Strongest Manure

After his parents passed away, how to support himself and his three-year-old sister became the most pressing problem Zhou Ming faced.

As the Son of a Farmer, becoming a farmer who made a living from the land was Zhou Ming's only choice.

As it happened, after the plague, Glan Territory's population had been reduced by more than half, leaving much more unused land. Unable to withstand Zhou Ming's repeated pleas, Steward Brunode finally agreed to let him select ten fairly fertile mu of fallow land near the river outside town as his farmland.

With ten mu of land, Zhou Ming had his own plans for how to cultivate it.

Unlike the East, where farming mainly combined cropland with mulberry trees, Western agricultural civilization farmed by combining cropland and pasture.

Roughly half the land was used to grow food crops such as barley, wheat, rye, and Oats, while the other half was used for peas and fodder grass and for raising livestock such as cattle, sheep, and horses.

The West had a smaller population and more vacant land. Its combined farming-and-pasture model could produce staple foods for people on one hand and large numbers of cattle, sheep, horses, and other livestock on the other.

These livestock could not only provide ample animal power, but also large quantities of meat, dairy products, and hides, fulfilling most of people's needs for food and clothing.

What was more, the manure left behind by livestock grazing in pastures was also an excellent source of fertilizer, with a strong effect on enriching the soil.

From these perspectives, the Western farming-and-pasture model was far less time-consuming and labor-intensive than the Eastern farming-and-mulberry model, which required intensive cultivation and vast amounts of labor and time.

After all, in an ancient agricultural civilization where one ox was worth seven men, more livestock meant farming took far less time and effort.

Not to mention that these livestock could provide large amounts of meat. Even in years of poor weather and failed harvests, there would not be mass starvation. Of course, those people mainly referred to the livestock owners—the lords.

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

For example, through intensive cultivation and the proper use of manure, Eastern agriculture could achieve an average yield per mu two to four times that of Western agriculture, with an average seed return ratio of ten to twenty.

Zhou Ming calculated it in his head. After handing over sixty percent as land rent, he would only need to farm five or six mu to support himself and his sister.

That was assuming the average yield per mu could reach around 450 jin.

In Glan Territory, where the average barley yield per mu was still under 120 jin, that was practically an astronomical figure...

Yet Zhou Ming was extremely confident!

Because in the "Zhang Ergou" instance, after farming for hundreds of years, he had at least a dozen methods to increase the yields of crops here.

Such as how to plow deeply, how to interplant, how to maintain crop spacing, how to observe the weather, how to preserve water and heat, how to prevent pests and disease, how to weed quickly, and so on.

Most importantly, there was how to fertilize properly.

Fertilizer was one of the most crucial parts of agriculture's three treasures—water, fertilizer, and seeds. Any farmer who had worked the land knew exactly what fertilizer meant for grain yields.

The foundation!

Or rather, the basis for high crop yields!

When water and seed quality did not change much, ninety percent of agricultural yield increases were achieved through fertilizer.

Although people in this world had some vague awareness of the importance of livestock manure, they had not yet valued it enough to dig manure pits, systematically collect human and animal waste, ferment it anaerobically, and then spread it back onto the fields.

In daily life, people of this era relieved themselves everywhere. Human and animal waste could be found all around homes and streets, and those foul-smelling places became breeding grounds for plagues.

Even lords and knights living in towering castles, or kings and princesses living in magnificent King City, relieved themselves wherever they pleased.

Zhou Ming planned to gather this manure that could be picked up everywhere, let it ferment in a manure pit, and put it to great use when planting his fields!

Over the next half month or so.

The men, women, young, and old of Rose Town discovered something utterly ridiculous.

Ryan, Derek's son, was actually carrying a wooden bucket around town in search of filthy, foul-smelling manure. He happily gathered it all up, then buried it in a large pit outside his home like it was treasure, doing so tirelessly every day.

The townspeople began speculating that Derek's son Ryan had been bewitched by a witch, or that a devil had eaten his brain, causing him to do something so absurd and bizarre.

"That poor child... Both his parents have gone to the embrace of the Father God. With no one to look after him, he actually became interested in something like that..." Aunt Susan, their neighbor, could not help wiping away tears.

"Yeah, but we can't help them. I already have two children, Tom and Jerick. Two more... Sigh..." Kind-hearted Uncle O'Neil sighed helplessly.

"Shit Ryan, Shit Ryan, shovels shit into a big pit deep! Next year he'll fall in a shit pit deep, and Ryan is his name to keep!" The mischievous little brats in town gathered around Zhou Ming and sang the song they had made up.

"Get lost, get lost! You crazy brat, don't bring that stuff here again!" When Zhou Ming carried a huge bucket of manure to the tax office to pay taxes, Tax Officer Dilak furiously drove him out amid the laughter of the onlookers.

"If you don't appreciate it, I'm still worried others will be fighting over it someday." Zhou Ming strained to carry the bucket of manure home, humming a little tune.

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

He asked kind-hearted Uncle O'Neil for help. Following his instructions, with the aid of a heavy plow pulled by six oxen, Uncle O'Neil plowed six mu of land for him in a single morning.

Then came selecting seeds, sowing, and leveling the ground. Because he was small and weak, the six mu of land kept him busy for an entire week.

The other four mu had originally been fallow land, so pasture grass would grow there without any need for sowing.

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

He dug up the manure from the large pit outside his home and spread it over the ground to bake in the sun for several days, until it had all turned into black, powdered solid matter.

Then he went to the forest outside town and dug up some humus from beneath old tree roots. This humus contained many humus bacteria that could speed up the decomposition of organic matter.

Furthermore, because fermented and dried human and animal manure still retained some acidity, which was unfavorable to barley suited to neutral soil, he also dug up some river mud from the riverbank to neutralize it.

Human and animal manure powder + humus + alkaline river mud. After Zhou Ming mixed them in a certain ratio, a highly fertile organic fertilizer that crops could absorb easily and that took effect quickly was complete.

This organic fertilizer was the ultimate fertilizer Zhou Ming had developed through over a hundred years of experimentation. In ancient agricultural civilization, it used the most widely available raw materials and had the most remarkable soil-enriching effect!

Even on an extremely barren plot of land, as long as the weather was normal and this fertilizer was applied, a bountiful harvest was guaranteed!

What a pity. If I could leave this small town and find several ores containing rare elements, grind them into powder, and add them to this fertilizer to create a "rare mineral powder ultimate compound fertilizer," its fertility level would rise to a whole new level. A thousand jin per mu would no longer be a myth...

Still, even without rare mineral powder, achieving his target of 450 jin per mu with this full-version ultimate organic fertilizer would be ridiculously easy.

The next day, after Zhou Ming spread the Strongest Manure he had prepared across his fields, he saw just a few days later that the wheat shoots in his land were clearly half a centimeter taller than those in the neighboring fields. His heart brimmed with confidence!