Although Wang Mingjun said that, if they really worked it out, apart from the land where they had to grow grain, most of the rest was planted with cash crops, including cotton and watermelons grown for their seeds.
After all, once they set aside grain for food and the public grain tax, selling what remained did not bring in much money.
Although the Corps companies operated under a collective system, everyone still wanted to grow more crops that fetched good prices and receive a bigger share of the money at the end of the year.
On this point, the company cadres and workers all thought alike.
Calculated that way, growing cotton was much the same as growing confectionery sunflowers. One particular nuisance with cotton was the seed. Cotton seeds had thick shells, and at this time, sulfuric acid had to be used to eat away at those shells. Only after the shells had been thinned were the seeds sold to farmers.
Otherwise, if they simply separated the seeds from the seed cotton and planted them the following year, they would not sprout.
The Corps' techniques in this area were already quite advanced. Every company had plenty of large white plastic drums of sulfuric acid. Once the acid was used up, the drums generally were not collected for reuse, and the workers eventually took them home as water barrels-each usually held fifty kilograms of water, making them very practical.
"Do you use plastic film on the cotton you're growing now?" Li Long asked.
"Plastic film? What would we use that for?" Wang Mingjun looked puzzled.
Li Long understood. So they were growing upland cotton now.
Upland cotton was the earliest way of growing it, planted just like wheat and corn. It would be another few years before people began laying plastic