The welcome banquet was exceptionally lively. Though the reception was not especially lavish, it was practical and generous.
To welcome the two thousand new laborers, Viscount Otres readily slaughtered fifty cattle, one hundred sheep, and several chickens, along with bread and vegetables carefully prepared by the cooks.
There was no helping it—there were many mouths, and appetites were large. As a good lord, Otres naturally invited all his subjects to take part in such a grand banquet.
Fifty cattle might have sounded like a lot, but nineteenth-century African cattle were all naturally raised and not particularly large to begin with. They were not the artificially bred beef cattle of later generations, so their meat yield was naturally far from impressive.
With one steak per person, all fifty cattle were gone. The hundred sheep were only for stew; if they had been roasted, there would obviously not have been enough to go around. By comparison, chicken was supplied in far greater abundance.
Of course, meat was not considered much of a luxury in Europe. Especially after Austrian Africa was opened up, the price of meat products had fallen again and again.
The African Continent was vast and sparsely populated, providing favorable conditions for the development of animal husbandry. Taking Otres's territory as an example, its more than seven thousand square kilometers held only a little over ten thousand people.
After excluding the elderly and children, there were only five or six thousand able-bodied workers. There was no way they could cultivate so much land, so developing animal husbandry was an excellent choice.
For noble lords with ample land, raising cattle and sheep that could grow simply by eating grass did not cost much at all. If you raised them and I raised them, then once enough people did so, prices naturally