for three years.

The whole town was in an uproar, but then the townspeople encountered another problem: they had a lot of food but little money, and could not buy daily necessities at all.

So Jiang Li opened a grain store that bought grain at a fair price, and then everyone sold their excess grain for money. The villagers then started buying all kinds of things with the money in their hands.

All of a sudden, the few goods stored in the few shops were sold out.

After calculation, Jiang Li found that the tax revenue plus the grain purchased amounted to more than one million catties, including 50,000 catties of rice, 50,000 catties of corn, 10,000 catties of sorghum, and 2,000 acres of pumpkins, totaling 2.8 million catties.

Only about half of this was tax, and the rest was purchased with money. It cost nearly 7,000 yuan to buy so much food. Other merchants certainly wouldn't spend so much, but Jiang Li didn't bargain, so he paid a little more.

Jiang Daniu was very worried when he saw these things. He said, "Brother, I won't complain about you spending so much money, but how are you going to deal with so many pumpkins? They will all rot in a few months."

Jiang Li smiled and said, "How could that be? We can process the flesh into pumpkin jerky, the pulp into pumpkin candy, and even the pumpkin seeds can be fried and sold as dried goods."

"So this time we will not only not lose money, but will also make a lot of money."

Jiang Daniu asked in disbelief, "I know about pumpkin jerky, but how come I don't know that pumpkin pulp can be used to make candy?"

Jiang Li smiled and said, "Brother, haven't you noticed that the flesh of a ripe pumpkin is sweet? As long as we take them out and squeeze them, we can get sweet juice."

"Then it can be made into pumpkin candy after filtering and boiling. It may be a little worse than sucrose, but generally speaking it is still sweet."

Afterwards, Jiang Li wrote down the entire process of making dried pumpkin and pumpkin candy, but these tasks would have to wait for some time, after all, the grains had to be harvested and dried.

Then plant another crop of rapeseed, cabbage, radish, carrot, peas, onions, garlic, etc.

With this rotation of crops, there will be some harvest next spring, so even if a person only has three acres of land, he can feed himself.

After twenty days of hard work, when the 500 acres of sweet potatoes were ripe, Jiang Li began to recruit people to process the pumpkins.

Now these townspeople don't have much work to do in the fields and have nowhere to spend their money, so many of them come to help Jiang Li with odd jobs. After all, Jiang Li not only provides food but also pays wages. It's hard to find such a mayor elsewhere.

After the first batch of pumpkin candy, dried pumpkin and fried pumpkin seeds were made, Jiang Li immediately transported them to Renjia Town and opened a specialty store, using a larger store that was given as a dowry by the Ren family.

Jiang Li roughly calculated that there were about 18% of the pumpkin left after being dried, so this time he would get about 500,000 kilograms of dried pumpkin.

Therefore, the purpose of this small shop is just to build its reputation. If you want to sell out all the products, you have to wait for merchants passing by to buy in bulk.

After the store opened, Jiang Li became a hands-off manager and gave some of these things to Ren Fa. He also talked to him about the issue of expanding the armed forces.

Then he went to Qingyun Temple again. Jiang Li had been away for a month, and the mountain was obviously more lively.

This was due to the business of Zhe Gu, and secondly, Uncle Jiu listened to Jiang Li and made some incense, candles and paper money to sell, and also opened a vegetarian food business, and Wencai was the head chef.

As for why they are vegetarian dishes, it is because Uncle Jiu is afraid that Wencai has killed too many people and will be contaminated with too much karma in the future.

Another thing is that vegetarian dishes can be sold cheaper. If the food is too expensive, it will seem too utilitarian and lose the solemnity of Taoism.

After reaching the mountain, Jiang Li placed several items as offerings in front of the Three Pure Ones statues. Uncle Jiu was puzzled and asked, "What are these? Why are you offering them to the Three Pure Ones?"

Jiang Li said, "These are pumpkins produced in Teng Teng Town. I processed them into dried pumpkins and pumpkin candies. I'm going to give them to Sanqing to try and see if they suit your taste."

Uncle Jiu became interested when he heard this and asked, "How is your pumpkin yield? How much did you harvest this time?"

Jiang Li shook his head and said, "Before, we had few people and didn't grow much food, so we planted 2,000 acres of pumpkins. However, due to lack of proper management, the yield per acre was only 1,500 kilograms."

"This time we harvested a total of 3 million kilograms of pumpkin. The townspeople kept some, and I spent several thousand dollars to buy the rest, and made 500,000 kilograms of dried pumpkin."