With Homo sapiens Company's forceful move, eighty Agricultural Cooperatives were quickly established. More than thirty thousand farming households soon joined, and that number was still growing.
Their participation brought Haitian Agriculture 270,000 mu of mountain land, 63,000 mu of paddy fields, 28,000 mu of dry fields, and 5,436 mu of fish ponds.
Of course, land was the least of it.
The Fernando family and the Lopez family were the real land barons.
Take the Lopez family's stronghold on Panay Island, for example. The plantations under its control covered a vast area of 1,736 square kilometers, roughly one-seventh of the island.
Meanwhile, the Fernando family's plantations in southern Luzon covered an equally impressive 2,245 square kilometers.
The plantations and other agricultural land controlled by the two families across Luzon covered a total of 5,571 square kilometers, equivalent to one-fiftieth of Luzon's total area.
That didn't even include the smaller families and farming households under their sway.
Haitian Agriculture naturally wasn't going to let such a huge expanse of land go to waste.
At that moment, on Panay Island.
Under the guidance of the Lopez family's local representative, Zhang Wei inspected the island, which had the second-largest area of rice paddies in Luzon. The main crops here were rice and sugarcane.
Luzon's total rice production currently stood at around 17 million tons, and its rice self-sufficiency rate was only 79%.
It also produced around 10 million tons of corn.
With Luzon's population of 102 million, total grain production of 27 million tons worked out to roughly 260 kilograms per person. That per capita output was enough to keep people fed.
The problem was that rice was Luzon's staple food. People also ate some wheat flour, while corn was grown for export.
Luzon produced around 27 million tons of grain a year, exported