At two o'clock in the afternoon, after Shao Yuanyi woke up from a nap, he rushed to his field unhurriedly. His wife Natasia was tying up wheat stalks in the field, Shao Yuanyi sighed, what a girl who can't be idle, the family's assets are now thousands of yuan, and when she is busy, she can't even go to the field to work, alas, it's really a fall.

His two older sons were also following their mother, carefully picking up the missing ears of wheat in the field, which was said to be a task given by the school, and all the students had to go to the field where they were harvesting when they came home from school. And at this time, whether it is their own children picking ears of wheat in the field or not, the adults will show a tolerant smile, the price of grain on the east coast is cheap, and the little grain left out in the field is picked up, and not many people care.

Their family has a total of 60 acres of land (30 acres per person), and when they are busy, they invite two Italian hired workers to come over to help, mainly to raise the grain, spread the dry, and put it into storage. Shao Yuanyi is a well-known doctor and a private money lender, who gets a lot of money every year, and he no longer needs to dig food from the soil. It's just that out of some deep-rooted habits, the sixty acres of their family are still being cultivated, but they need to hire someone to help them the whole time.

The hired people are generally part of the labor group controlled by labor brokers (the ownership of these people has not been transferred to the East Coast government), and they usually "move bricks" on various labor sites, and when they are busy farming, they are attracted by high wages to go to the countryside to work short-term, that is, they are mainly responsible for wheat harvesting (not all places have harvesters), threshing, drying and subsequent grain packaging and sales, etc., all of which are heavy work, and the money earned is also hard money.

Forty acres of Shao Yuanyi's family's sixty acres of land were planted with wheat, and the other 20 acres of fallow land were planted with alfalfa. At this time, the wheat in the field was almost finished, and Shao Yuanyi had no intention of looking at it again, so he was ready to go home. Unexpectedly, he ran into Gao Jinzhong, who came to buy wheat by the grove at the entrance of the village.

Gao Jinzhong is one of the main partners of the now growing Rabbit Hole Flour Mill, and over the years they have "conquered the east and west", not only to unify the flour market in Zhenhai County in one fell swoop. Now it has begun to march into the neighboring Zhongshan County and Xihu County, and has launched fierce competition with local enterprises. And as an important part of the competition. The rush to buy wheat as a raw material has entered a white-hot stage from the very beginning, and the owners of the major flour processing workshops have crossed the sea to show their magic and began to rush to the countryside where they are familiar with each other.

This year was no exception, from the beginning of the harvest season, Gao Jinzhong and others came to Mucaoling Township, where several comrades-in-arms worked (all of them were township cadres), ready to take advantage of their convenience to buy grain - mainly needed their help to contact the leasing of transport ships, these inland river transport ships were quite in demand in the East Coast Republic today, and the steamships of the state-owned inland river transport company generally undertook the bulk transportation tasks such as ore, rails, machinery, building materials, coal, etc. There is no extra capacity at all; The work schedule of the inland waterway transport ship purchased by private funds is also full, and people who have no relationship or friendship rashly come to the door, but they may not be able to rent the boat.

As a private money lender, Shao Yuanyi often had farmers who were in urgent need of money to give him the low price of grain, so his family built a grain depot to store all kinds of dead grain that he received. Over time, Gao Jinzhong also knew that he had a lot of food stored at home, so he often came to buy it, and the two had some friendship after coming and going.

If you meet outside by chance at the moment, you naturally have to say hello. Therefore, I saw Shao Yuanyi waving his hand at Gao Jinzhong, and said with a smile: "This year is really urgent, this grain has just been cut." You're here. Is business booming now? It seems that there have been a lot of people in China in the past two years, and fortunately, grain production has increased year after year, otherwise, it may not be able to feed so many mouths for eating. ”

"Why! It's a harder business than it used to be. Gao Jinzhong sighed as soon as they met, and then explained: "The Linhu Flour Mill in Xihu Town, Guixian County, is now competing with us very hard." I heard that the flour used by the Dafeng Food Company to make zuò biscuits was now purchased by them, and several branches of the General Directorate of State Development along the Yakui River were also ordering flour from them. Damn, I've climbed the high branches, and now it's very horizontal. The momentum is kind of going up. ”

"Dafeng Foods' biscuits?" As soon as Shao Yuanyi heard Gao Jinzhong's words, his mind immediately remembered the biscuit that his son had eaten this morning—a biscuit made with high-quality flour, butter and sugar. This biscuit has only been on the market for a few months now. The price is still relatively expensive, and families with average incomes still regard this fresh food as a luxury. is also a local tyrant like Shao Yuanyi, who is not bad for money, will buy it for his children to eat as snacks. Of course, he himself is also very fond of eating this sweet and crispy food, especially the "Fu" series (there are four series of East Coast biscuits, namely the "Fulu Suxi" series, based on the words engraved on the biscuits), which is his favorite.

"Don't be discouraged, your factory is not bad, there are so many people in the construction team of the Third and Fourth Bureaus of Communications and Construction, they have been buying your flour, and this business is not small, so be content, other small milling workshops still envy you." Shao Yuanyi laughed and said.

"It's incomparable." Shao Yuanyi didn't say that it was okay, but when he said that Gao Jinzhong was full of bitterness, he only heard him say: "The Linhu Flour Mill sells second-class and third-class flour, and even the first-class and special flour sold to Dafeng Food Company is too profitable." As for us, most of the flour sold to the construction team is fourth-class flour (mixed with a lot of bran, the color is blackened), and occasionally there is a little second-class or third-class flour, which is not a grade at all. ”

As soon as Gao Jinzhong said this, Shao Yuanyi understood that the cadres of the Third and Fourth Bureaus of Communications and Construction did not regard their construction workers as human beings at all, and in order to save money, they tried their best to buy the cheapest inferior flour for them to eat -- in fact, strictly speaking, this so-called fourth-class flour was no worse than what these Italian, Scottish, and Polish laborers ate in their hometown -- as for the second- and third-class flour purchased a little, it was estimated that it was still eaten by the black workers and themselves, and this profit margin really could not be compared with that of the other people's Linhu flour mills.

However, it is normal to think about it, as the scale of domestic infrastructure on the east coast is getting bigger and bigger, the number of these foreign "non-nationals" is also increasing, and their daily expenses have gradually become a big burden. Although the State Development Administration, the railway company, the construction bureaus of the Ministry of Communications and other employers have been trying their best to squeeze their labor force, and enjoy the benefits brought by these cheap labor, but if it is specific to what kind of treatment they are given, the funds have not been very sufficient, they have to consider it, after all, the money of the people on the east coast is not blown by the wind, and they must save some money.

Fourth-class flour, a little meat and fish (whale, salted fish, cured ham) and some vegetables are already the greatest sincerity that these employers can show, and any more will make their balance of payments impossible to maintain. In any case, this kind of treatment is quite good compared to the daily life of the laborers in the Old World, and they are indentured slaves bought by the East Coast government, so there is nothing to complain about - perhaps, the only thing they can complain about is the lack of labor protection equipment, the high rate of work-related injuries, the heavy work, and the excessive cruelty and rudeness of the black laborers.

"The quality is not enough to make up for the quantity...... Shao Yuanyi picked a fruit from the tree next to him, wiped it with his sleeve and ate it, and then comforted Gao Jinzhong while eating: "The profit margin of your products is not high, but the powder yield is high!" People sell first-class and second-class powder, but the powder rate is only more than 60%, which is much worse than yours. Besides, the number of domestic laborers has exceeded 80,000 now, and it is a market of more than 100,000 yuan a month. Can the state-owned Dafeng Food Factory's machine quì powder line fill this hole? It's impossible! Therefore, you are right to take the road of the construction team, and the extension of Highway 2 is still being built, so you must hold on to this line and not let it go. ”

It is said that after several years of "accumulation", especially in the past two years, the Polish prisoners of war sold by the Crimean Tatars (including Poles and German mercenary prisoners of war, most of which have been sent to the Far East) and the ordinary Polish and Ukrainian civilians they have taken captive; At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, Europe bought thousands of Cossacks and rebel serfs from Khmelnitsky who were about to be executed. Adding up the two, and counting the Italians and Scots who came to the east coast through guò labor brokers, the number of these white indentured slaves has exceeded 45,000, of which about 10,000 were assigned to New China to "send to death" (in fact, it was a tropical frontier), 5,000 were "borrowed" to the Southern Railway Annex, Hezhong County in South Africa and the two bases in Australia, and as many as 30,000 remained in the mainland.

These people, together with about the same number of Indians, and the number of Xhosa blacks, numbered about 20,000, constituted the majority of the "non-nationals" in the East Coast. These non-nationals were active on all fronts of construction, helping the people on the east coast to build reservoirs, dredge rivers, build houses, build roads, and complete docks.

But since you are a contract slave, then you have to manage the food and drink of other people, and the daily expenditure of these 80,000 people is extremely huge, and the consumption of flour alone is not a small number. In addition to the milling line of the state-owned Dafeng Food Factory, most of the supply is made up by privately invested mills. And this huge market, has always been a great attraction to the increasingly abundant private capital, a lot of social funds have been attracted to this industry, in the intensification of industry competition at the same time, but also make the industry operators forced to constantly improve the management mechanism, continue to reduce costs, constantly improve new technologies, and constantly open up new markets, in order to cope with the fierce and breathless competition.

In this way, the private industrial capital on the East Coast surprisingly began to explode from the light industry of machine flouring. (To be continued)