Actions spoke louder than words. Ji Chang immediately urged the old ox forward and began plowing.
The old ox was exceedingly docile. At his call, it immediately began pulling the implement through the field.
After the old ox had walked a hundred paces, several farmers cried out in astonishment.
As the old ox moved, the strange tool dug deep into the earth, turning up great clods of soil before breaking them apart and pushing them to either side.
"This..."
"How is this possible?"
"What on earth is that?"
The farmers were utterly stunned by the sight before them. They involuntarily dropped to the ground, picked up the broken soil that had been pushed aside, and examined it closely.
"So deep!"
"So fast!"
"At that depth and speed, even I would need quite some time, yet this old ox only has to take a few steps!"
The speaker was an old farmer. He stared eagerly at the old ox and Ji Chang. This thing was more useful than the Dragon-Bone Waterwheel, the Counterweighted Well Sweep, or the Treading Pestle. Those only made farming easier indirectly, while this directly increased the efficiency of cultivation!
Ji Chang said, "The implement attached to this old ox is called the Curved-Shank Plow."
The Curved-Shank Plow?
The name was easy enough to understand. The main structure of the implement attached to the old ox resembled a cart shaft, and it was curved.
The plow was a farming implement that had emerged in the late Shang period to replace the traditional digging plow. As for why this was the Curved-Shank Plow, which had only appeared in the Tang era, with its movable body, maneuverability, and suitability for deep plowing, rather than the straight-shank plow that should have appeared in this period, which was awkward to turn and