Li Long brought the sheep back to the village, handed it over to Xu Chengjun, returned the cart, and went home.
The next day, Village Director Xu Chengjun gathered the commune members' representatives-or village representatives, as they should now be called-to discuss allocating the land. They also slaughtered the sheep and cooked a big pot of mutton.
The first step in allocating land was to decide on the plots, then measure them. After all, the village had several hundred people. To divide it fairly, they could not simply measure it once and be done with it.
Fortunately, these village representatives, including Li Jianguo, were all founding members of the Production Team. They knew the land currently under cultivation very well and had a rough idea of how much each plot yielded.
So while the sheep was being slaughtered and its offal cleaned, they more or less settled on the plots to be allocated and their assessed yields—for example, each person would receive two mu of Ration Fields, based on a wheat yield of two hundred jin per mu.
Once the strip fields yielding two hundred jin of wheat per mu had all been allocated, anyone left who received land assessed at one hundred jin per mu would have to receive four mu per person. Otherwise, it would not be fair.
After deciding on the plots and their assessed yields, all that remained was to arrange the drawing of lots and appoint people to measure the land and mark its boundaries. They also needed to sharpen plenty of wooden stakes for boundary markers. Miscellaneous tasks included supervising neighboring plot holders as they built the ridges between their fields.
The Village Committee and the village representatives worked very efficiently. The next day, they held a meeting of all the villagers, explained the