113: Chapter 113 The Summer Harvest Begins, and the Worries of the Royal Family!

General Wang Jian had a house in the countryside.

Besides hiring people to farm his land, he would also lease it to tenant farmers for cultivation.

During the summer harvest and autumn harvest, the tenant farmers would hand over a certain amount of grain as rent for the land.

Da Wu and Xiao Wu followed the members of the Wang family to the countryside.

When they set off, they also brought along wearing parts for the steam thresher, as well as maintenance tools like pliers and wrenches.

The wearing parts of the steam thresher were the gears.

The Qin Dynasty had "black oil," which is crude oil.

Although Zhao Fusu had the workers soak the wear-prone parts like gears in black oil.

However, black oil is not gear oil, and its performance in preventing wear is limited.

Therefore, not only did Da Wu and Xiao Wu bring many gears, but the maintenance workers who went to the countryside with the nobles also brought many gears.

After General Wang Jian arrived in the countryside, the Wang family immediately organized personnel to harvest the millet, wheat, and rice they had planted.

Yes, the Wang family's vast lands were not just for millet; they also grew a lot of wheat, and in plots with better water conditions, they had even planted quite a bit of rice.

Just as General Wang Jian had expected, after the grain market was opened up, a large number of people went into the business of buying and selling grain.

This involved buying grain from places where it was cheap and selling it in places where it was expensive to earn a profit from the price difference.

With a large number of laborers working on road construction for Zhao Fusu and entering factories to produce parts for steam threshers, the difficulty for the Wang family to find workers had increased significantly.

It was only after the Wang family improved the benefits, providing not only meals but also wages, that they managed to gather a group of laborers.

However, compared to previous years, the number of people was still much lower.

General Wang Jian frowned slightly.

After Zhao Fusu liberalized the economy and developed industry and commerce, he had a premonition that fewer people would continue farming.

But he had not expected the numbers to decrease by this much.

The ones with the deepest feelings about this were the stewards in charge of recruitment.

In previous years, as long as the Wang family recruited, a large number of commoners were willing to come and work.

It was nothing like this year, where he actually had to beg others to work.

The stewards all had their brows furrowed, their faces full of worry.

If the grain wasn't rush-harvested from the fields, dried, and stored in the granary before the rainy season arrived, the grain piled up would heat up and sprout.

Once grain sprouts, its texture and taste change significantly.

Grain that was originally plump and hard becomes soft and loose due to moisture absorption and changes in internal structure during the sprouting process.

For example, if sprouted wheat is made into flour-based foods, the texture becomes coarse, losing its original toughness and elasticity.

Rice that has sprouted will turn into mushy rice when cooked, lacking chewiness and having a greatly diminished flavor, which affects the eating experience.

Grain that has already sprouted has more vigorous respiration and metabolism than unsprouted grain, making it more prone to heating, molding, and spoiling during storage.

Even with certain storage measures, such as controlling temperature and humidity, it is difficult to prevent further deterioration. Therefore, sprouted grain is hard to preserve for long periods, leading to waste and economic losses.

It wasn't just the stewards who were worried.

Seeing how few hands there were this year, the members of the Wang clan also looked displeased.

To rush the harvest, they even went out into the fields themselves to harvest the grain.

Mainly because Old Master General Wang Jian had rolled up his sleeves to harvest rice, so how could they feel comfortable just watching him from the sidelines?

When Old Master General Wang Jian did farm work, his movements were skillful; he looked like an old farmer at a glance.

He pressed the rice clumps forward, making them lean slightly.

He held the sickle in his right hand and grabbed the rice stalks with his left.

Amidst the rustling sounds, General Wang Jian harvested one clump of rice stalks after another.

After cutting a large handful of rice stalks, he tied them into a bundle using a few stalks and placed it diagonally behind him.

General Wang Jian's left hand continued to grab the stalks in front of him to harvest them. When his hand could no longer hold any more, he tied them into another bundle, turned it around, and pressed it onto the bundle he had previously placed in the field.

Then General Wang Jian tied another bundle of rice stalks and pressed it onto the two bundles already piled on the ground.

There was a specific technique to stacking these bundles of rice stalks.

They weren't just placed randomly.

The stack of rice stalks General Wang Jian made looked like a curved bow.

The reason General Wang Jian stacked the rice stalks this way was to make it easier to gather them.

The curve of the stalk stack is usually convex, so that when gathering the stacks, the person doesn't have to walk to the outside.

General Wang Jian did not come from a noble background but from a poor family. With no relatives to rely on, he depended purely on his own talent. Since childhood, he had enjoyed practicing with spears and staves, and he especially loved military strategy.

After years of experience in the army, he relied on his talent in military strategy to repeatedly achieve great military feats, eventually becoming a General and single-handedly conquering five states, reaching the peak of his life.

One wonders if General Wang Jian's military talent was so great that it was all concentrated in him, as his son Wang Ben and grandson Wang Li did not possess any significant talent in military strategy.

If it hadn't been for that incompetent Hu Hai taking power and getting rid of Meng Tian, control of the Great Wall Legion would never have fallen into Wang Li's hands.

Under Meng Tian's command, the Great Wall Legion could drive the Xiongnu people back eight hundred li and seize the Hetao Plain from them.

Under Wang Li's command, the Great Wall Legion achieved no military success before being crushed by Xiang Yu.

The contrast was so great that one can only say an incompetent General exhausts the entire army!

When the sun reached its zenith, General Wang Jian stopped.

They had to thresh the harvested rice first so they could transport the threshed grain back before sunset.

In the past, a dozen or so women would stand in two rows, moving back and forth, using flails in their hands to strike the rice ears and thresh the grain.

This year, they were using a steam thresher. A dozen or so women stood curiously to the side, watching their men tinker with the machine.

After all, General Wang Jian was getting on in years. Three continuous hours of non-stop labor left him panting, so he sat to the side drinking qin wine to recover his strength.

He watched as the drum of the steam thresher began to rotate.

The women began spreading a large cloth in front of the steam thresher to collect the grain knocked loose by the drum's angle iron.

The farmers began gathering the rice, stacking the piles of stalks on both sides of the steam thresher.

The coal in the steam tractor's furnace burned brighter and brighter, and the drum's rotation speed increased.

The women picked up two bundles of rice stalks and placed the rice ears over the drum.

They felt the two bundles of rice stalks in their hands being pulled forward as if by a massive force, which gave them a fright, and they quickly pulled the bundles upward.