Standing at the edge of the twenty mu of sugar beet fields, Li Long saw that the white salt crust that had originally crystallized on the surface had now disappeared. The beet seedlings were sturdy, their leaves a deep, dark green. Clearly, they lacked neither fertilizer nor water.
These sugar beets looked nothing like something grown in saline-alkali soil. They looked more like the produce of improved, high-yielding farmland.
"Professor Luo, you really are impressive. I never imagined you could improve this patch of saline-alkali land so much in just one month," Li Long said admiringly. "At this rate, our Fourth Team could gain several thousand mu of good farmland in just a few years."
"It isn't that simple." Professor Luo shook his head. "We managed to improve these twenty-odd mu this much partly because we applied fertilizers tailored to the soil, and partly because irrigation was a crucial factor.
"In other words, some of the salts and alkalis in the soil were neutralized by the fertilizer, while some were washed away by the water."
"That works too," Li Long said with a smile. "Our Fourth Team has enough water for farming. For the other saline-alkali land, could we solve the problem the same way, as long as we applied enough fertilizer and watered it more?"
"It's hard to say. It would be difficult." Professor Luo still shook his head. "We succeeded with this plot because we measured the soil composition precisely and applied fertilizers specifically suited to it. The salts and alkalis in other plots will certainly have different compositions. It's hard to say how much good the fertilizers we used here would do.
"Besides, to improve this patch, we applied several times as much fertilizer as we would to an ordinary field. That's fine for an experiment, but