Having porridge at night—weren't you hungry?
"It was enough to make the side dishes a little more varied."
Lu Ao carried his shoulder pole as he and Song Zhou walked down the mountain one after the other. He chatted casually as they went. "I asked Tan Junhao today. Haining Mountain in their village hasn't been contracted out yet. It's pretty large, and the asking price is high—fifty-six yuan per mu per year. No one can afford it."
Growing agricultural products in Yandong County was not particularly profitable.
Most of the county consisted of mountainous terrain, transportation was underdeveloped, and it was far from the cities.
If they wanted to sell agricultural products in the cities, transportation costs were extremely high.
On top of that, large numbers of people had left. There were few young people in the entire county, and most of the labor force consisted of middle-aged and elderly people in their fifties and sixties. Agricultural production could not reach scale, so competitiveness was weak.
It was difficult to make a living locally, so more and more people left, trapping the area in a vicious cycle.
Lu Ao had asked around. Contracting a mountain would be fairly easy for him, since basically no one would compete with him. If he negotiated, he could probably get it for forty-eight or fifty yuan per mu.
It was just that the mountain was too big. Its total area was said to exceed two thousand mu, and the rent alone would cost around a hundred thousand yuan a year. He felt it was genuinely a little beyond him.
As for the mountain itself, it was actually a good one. The soil was yellow-black earth, and years of accumulated humus had made it very fertile.
A river curved around half the mountain, making water