Li Long was a man of action. Once he decided this could be done, he took Mingming and Haohao to the Fourth Team early the next morning, then went to his eldest brother's house and called Factory Director Du at the Farm Machinery Factory.
"You mean you've designed a piece of farm machinery for spraying pesticides, and you want to manufacture and sell it like the Snow-Clearing Machine?"
"Yes," Li Long said earnestly. "I've done some research around our county these past two days. To put it plainly, this spraying equipment is mainly intended for cotton.
"At present, most cotton is grown by the Corps, with relatively little grown outside it, so in the short term, sales of this machine would mainly target the Corps.
"But I believe there will be a very broad market for it over the next ten or twenty years, because I expect cotton acreage to keep expanding. It will become a pillar of agriculture in Northern Xinjiang."
"Now that you mention it, I do remember something. At the city meeting early this year, the Seventh Division leadership spoke about vigorously developing grain and cotton production. Cotton acreage here in our Seventh Division has been expanding very quickly.
"Put that way, I think this is feasible."
"There's no getting around it. Northern Xinjiang has vast stretches of land and very few people. The Corps has always practiced large-scale mechanized farming. Other operations can already be mechanized, but mechanized pesticide spraying for cotton hasn't started yet.
"And cotton is particularly prone to pests and diseases that spread easily. With the Corps growing so much of it, spraying by hand takes far too much labor. That's why I think there's real potential here."
Factory Director Du immediately understood what Li Long meant. He laughed and said,
"You mean