On September 12, 1651, at the junction of the Santa Maria and Camakang rivers, seven or eight hundred Ming people, dressed in single clothes, were busy in the dry water. They stood by the river, which was covered with reed mats and door panels (to prevent them from stumbling in the mud at the bottom), wielding shovels and shoveling inch by inch the already cracked riverbed—if these channels were not widened and dredged during the dry season, then perhaps the river would not be able to be navigated when the summer flood season came, which was undoubtedly difficult for the seven or eight hundred Ming men who had settled here.

If the waterway is not passable, then the materials cannot be transported, this is a truth that everyone understands. Other materials such as building materials (bricks, cement, lime, sand, etc.) are easy to say, after all, everyone can barely hold on to living in the shacks, but if things like food cannot be transported in time, then the situation of these pioneers in the deep hills of Huxi is very worrying. Although there was no harassment from the Indians, the wild was full of wild grass and forests, and the food was not very abundant, which was very difficult for them.

At present, they are a pioneer base named "New Castle" on the map, and the supplies they need for daily life need to be collected from the "Red Star Farm" further downstream. Red Star Farm, located near the city of Ferrado in Amara, Brazil, is also a pioneer farm that has only been built for a few months, and in addition to the more than 500 Ming people arranged by the Executive Committee, there are also some cattle breeders recruited from Jutland, Denmark.

As everyone knows. The cattle of Jutland in Denmark feed almost all of the Netherlands and the surrounding areas, and the local herders still have a lot of unique cattle raising techniques. Most of the cattle from Red Star Farm are imported from Denmark (to increase the variety of domestic cattle and enrich the gene pool of cattle). So he recruited some poor Danish cattle breeders to develop on the east coast. The treatment of these "skilled immigrants" is very good, not only free of charge a set of standard brick houses of the East Coast system, but also two cattle as a reward, the only requirement is to do their best to assist the Ministry of Farms to establish this mixed farming farm. After all, hilly and mountainous areas are rich in pasture resources, which is an excellent area for raising cattle and sheep. It's a shame if you don't make good use of it.

The construction of the Red Star Farm is much stronger than the new castle! Because the 72-ton inland steamboat can go directly to the temporary wharf on the bank of the Kamakuang River through the Grass Ridge, a large number of building materials, machinery and equipment, daily necessities and even livestock and personnel. All can get there with relative ease. Naturally, then, the construction of the area will not be bad - in addition to the farm department and the warehouse, hundreds of brick houses have been built for the new Danish cattle breeders, and it is said that a centralized water supply and sewage treatment pond are being built, and irrigation canals are being excavated. The successes of the construction have blinded the eyes of hundreds of pioneers in the new castle, and they have to work harder to dredge the river in the hope that the river steamboats will one day be able to sail straight to their docks.

The people of the new castle came to Red Star Farm every four or five days, and they brought with them a large team of mules and horses to bring back as much food as they could, and occasionally some tools, cloth, liquor, and tobacco, which were not easy to transport. Among the goods transported were flour and a little cured meat - mainly beef, from the nearby township of Mucaoling in Xihu County.

Speaking of Mucaoling Township. That was thunderous for both the Red Star Farm and the pioneers of the New Castle. Without him, most of the supplies needed to sustain life in these two places were supplied by here. Other words. It is the fruits of the development of Mucaoling Township that have been developed over the years, silently supporting the development of people on the east bank in the upper reaches of the Kamakuang River. You must know that the pasture ridge township was also gradually developed under the support of Dafeng Township, which is located on the shore of Duck Lake and near the mouth of the Kamakuang River, and now it is finally their turn to support the pioneering action in the upper reaches.

After years of development, the population of the township has reached more than 5,000 people. It is distributed in a wide range of hills and mountains. With their admirable courage and industrious and intelligent suzhì, they wiped out the nearby Guarani people, opened up thousands of acres of farmland, and built brick kiln factories. Shengsheng has transformed this wild land into a poetic mountain idyll.

Of course, as a typical agriculture in the hilly area, the agricultural structure of Mucaoling Township is quite different from that of the plain area. For example, the farmers here raise a particularly large number of cattle and sheep, especially the Andalusian black cattle, which are now the largest in the country on the east coast, which is almost seven or eight times the population of the country, which is impressive.

The benefits of such a large number of livestock are obvious, first of all, the large amount of manure it produces, which allows the cultivated land to be grown to maintain sufficient fertility, which is essential for a good harvest - according to the Xihu County Agricultural Bureau, the seed-to-harvest ratio of winter wheat in the whole township of Mucaoling is 1:19, which is the highest in the country, which is already a good explanation.

With the increase in the number of cattle base, the number of beef cows in the whole township of Mucaoling is bound to usher in a geometric growth in the next few years, in this domestic beef price has not completely dropped to a "reasonable price" era, aiming at the market to establish a large meat processing enterprise has become an inevitable choice. Since last year, Mucaoling Township has been ordering machines and recruiting people, and then set up a joint-stock animal husbandry products deep processing enterprise led by the Xihu County Government and the Mucaoling Township Government (and also made some in-kind investment) and heavily invested by some rural rich peasants -- Mucaoling Meat Products Factory.

The factory currently employs hundreds of workers, most of whom are Italian and Scottish laborers (commonly known as indentured slaves) brought from Europe by the famous labor brokers Valentino and Mendes. Since last summer, they have found a suitable place to build a small inland river wharf on the Kamakuang River, built several spacious factories with the abundant local timber resources, dug an ice cellar, and purchased an inland steamship with a cold room (ether freezer cooling).

After the factory was established, the factory began to go to the homes of villagers to buy beef cattle that were too old to work, and then pulled them to the slaughterhouse of the factory for slaughter. The slaughtered beef is stored in an ice cellar and sold in nearby industrial cities such as Ping'an and Zhenhai in the future by ship with a cold room to make a profit. On top of that, another part of the meat (or perhaps the majority) is sent to the processing plant next door for reprocessing – mainly salting.

Salting is carried out in specially made marinating tanks, that is, workers put a certain concentration of brine in some particularly large wooden barrels (originally intended to use iron cans, but abandoned due to the lack of tin plating technology in the inner layer), and after thorough stirring, they put in various types of meat (mostly lean meat), and then seal it to allow it to marinate itself.

This method of pickling in brine was also first built by Danish immigrants to the East Coast, and was quickly accepted by the builders of the factory - this method is most suitable for large-scale industrial production, and a fool would not accept it! The salted meat pickled generally contains 5%-9% salt, which is suitable for the consumption taste of ordinary urban workers, and its sales are better, and the dry-cured salted meat with red color in Europe (because the pickling mixture contains a lot of nitrate, and some of them contain saltpeter at all) are not the same at all, so the sales in Ping'an and Zhenhai counties are quite good, which makes a dry investor very happy.

What made them even more pleased was that the Joint Staff Headquarters of the Eastern Republic had also ordered a large amount of bacon and ham from them to supply the daily consumption of the troops; In addition, the Ministry of Communications, the East Coast Building Materials Company, the State Railway Administration, and even the Southern Railway Company as far south as the South Railway Company have placed orders for large quantities of cured meat from them to supply their large labor force, which is fair, the largest customer of the Mucaoling Meat Products Factory at the moment.

The cost of large-scale and industrially produced cured meat products is often much lower than that of the commodities that farmers have cured themselves and sold on the market. Coupled with its relatively uniform taste (strictly controlled salt content), safe purchase channels and supervised processing process, this makes it very competitive in terms of self-processing cured meat from ordinary villagers, and often completely outperforms them in the end.

This is almost the first industrial pickling factory in China (the meat factory in Dongfang County is based on the state-owned pasture of the pasture township, which sells fresh meat to the capital area), and its establishment has won unanimous praise for its good performance in just over a year. Now, even the Ministry of Immigration, the General Directorate of Exploitation, and the like have begun to order large quantities of bacon from them to support the consumption of the pioneers of the new settlements.

This is the case for the two to three thousand pioneers at the nearby Red Star Farm and the New Castle, where the General Bureau of Pioneers purchases up to two tons of salted meat and salted ham every month from the Mucaoling Meat Products Factory to supplement the nutrients of the pioneers who are doing heavy work, and this alone can bring them hundreds of yuan in profits every month, which is not unimpressive! And if we zoom in on this at the national level, what a deal it would be if so many new settlements were to buy relatively cheap and uniform bacon from them every year! (To be continued)