Master Yuan, start!

"Governor, that's a big deal." Upon hearing this, the old farmer surnamed Liu opened up:

"I still remember the sixth year of the Guangxu reign, the first year after the drought, when I was turning the soil in the fields and the prefect of Caozhou happened to be passing by.

You say he can just pass by, but damn, it was such a grand scene, with more than 100 people clearing the way, it was so crowded that they trampled down all the soil I had just turned.

966 paint 91 5 *

I felt so heartbroken at that time, but seeing the guard holding a knife, I didn't dare to say a word. I just knelt on the ground and waited until that damn prefect left before I stood up and started searching again.

Unexpectedly, such a high-ranking official as the governor outside the Great Wall also takes the train like ordinary people.

When I went to the county market, the students were talking about President Yuan’s words about equality for all. He really lived up to his words. It was amazing!

Old Zhang nodded and agreed, "That's right. Treating officials and civilians equally is national policy. Last month, the county magistrate of the neighboring county was reported to the Red Confucian Society by students from the county school for his extravagant travels, and he was dismissed from his post!"

"Yes, there was such a thing. I heard about it before!" The old farmer surnamed Liu was stunned for a moment, then slapped his head and recalled the incident.

"Hey, Lao Zhang, you know so much and can read. Why don't you go to Lushun or Niuzhuang and work as a hired hand? I heard they pay two yuan a month now, which is much better than working in the fields."

"Me?" Hearing the farmer surnamed Liu ask this, the man called Lao Zhang looked a little strange and quickly replied in his very recognizable Hefei accent:

"I... I only know a few words and can't do the math. How can I be a waiter for someone? Isn't it better for them to have a teenager?"

"Oh, so that's it." Seeing this, the old farmer surnamed Liu did not argue too much.

Seeing the train gradually moving away, he raised his hand to hold the cigarette, put it to his mouth and took a deep breath. After the epic smoke entered his lungs, the cigarette butt burned quickly and then was thrown to the ground. He stomped on it twice, picked up the sickle and started harvesting.

A farmer named Zhang, from Anhui, once surrounded the Yuan family's old house during the battle of Hunan and scared to death several people. It is said that the fourth ancestor of Yuan Xiangcheng was Zhang's uncle.

That year, the National Defense Army marched south to attack the Hunan Army. The main force marched south along the canal, while the flank forces were divided into two groups.

One group was the National Defense Army that landed on the coast of Jiangsu to attract the main force from Jiangning; the other group was the Yuan clan members who rose up in Chenzhou Prefecture to cut off the food supply route of the Hunan Army heading north.

Upon seeing this, Hunan Army Admiral Zhu Hongzhang sent a group of soldiers to Chenzhou, using the clearance of the Yuan family's ancestral home as a bargaining chip, hoping to force the Yuan family members who had raised an army in Chenzhou Prefecture to return and relieve the pressure on both sides of the Huai River.

However, the front line of the Hunan Campaign progressed rapidly, and the Hunan Army's mopping-up plan came to nothing.

After arriving at Chenzhou Prefecture, these soldiers had no time to take action. They had only captured some distant relatives of Yuan Shikai who were within the fifth degree of kinship when they received the news of the army's defeat.

Seeing that the situation was hopeless, they gave up the idea of ​​killing.

However, although no one was killed, some elderly people could not help being frightened by the shining steel knives. They fainted on the ground and died on the spot.

A farmer named Zhang was one of the soldiers who arrested people.

After hearing the wailing and crying of the old man's family, he thought that the dead person was Yuan Xiangcheng's great-uncle. Fearing that he would be punished later, he did not dare to stay there and wait for surrender, so he sneaked away and ran back to his hometown.

Later, the situation changed dramatically, the Hunan Army was defeated, and the National Defense Army launched land reform in Anhui, dividing clan land and giving it to private individuals.

During that period, in order to resist the policy of dividing clan land, the landlords spread the news in the countryside that "Yuan Xiangcheng's men were killing innocent people indiscriminately."

Afraid of being found, the farmer surnamed Zhang boarded a ship to the outside of the Great Wall during the vigorous wave of crossing the Great Wall to the Northeast, and was allocated land on the Liaodong Peninsula and settled down.

Yuan Xiangcheng, who was on the train, had no idea that among the farmers he had just seen in the fields, there was an Anhui soldier who was thought to have violated the "Heavenly Law".

Even if he knew, he would probably just wave his hands and smile silently, and not take it to heart.

Not to mention those old people who were scared to death. They just had the surname "Yuan" and were probably already five generations apart. Even if they were real relatives, they could not vent their anger on the soldiers.

After all, on the battlefield, everyone serves their own master.

Besides, these soldiers did not really kill anyone. As a president, there was no need for him to care about such a thing.

Amidst the constant clatter of the train beneath his feet, Yuan Xiangcheng turned his gaze to the little Hoover in front of him:

"Clark, do you think the agriculture here is different from the agriculture in America?"

Chapter 478 How to Promote Agricultural Cooperation

"Agriculture?" Hoover shook his head and replied, "Mr. President, I studied geology in college. If you ask me what year a rock was formed, I might know.

But if you ask me how agriculture differs between your country and America, I'm not sure."

Hoover thought for a moment and continued, "However, it can be seen that the number of farmers in your country is much larger than that in ours. The train just passed by many wheat fields, and there seemed to be more than a dozen people standing in each field.

In my opinion, this kind of scene is rarely seen even in the densely populated eastern United States.

?Yuan Ji Tiqu82+269?85

On the contrary, we have more horses on our farmland.”

"horses!"

When he heard these two words, Yuan Shikai's face lit up. This was why he invited Hoover to take the railway from Lushun to Tianjin.

The reason for not taking the ship but going far away was to let Hoover see the vast land of Northeast China and the endless farmland, and to use this to negotiate another business deal with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Big business in modernizing agriculture.

At this time, the United States was undoubtedly the most powerful country in the Americas and even the world, but its agricultural level had not yet reached the level that seemed "outrageous" to Asian, African and Latin American countries after World War II.

In fact, before the Civil War, the production efficiency of some American farmers was not even as good as that of Qing Dynasty farmers.

Apart from the plantation economy in the South, most of their areas also rely on self-sufficient agriculture. Compared with Chinese farmers who have been farming for thousands of years, American farmers who immigrated from Europe are less skilled in intensive farming.

However, the United States has too much land, which means they have to find a way to cultivate it, otherwise the land will go to waste.

As a result, Americans created a farming method that suited the times and the local environment, and thus began their first agricultural revolution.

That’s right, the agricultural revolution, not the industrial revolution.

Sometimes, the term "industrial revolution" does not necessarily mean large-scale industry and mechanization.

For example, the "horse-drawn steel plow" and "horse-drawn combine harvester" used by Americans in the second half of the 19th century, although they were certain improvements over the previous wooden plows, stone plows, and sickles in terms of farming tools, still relied on animal power.

In other words, the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century completed a "semi-mechanized agricultural revolution" by relying on a large amount of "animal power + steel farm tools"

In 1898, although the Second Industrial Revolution was on the eve of its full outbreak, even the United States, now the world's leading industrial power, still retained a large number of remnants of the agricultural era across its vast territory.

At this time, the gap between China and the United States was far less than that after World War I and World War II in the original time and space.

At that time, Americans could fly and sail, while their country, which was constantly at war, could neither build warships nor airplanes, and a generation gap had already formed.

Therefore, Yuan Xiangcheng believed that it was necessary to learn from the agricultural production methods after the American Civil War and promote the modernization of agriculture in the Northeast region by learning from American experience while the gap was not large.

Before the 20th century, farming could be done with traditional manpower.

In the second half of the 20th century, agricultural farming could be carried out with the help of mature agricultural machinery such as tractors.

But in the 4-50 years in between, we were stuck, neither going up nor down.

Although Yuan Xiangcheng believed that the mechanized method of animal power was somewhat ridiculous, like "horse-drawn locomotive", this was all he could do in the face of such a stagnant era.

He was unwilling to allow a region like the Northeast, which had a lighter historical burden of land relations, to continue to evolve towards the small-scale peasant production mode of the interior.

Although Yuan Shikai has retained the continuous arable land in the Northeast to a considerable extent by relying on the Production and Construction Corps, agricultural cooperatives, etc., this only serves the purpose of "stabilization" and will not go any further.

In other words, it only has the shell of an "agricultural cooperative" but lacks the substance of an agricultural cooperative.

What is the essence of an agricultural cooperative?

It is nothing more than intensification, scale and mechanization.

But now, within the military corps and agricultural cooperatives, the small-scale peasant production mode is still used, but it is covered with a collective skin and is relatively ahead of the times in handicrafts and agricultural product commercialization.

As for the most fundamental agricultural productivity, there has been no fundamental change. At best, the production relations have improved slightly.

Marx said that productivity determines production relations.

If the productivity of Northeast China fails to develop and progress for a long time, then even if the current production relations have progressed, they will sooner or later regress to the production relations of the era of small peasant productivity.

Yuan Xiangcheng knew that this was beyond his personal control.

Therefore, what Yuan Xiangcheng wanted to do was to improve agricultural productivity in the Northeast region and make productivity match the development of production relations.

In the central United States near the plateau, the local climate is relatively dry and not suitable for farming, so crops cannot grow, but it is naturally suitable for the growth of grassland.

Similarly, the Northeast Plain, close to the Greater Khingan Range in the west, is also a relatively dry area with a large amount of grassland.

This area includes the later famous Holingol, Xilingol and Hulunbuir grasslands, which are naturally suitable for grazing.

Americans used horses grazed in the Rocky Mountains to promote the "semi-mechanized agricultural revolution"; the Northeast can also follow suit and raise horses on the Mongolian Plateau close to the Northeast Plain to benefit the nearby Songnen Plain agriculture.

The decision to use horses instead of cattle in the Northeast was not a spur-of-the-moment idea of ​​Yuan Xiangcheng.

The reason why cattle are widely used for farming in East Asia is because they have strong adaptability to the environment, whether it is paddy fields, dry fields, terraced fields, sloping fields, in the south or the north.

Horses, on the other hand, are only good at farming in open, flat areas.

However, the geographical environment of Northeast China is different from that of North China and South China. Instead, it is similar to the Great Plains of the United States at the same latitude, an endless vast plain.

Therefore, the disadvantages faced by plow horses in the south do not exist at all in the Northeast.

Another point is that horses have high requirements for feed. In addition to grass, they need to supplement with concentrated feed such as beans and corn, which makes the feeding cost relatively high.

Cows, on the other hand, only need to eat grass and rely on their own stomachs to regurgitate the food.

This is also the reason why oxen are mostly used for plowing instead of horses in China.

However, this problem does not exist in the Northeast either.

There isn't much else in Northeast China, but there is no shortage of soybeans and corn.

Moreover, compared with cattle, the horse's body structure is heavy in the front and light in the back, which makes it more suitable for inertial movement. That is to say, when plowing the land, the horse can pull the plow more effortlessly and reduce energy consumption.

At the same time, horses have longer working hours, which can reach more than 8 hours a day.

As for cattle, it is mostly around 4-6 hours. In addition, the lifespan of a draft horse can reach 20-30 years, while that of a draft ox is only around 15-20 years.

"Clark, there are probably tens of millions of farmers outside the Great Wall, and they are still using traditional farming methods."

Yuan Xiangcheng took a sip of tea and said slowly, "I'm thinking, if we let them learn from American farmers and use your popular horse + steel plow, horse + animal-powered combine harvester method to cultivate the land, perhaps we can plant more soybeans and export more soy products to your country.

Moreover, our country is not yet capable of producing such a machine at present. If your country is willing to provide it,

Putting down the teacup, Yuan Xiangcheng looked at Hoover quietly with a smile on his face.

"If the United States is willing to provide it?" Hoover heard this and began to calculate in his mind:

"With a population of 1000 million, even if we divide it into families of five, there are still 5 million families.

如果这200万个家庭，都采0购美利坚的联合收割机，6来耕种他们的农1田的话...3...liu

My God, this is a multi-million dollar deal!"

Thinking of the many farmers on the ridges of the fields that he had seen through the window on the train just now, Hoover excitedly pinched the flesh in his palms.