The day before they planned to head to Pasture City, everyone was somewhat busy.
Macken and Tom were drawing up plans for David's upcoming territorial defenses and patrols. Elrond rode through the town on horseback, dispensing Luo Ning's benevolence.
Chahar was tinkering with the castle latrine project, while Wilson, having finished the census, was busy dividing the town into villages and groups.
Luo Ning had not been idle either.
After finishing the knight novel in his hand, he rode to the southeastern edge to see how the serfs and tenant farmers reclaimed wasteland.
The farmers were selective when reclaiming wasteland. They did not simply find a patch of land and start working it. They generally chose areas with relatively flat terrain and softer soil, avoiding sandy, rocky ground whenever possible.
Fortunately, there was a large relatively flat area southeast of Mountain Forest Town, providing the town with a considerable amount of farmland. If they continued reclaiming it, there would likely be no fewer than forty or fifty thousand mu.
Adding the reclaimable land in the northeast and the more than ten thousand mu currently lying fallow, Mountain Forest Town should have around eighty thousand mu of arable land.
That did not even include the dangerous west...
Even Luo Ning was startled by the figures he had arrived at after this analysis.
A single town had so much farmland. Could it really be called barren?
As long as Luo Ning reclaimed all the uncultivated land and raised the yield per mu a little, Mountain Forest Town could probably support twenty to thirty thousand people through self-sufficiency.
That only accounted for barley and wheat production. If carrots and cabbage were included, the population that could barely survive would probably be a little higher.
"Prinster's policy of forcing the people to reclaim wasteland