The wind is blowing, and autumn is strong.

There is no shortage of short brown farmers walking back and forth on the ridges of the fields, carrying bamboo hats on their heads and long bamboo poles on their shoulders, with hooks at one end of the bamboo poles. Once the barnyard grass in the rice field is found competing with the seedlings for nutrients, the bamboo pole slips in the hand and sticks out, and with a slight hook, the barnyard grass is hooked out and thrown next to the ditch.

This set of actions is like a smooth flow, not only to test the school's eyesight, but also to the wrist strength, ingenuity and so on are extremely demanding. For those who practice makes perfect, a bamboo pole rotates flexibly in the hand, as if the extension of the arm, which not only cleans up the weeds, but also does not hurt the seedlings.

If there is such a master of weeding in any farm, it is like a treasure and needs to be treated seriously and respectfully.

Near the ditch next to the rice field, there are often children in linen shirts where they laugh and catch butterflies and insects, and occasionally older children carry bamboo baskets to rummage in the grass to collect berries and herbs.

This kind of agricultural goods, every farm is a long-term purchase, if you are lucky to touch a large group of gathering points, you can exchange for more than the parents' daily work. At this time, the children are proud of their achievements, clamoring for their parents to eat meat.

Of course, while doing these things, they also have to take care of the buffalo in the mud pond. Those buffaloes are owned by Zhuangzi, if they lose their fat and suffer from disease, which affects the harvest of Zhuangzi at the end of the year, every family in the village will have a few points less than the annual prize. If this kind of thing really happens, the parents and elders will not be polite to the child, and after a few bamboo planks, the buttocks hurt so much that they dare not sit for half a month.

At noon, the women who were raising mulberry and silkworms in the workshop were idle, and they made hot meal soup with quick movements, and put it in a huge bamboo barrel, and the strong arms of the man carried the wooden barrels one by one onto the bamboo raft sampan, etc., and then shook out the Zhuangzi and sent the rice soup to various places where the Zhuangzi belonged.

At this time, during the whole busy day, the men, women and children have to gather together, sit on the ground, eat while holding the soup, laugh and talk about trivial matters, and think about how much work they can get at the end of the year, how much surplus they can have at the end of the year, whether to replace the brick houses with more spacious bricks and tiles after a few years, or to prepare for the work and marriage of their children.

After the lunch, the men go back to work in the fields, the children go to play and herd the cattle, and the women return to the village with their hands on their own, and then according to their strengths, they either reel silk and weave, or cook fish, or go to the orchard to pick ripe melons and fruits, or raise and care for the livestock in the farm, or prepare hay for wintering.

The whole day is busy, each performing its own duties, and being orderly. At dusk, the large bamboo hall in the village was full of people, waiting for the scribes in the bamboo hall to calculate their share of the day's work.

At this time, it is also the busiest time for every farmstead. Some families get more work than expected, and the whole family laughs, laughing at a few neighbors who are too lazy to grow.

Some people suspect that the accounting of the work is wrong, so they make a big noise in the big bamboo hall, and let the scribe calculate it several times, no matter whether the result is right or wrong, they often have to drop a sentence: "Tomorrow, I will send my son to the art hall, and I will learn the skills of Lao Tzu and be the steward!" ”

The wooden barrel under the big tree is full of plum soup or bamboo leaf tea, for people to drink to cool off, of course, there are all kinds of food, but this extra meal in the evening is to deduct work points, most families are reluctant to waste so much, pour a full stomach of herbal tea to survive.

If you really can't hold on, you can use the mountain pheasants, fish and shrimp, wild vegetables and the like caught and collected during the day to boil a pot of soup, which is enough for the family to eat. If there are children who are really noisy, they can only take out the dried fruits and pastries distributed by the farm during the New Year to appease them, and threaten the children to work more tomorrow to earn back this unnecessary luxury and waste.

Although each family in the farm has a share of wax and oil tickets, in fact, few houses light up candles after dark. Those who can turn on the lights, except for those in charge of the house, are the children of the family who are studying in the art hall and need to be lit up to study.

Of course, this kind of family is often the first class of wealthy families in the farm. Therefore, there is a folk proverb in Wukang and even in Wuxing today, which is used to satirize those who are glamorous and good at talking: "You can't open your eyes to see things at night, and you deserve to say that your surname is Shen!" ”

After a day's work, the children were washed away with mud by the neck, and then they were thrown on the bed, and soon fell asleep, but they were not honest in their sleep, kicking their legs and shouting at their parents to take them to play in the Longxi Hundred Opera Garden again.

Listening to these dream words, even if the husband and wife had some fun, they also hummed, and then whispered a few gossips, and soon there was a steady snoring sound.

This kind of Zhuangzi, the larger ones are between 100 hectares, the smaller ones are 20 or 30 hectares, and there are more than 1,000 Zhuangzi people, and the few are between a few hundred. In Wukang alone, there are more than 200 such Zhuangzi, of which there are only about 20 that really belong to the Shen family, but almost all of them are around the Shen family or attached to the Shang Alliance.

When Shen Zhezi returned home, it was already the end of August, and then there were many guests, and it was noisy until the beginning of September. Although there was an endless stream of visits every day, fortunately, it was not as concentrated as in the first few days, and I was able to take time out to do some of my own things.

In the past few years, he has been living in Jiankang and has hardly returned to his hometown, and now most of the family business is actually taken care of by Shen Zhezi's third uncle Shen Hong. Although there are communication situations all the time, it is better to see and feel it with your own eyes.

So as soon as he had some leisure, Shen Zhezi and the third uncle and the others went around Longxi to inspect the entire Wukang.

The development of cooperatives is even better than Shen Zhezi expected, and many of the first batch of Zhuangzi to be restructured have almost doubled their production capacity.

For example, Longxi Laozhuang, which is run by his family's ancestral business, has more than 3,000 people, which seems to be a small number, but it is a scale that has developed after a large number of people have been transferred to Huiji.

It can also be said that it is one of the most typical models of cooperative farms, with the main cultivated land between 100 hectares, and there are more than 20 workshops of various kinds, and the main food products produced every year have a large surplus in addition to meeting their own consumption. As for the by-products of the workshop, it is purely profit-oriented.

This Zhuangzi alone produces more than 50 million yuan of profit every year. The reason why there is such a huge income is because many of the products produced by Longxizhuang have represented the top craftsmanship of the moment. Products such as celadon, snow satin, and caramel have formed a double monopoly of market and technology.

Not only the orders of the Shangmeng are drifting like snowflakes, but even the merchants as far away as Jingjiang live in Wukang all the year round, just hoping to leak a little bit between the fingers of the Shangmeng.

However, the income of other Zhuangzi is not as high as that of Longxizhuang, and some even have a slight loss. In the final analysis, overly refined luxury goods are just a means to ensure income, and they are not the focus of Shen Zhezi's business. Most Zhuangzi is still mainly cultivated, after all, food is the core of maintaining social stability and stimulating population growth.

Nowadays, the model of agricultural cooperatives, with Wukang as the center, has quickly become popular throughout Wuxing. On the one hand, it is because of the strong support of the county government Yutan, and on the other hand, it is naturally because this model has more advantages than the closed operation of the manor, and can quickly fission.

In the past, the manor was too conservative, and the people and property of the shade households did not belong to themselves, and there was little communication with the outside world, which resulted in low production capacity, and the accumulation of capital was very primitive and slow, and after deducting the cost, the real harvest was not much.

What cooperatives bring is a market-oriented, precise division of labor, industrialized, large-scale production mode. In other words, as long as the large households provide agricultural tools, cattle, fields and other means of production, they can reap a lot of profits, provided that they give up some of their personal control over the farmers.

It is true that population is an extremely important asset to the great families of today, but on the other hand, it is also a burden. At the beginning of Shen Zhezi's crossing, the huge food gap almost almost collapsed his family, which was the inevitable price to pay for shading a large number of people.

Of course, in addition to the advantages of the organizational form of agricultural cooperatives themselves, another very important reason for the rapid expansion is the sales channel of the business alliance. When cross-regional market transactions become the norm, the previous hoarding becomes meaningless, and the operation that was too slow in the past becomes outdated.

During this period of time, Shen Zhezi received many visiting villagers in the township, and while discussing current affairs, he felt the most that the strong feudal style of Wuzhong and inherited from Eastern Wu was breaking the ice. People talk about the management of the family business, especially among young people, no longer on the basis of population and land, but on the basis of the goods at hand and the accurate profits.

Of course, the first premise of this series of changes is to ensure regional security and ensure that production and trading can be carried out normally. As in the past, whenever there was a war in Jiangdong, it was inevitable that the rebels would swarm, and production would be seriously damaged, and trading would be impossible.

However, with the establishment of the Dongyang Army, regional security was guaranteed, and although Wuxing was still inevitably in turmoil, normal production was not delayed. With the general failure of harvests in various places this year, grain will become an extremely important political bargaining chip in the second half of the year and even in the next two years.

So right now, for Sergeant Wu led by the Shen family, it is simply a superior situation that the dynasty has never had! If you want soldiers and soldiers, you want money and money, you want food and food, it can be summed up in a simple sentence, that is, wealth is big and coarse!