A little calculation made it clear: Zhuwei Lake was not particularly large, yet it still covered roughly ten thousand mu of water. Dredging it to an average depth of one meter would mean six to seven million cubic meters of silt...
Wang Shouzhe had seen dredging boats in this world before.
They all relied on laborers using dredging rakes to scoop the silt onto the boats. A single dredging boat could carry only around ten cubic meters of mud.
The silt normally cleared out contained plenty of organic matter. Once mixed with other fertilizers, piled up, and fermented, it became a fine agricultural fertilizer that could replenish the fertility of farmland.
After all, the river and lakebed silt of this era had not accumulated contaminants such as heavy-metal pollution.
But six or seven million cubic meters meant six or seven hundred thousand boatloads! If ten dredging boats worked year-round, with each boat clearing three loads and hauling three loads of fill each day, it would take over twenty thousand days—sixty or seventy years without rest!
Moreover, the silt would shrink drastically after drying, while the marshland itself was mostly sludge. At most, it would likely yield only two or three thousand mu of good farmland. The whole project was expected to cost more than ten thousand Qian Gold.
After consuming such immense manpower, resources, effort, and time, it would cost three or four Qian Gold to reclaim a single mu of land. That was rather uneconomical.
If Zhuwei Lake were dredged another two meters deeper, the cost would more than double. The farther down one dug, the harder it became to clear. Even buying fertile farmland would cost only two or three Qian Gold per mu.
Yet the accounts could not be calculated so simply. Once Zhuwei Lake had been