The Strongest Manure

After his parents passed away, the most pressing issue facing Zhou Ming was how to support himself and his three-year-old sister.

As the son of a farmer, becoming a farmer who lived off the land was Zhou Ming's only option.

Coincidentally, after the plague, the population of Glan Territory had decreased by more than half, and there was more vacant land. The steward, Brunode, couldn't resist Zhou Ming's repeated pleas and finally agreed to let him choose ten acres of relatively fertile fallow land near the river by the town as his farming plot.

With ten acres of land, Zhou Ming had his own plan for how to cultivate them.

Unlike the Eastern farming model, which primarily combined farmland and mulberry trees, Western agricultural civilization cultivated land by combining farmland and pastures.

Roughly half of the land was used for planting grain crops such as Barley, Wheat, Rye, and Oats, while the other half was used for planting Peas and forage grass, and for raising livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses.

The Western population was smaller, and there was more vacant land. Their farming and livestock combination model could produce staple foods for people to eat on one hand, and a large number of livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses on the other.

These livestock could not only provide sufficient animal power but also a large amount of meat, milk, and fur, satisfying most of people's needs for food and clothing.

Furthermore, the pastures grazed by livestock and the manure left behind by the livestock were also excellent sources of fertilizer for the land, with good soil enrichment effects.

From these perspectives, the Western farming and livestock combination model was much more time and labor-saving than the Eastern farming and mulberry combination model, which required intensive cultivation and a lot of human labor and time.

After all, in ancient agricultural civilizations where one ox was worth seven men, the more livestock there were, the more time and labor were saved in farming.

Moreover, these livestock could also provide a large amount of meat, so even in years with unfavorable weather and poor grain harvests, there would not be widespread starvation (of course, these people mainly referred to the owners of the livestock – the lords).

However, the Eastern farming and mulberry combination model was not without its advantages.

For example, through intensive cultivation and proper application of manure, the average yield per mu in Eastern agriculture could reach two to four times the average yield per mu in Western agriculture, and the average seed return rate could reach 10-20.

Zhou Ming calculated in his head that after paying six-tenths of the land rent, he would need to cultivate about 5-6 mu of land to support himself and his sister.

The premise was that the average yield per mu of these lands could reach around 450 jin.

This was an astronomical figure in Glan Territory, where the average Barley yield per mu was less than 120 jin...

But Zhou Ming was very confident!

Because in the Zhang Ergou instance, having farmed for several hundred years, he had at least a dozen ways to increase the yield of crops here.

For example, how to deep plow, how to intercrop, how to maintain plant spacing, how to observe the weather, how to conserve water and maintain temperature, how to prevent and control pests and diseases, how to quickly weed, and so on.

Most importantly, how to apply fertilizer properly.

Fertilizer is one of the most important parts of the three treasures of agriculture (water, fertilizer, seeds). Any farmer who has farmed knows what fertilizer means for grain yield.

It's the foundation!

Or rather, the basis for high grain yields!

When the factors of water and seeds do not change much, 90% of agricultural yield increase is achieved through fertilizer.

In this world, although people had a certain vague understanding of the importance of animal manure, they had not yet attached enough importance to digging manure pits, systematically collecting human and animal manure, anaerobically fermenting it, and then applying it back to the fields.

In daily life, people of this era defecated everywhere. Human and animal manure could be seen everywhere in front of and behind houses, and places with foul odors became breeding grounds for plagues.

Even the lord knights living in tall castles and the kings and princesses living in magnificent royal cities would relieve themselves randomly like this when they needed to.

Zhou Ming planned to collect these readily available feces, put them in a manure pit to ferment, and planned to put them to great use when farming!

Over the next half month.

The men, women, and children of Rose Town discovered something quite comical.

Derek's son, Ryan, was carrying a wooden bucket and searching everywhere in town for dirty, smelly feces. He happily collected these feces, gathered them together, and then, treating them like treasures, buried them in a large pit in front of his house, doing so tirelessly every day.

The townspeople were abuzz with discussion, wondering if Derek's son, Ryan, had been cursed by a witch or if his brain had been eaten by a demon, causing him to do such bizarre things.

"This poor child, his parents have gone to the embrace of the Father God, and with no one to look after him, he's actually developed an interest in this kind of thing..." Aunt Susan, a neighbor, couldn't help but wipe away tears.

"Yes, but we can't help them. I already have two children, Tom and Jerick, and two more... sigh..." Uncle O'Neil, a kind-hearted man, sighed helplessly.

"Poop Ryan, Poop Ryan, shovels poop and buries it in a big pit, next year he'll fall into the poop pit, his name is Ryan!" The mischievous little brats in town surrounded Zhou Ming, singing the rhymes they had made up.

"Go away, go away, you crazy kid, don't bring this kind of thing here again!" When Zhou Ming arrived at the tax office with a large bucket of feces to pay taxes, the tax officer, Dirak, in the midst of the onlookers' laughter, angrily chased him out.

"You don't want it, but I'm afraid others will be scrambling for it later." Zhou Ming struggled to carry the bucket of feces, humming a tune as he returned home.

After most of the feces from around the town had been collected and left to ferment in the manure pit, Zhou Ming began preparing for the spring planting.

He asked the kind Uncle O'Neil for help. According to his requirements, with the help of a heavy plow pulled by six oxen, he helped him plow six mu of land in one morning.

Then came seed selection, sowing, and leveling the land. Because he was small and weak, it took him a full week to work on these six mu of land.

The other four mu of land, being originally fallow land, could grow pasture without needing to be sown.

After the seeds were planted, the next two months became his busiest time.

The pit of feces in the large pit in front of his house was dug out and left to dry in the sun for several days until it all turned into a black powdery solid.

Then, he went to the forest outside the town and dug up some humus from under the roots of some very old trees. This humus contained many humic bacteria, which could speed up the decomposition of organic matter.

Furthermore, because human and animal feces, after fermenting and drying, would still be somewhat acidic, which was not conducive to the growth of barley, which thrives in a neutral soil environment, he also dug up some river mud from the riverside to neutralize it.

Human and animal feces solid powder + humus + alkaline river mud, mixed by Zhou Ming in a certain proportion, thus, an organic fertilizer with strong fertility, easy for crops to absorb, and strong effectiveness was completed.

This organic fertilizer was the ultimate fertilizer that Zhou Ming had spent over a hundred years exploring and formulating. In ancient agricultural civilizations, it was made from the most widely available raw materials and had the most significant effect on fertilizing the land!

Even on extremely barren land, under normal weather conditions, as long as this fertilizer was applied, a bumper harvest could be guaranteed!

"It's a pity, if I could leave this small town and go outside to find a few kinds of ores containing rare elements, grind these ores into powder, and add them to this fertilizer to make 'Rare Mineral Powder Ultimate Compound Fertilizer', the fertility level of this fertilizer would be raised to a new level, and a yield of a thousand catties per mu would not be a myth..."

However, even without rare mineral powder, achieving the goal of 450 catties per mu with this complete version of the ultimate organic fertilizer was simply too easy.

The next day, after Zhou Ming applied his formulated "Strongest Manure" to the farmland, within a few days, he saw that the wheat seedlings in his field were clearly half a centimeter taller than the wheat seedlings in the neighboring field. His heart was filled with confidence and assurance!