Yuan Xi sat on his horse, looking at the locust in his palm and saying nothing.
At the end of the Han Dynasty, there were frequent locust plagues, which caused great harm to the whole country. Grain harvests dropped sharply and local production was seriously damaged.
Last year, Yuan Xi accurately predicted the locust plague in Jizhou in front of Yuan Shao, and with the help of Tian Feng, he minimized the damage of the locust plague, thus preserving the vitality of Jizhou and becoming the confidence and capital for Jizhou to launch troops against Gongsun Zan.
Although the locust plague in Jizhou has been extinguished, it is impossible to completely eradicate it. If the loss can be reduced by half, it is equivalent to a great success.
The remaining locusts are ready to attack again this year. Although Jizhou has taken some measures in advance, the remaining locust eggs from the previous year still fly around and cause harm after hatching, but it is difficult to prevent them.
This naturally includes the direction of Youzhou. Yuan Xi has now entered Youzhou, but he has discovered many locusts along the way, which makes him quite worried.
In the past two years, Youzhou has built water conservancy projects and harvested a lot of food. As a side effect, the locust-infested areas have begun to move northward.
Locust-prone areas are most common in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, especially in the provinces of Jizhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, and Qingzhou. However, they gradually decrease in the south of central China, and are basically absent along the southeastern coast.
From 700 BC to 1900 AD, during these 2,600 years, there were 508 locust plagues recorded in history books, including 436 in the Yellow River Basin, 69 in the Yangtze River Basin, and 3 in South and Southwest China.
The places where locusts lay their eggs are mostly low-lying places where water accumulates and aquatic plants grow. Unless the grass is cut and drained, it is extremely difficult to control.
Different from Youzhou a thousand years later, the Youzhou area in this world has extremely rich water systems, and most of the terrain is swamp wetland. Although after the water is drained, there will be excellent fertile farmland, but this process, even if artificially accelerated, may take a long time.
More than ten decades.
Before this, the only way to open up wasteland was to farm next to wetlands and swamps, which invisibly created a breeding ground for locust plagues.
This goes hand in hand with Youzhou opening up wasteland, vigorously developing water conservancy, and growing food. Without food, there would be no locust plague.
However, people cannot starve to death. If they want to increase food production, they must face the dilemma of frequent locust plagues. At the same time, they cannot stop eating due to choking and can only find ways to reduce the damage caused by locust plagues.
There are many methods, including timely discovery of locust breeding sites, driving out the hatched locusts and filling them in landfills, digging up the soil for egg-laying sites in winter months, and catching adult locusts, etc.
These measures are already quite well known, and even without the knowledge of later generations of Yuan Xi, they are recorded in detail in agricultural books of this generation.
What hinders the control of locusts are often human factors. For example, the theory of induction between heaven and man proposed by Dong Zhongshu is a great obstacle to the control of locusts.
It believed that heaven is the king of all gods, and that the emperor was ordered by heaven to exist in the world. This gave rise to the "transformation theory", which believed that all disasters from heaven were the will of God. Only through sacrifice and prayer can disasters be transformed and returned to normal, which is called
Become complex.
Under the advocacy of this theory, it is recognized that the final means to control locusts is to offer sacrifices.
This idea is reflected in Bai Juyi's poem "Catching Locusts", "It's useless to catch locusts. It only makes hungry people heavy labor and waste. Although one insect dies and hundreds of insects come, how can it be a natural disaster for manpower."
This is because they believe that man-made locust hunting cannot overcome natural disasters, and the root of the cure must rely on the emperor to swallow locusts for sacrifice to calm God's anger.
Under the advocacy of this kind of thinking, the method adopted during the locust plague in the late Han Dynasty was that the emperor blamed himself and then waited for the locust plague to disappear.
Of course, this will not have any effect in the eyes of future generations, so the locust plague becomes more and more severe day after year.
But now, the locust control situation faced by Yuan Xi has actually improved. This is not only due to the military disaster that led to the waste of production, but also to the weakening of imperial power.
The Han Dynasty lost its virtue. After the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the Emperor could not intimidate the world. The prestige established by the Han Dynasty over the past four hundred years was almost collapsed. In contrast, for the control of locusts, the princes of the world no longer relied on the Emperor to show off and blame themselves. Instead, they themselves
Start thinking of ways to manage it.
There are two sides to this matter, just like the comparison between the previous locust plague and grain farming, which is very ironic. However, the good thing is that now Yuan Xi can abandon the negative impact of the theory of heaven-human induction to the maximum extent and mobilize the people of Youzhou to control the locusts.
He went to Guo Jia with locusts and discussed with him how to prevent locust plagues. Guo Jia listened and gave some suggestions.
After talking, the two of them realized that now Yuan Xi had more than one counselor. In Youzhou alone, there were Jushou Chen Gui and others. Chen Gui was originally responsible for this kind of thing, and it was no longer Guo's responsibility.
Good luck.
Yuan Xi couldn't help but laugh and said: "It's my fault. In the past two years, I relied on Mr. for everything. Now that there are suddenly more people, I am not used to it. I always subconsciously come to Mr. for advice."
Guo Jia smiled and said: "I am the same way. People's habits can indeed affect their actions. Fortunately, it is not on the battlefield."
The two looked at each other and laughed.
After Yuan Xi got on the horse, Lu Lingqi came over, holding a locust in her hand, and said: "When I was a child, there was a locust plague in Wuyuan, Bingzhou. It was really overwhelming."
"Later, all the food was eaten away, so we had to eat locusts to satisfy our hunger. I was forced to eat several meals."
Yuan Xi was surprised and said: "If there are too many locusts gathered, they will turn from green to yellow, and then they will be poisonous. Are you okay if you eat them then?"
Lu Lingqi scratched her head and said, "Is there still such a thing? Now that I think about it, I did have diarrhea several times, and some people died of it."
"But if you are going to starve to death, eating a full meal will give you a better chance of surviving, right?"
Yuan Xi was silent, Lu Lingqi was right, as the poem said, if famine still eats people, how can we not eat locusts?
Sometimes people are about to starve to death and will drink poison even though they know it is poison. If a person is drowning and there is a crocodile in front of him, he will still hold on to it.
For most people in this world, there are not many choices to survive.
Yuan Xi and Lu Lingqi rode side by side. Now the passage back to Beicheng has been smoothed several times, and the road condition is much better than before.
In ancient times, road paving, compared to its low production capacity, actually involved cutting down trees, leveling weeds, and making a dirt road. If the road could be compacted, it would be great.
As for smoothing the roadbed, filling it with three-component soil, and placing gravel or stone slabs on it, it is not generally used in big cities, let alone in the wild.
Therefore, on the roads between various places, people and animals have traveled a lot, so they can smooth the road surface. The layers on top are also mixed with livestock excrement, which slowly pile up and become part of the road.
If there is a flood or heavy rain, the loess road will be washed away and become pitted and muddy, making driving extremely difficult.
In the past two years, Yuan Xi also considered these problems when he mobilized civilians to build roads. Although he did not have no solutions, he ultimately faced the same problem.
economic costs.
Building a road of better quality and adding hardened materials requires an astronomical amount of manpower and material resources for a small-scale peasant economy. Especially after such a road is built, it requires frequent maintenance!
The cost of road maintenance in later generations sometimes often exceeds the cost of construction, let alone in ancient times, when people didn't have enough to eat, where would the money come from to do this?
Therefore, large-scale construction projects in ancient times all required labor levies, and countless civilians died in order to succeed, and the negative effects were very large, often leading to social unrest, and it took many years for the aftermath to subside. A typical example is that the predecessors planted trees, and the descendants took advantage of the shade.
Yuan Xi considered cement, lime, and asphalt, but later gave up. Especially for asphalt, the fuel problem of light heating could not be solved.
You should know that Yuan Xi has vigorously promoted drinking boiled water in Beixin City for three years and distributed some firewood from time to time. However, even so, more than half of the people are still in short supply of firewood for cooking, let alone boiling water.
In an era when people can't even get enough to eat by farming, blindly engaging in labor-intensive projects is tantamount to committing suicide. All new technologies cannot be divorced from productivity, otherwise they will only be fantasy.
This is the helplessness of the times. In ancient times, productivity was so low. The two major problems that restricted development were food and energy. Without sufficient supply of these two, all other means are empty talk.
Yuan Xi sighed in his heart, in a time of great strife, if you only stock up on food and don't stock up on guns, you will be robbed and killed, so immersing yourself in farming is just a beautiful vision.
Now all the princes in the world are waging war. Under this situation, Youzhou has a good environment. At least it is blocked by Jizhou in the south, so there are less worries.
But Yuan Xi also knew clearly that by relying solely on farming, he could only maintain food and clothing. If he wanted to obtain more land and wealth, the most effective way out was to go to sea.
He has already thought of a blueprint in his mind. Next, western Youzhou will enter a period of stable development, but Liaodong and Liaoxi in eastern Youzhou are still wild lands, and there are many places to start.
The first step is to establish ports and develop shipping and fisheries.
Youzhou has a very long coastline, from Yuyang to Youbeiping, to Liaoxi Liaodong Territory, Liaodong County, and Lelang County. This series of coastal counties has extremely convenient port addresses.
Youzhou has developed salt and iron and luxuriant trees, and has the conditions to develop the shipbuilding industry.
In recent years, relying on the Zhen family shipping trade route, Youzhou has established many ports. As long as Yuan Xi finally takes Lelang, Liaodong, he can go south to the Korean Peninsula, establish a springboard, and shorten the navigation distance with the Japanese Nu Islands.
Yuan Xi's ultimate goal was to completely digest and deal with the mustard ringworm disease of later generations in this era of prosperous martial ethics and incorporate it into the territory of China.
Since these two places in later generations want to steal Chinese culture so much, why not turn them into the shape of Chinese culture now?
Of course, the Gongsundu family that now occupies the Liaodong Peninsula is not an easy one. Its power is extremely stubborn. If you want to deal with it, you still have to come up with something that can tempt the other party.
Thinking that he would die at the hands of this family in the future, Yuan Xi felt quite complicated. However, there was no grudge between the two parties in this life. If it could be resolved peacefully, that would be the best.
After all, in Yuan Xi's view, Gongsun Du is a Chinese citizen after all, and no matter how the two sides fight, it is also an internal conflict.
Later, Sima Yi killed all the Gongsun family and moved the people above him to the interior. Yuan Xi did not agree with it.
This move was tantamount to giving up the Goryeo Peninsula. As a result, Goguryeo, which had been suppressed by the Gongsun family, took advantage of the situation to rise and occupy the territory that belonged to China.
Thinking of this, Yuan Xi sneered in his heart. It was impossible to give up. It was absolutely impossible to give these places away.
Now that I have come to this era, China has no right to cede territory. From now on, whether it is sea or land, China's road will only go outwards!