Chapter 129 - Sweet Potatoes

As a gesture of reciprocity, Shi Niaoren was eager to do something to express his gratitude. No, not just to the chemical department, but also to the Industrial and Energy Committee, the Agricultural Committee, the Army and Navy, the Ministry of Civil Affairs…

Counting on his fingers, it seemed there were too many departments and people to express gratitude to, and it was not appropriate to favor one over another. The best way, it seemed, was to send a token of friendship to the transmigrators in all these places.

This was rather difficult. The Ministry of Health was in the business of saving lives and healing the wounded. In general, the people in the Ministry of Health enjoyed unparalleled expert treatment within the transmigrator group. Wherever they went, everyone was very polite, and their requests were always met as much as possible if they could be satisfied—for no other reason than that in this time and space, medical care was the scarcest resource. No one dared to say that they would always be healthy, never get sick, and never get injured until they became one of the five hundred powerful family heads.

This was a mixture of fear and respect. Shi Niaoren disapproved of this kind of respect, which was triggered by the fear of “perhaps having to ask for his help in the future and falling into his hands.”

The Ministry of Health was too revered now. From the perspective of long-term stability, they should do something to win more goodwill from everyone.

Shi Niaoren’s gaze fell on the road outside the window. The early summer sun was shining brightly, and the newly planted roadside trees were all withered. The people walking by, whether they were transmigrators or native workers, were all wearing straw hats and sweating profusely.

“Hmm, heatstroke prevention and cooling,” Shi Niaoren immediately thought of this. Liu San said he wanted to prepare a few traditional Chinese medicines, such as Zhuge’s marching powder, Shidi Shui, and Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui. The medicinal materials for these three things were easy to obtain. They could be purchased from local pharmacies and grown by themselves. The auxiliary materials were nothing more than ethanol. They were very effective for common summer diseases.

But making medicine takes time. It would be a bit difficult for Liu San and his apprentice to prepare enough medicine. The workers in the pharmaceutical factory were not ordinary workers. Not only did they need to be highly responsible, but it was also best if they knew some pharmacology. Expanding the staff was not something that could be done overnight.

“Hmm, saline solution!” Shi Niaoren suddenly thought, “Salt soda water!”

Salt soda water was a labor protection product. It was the best drink for manual laborers in summer. It not only prevented heatstroke and cooled down, but also helped to maintain the electrolyte balance in the body and prevent dehydration.

But Shi Niaoren immediately thought that he didn’t have baking soda. Not only him, but the chemical department didn’t have it either. Baking soda was not a rare thing, but it required soda ash first. As long as the soda ash factory was not in operation for a day, there would be no baking soda available for a day. So he had to give up this idea for now.

If he couldn’t make soda water, he might as well make saline solution first. Thinking of this, Shi Niaoren decided to go to the pharmaceutical factory. He was waiting for He Ping to come to give some administrative instructions and talk about the Mongolian doctor training class—this was the nickname they had privately given to the first doctor training class. Through online recruitment, the Ministry of Health had found four or five transmigrators who wanted to escape labor and satisfy special hobbies by studying medicine.

He Ping, however, did not come after a long wait. While he was anxiously waiting for him, a man with glasses walking with his legs apart came. On his chest was a number “007.” Shi Niaoren took a closer look and saw that it was actually Dugu Qiuhun, the head of the East Gate Market police station.

“Doctor, please have a look at my illness… here,” the chief Dugu quietly pointed to a certain part.

Shi Niaoren asked carefully, lifted his clothes to check the signs, and had an idea in his mind.

“It’s a chlamydia infection, nothing serious,” Shi Niaoren said tactfully.

“What’s chlamydia, inflammation?”

“This…” Shi Niaoren thought for a moment. “It’s no big deal. Infection, infection.” He wrote a prescription. “Take the prescription to the pharmacy and get the medicine from He Ma. Ask Sister Li to give you a shot. You’ll be back in action in two or three days,” Shi Niaoren comforted him and casually took a small paper box from the table and gave it to him. “Be careful when you go in and out.”

Dugu Qiuhun was startled, “Yes—!”

“It’s alright, it’s not a serious illness,” Shi Niaoren said with a smile. “It’s better to have less contact with native women in the future.”

“I know! Is this no problem?”

“It’s really no problem. You should pay more attention to your health and get your shots on time,” Shi Niaoren comforted him for a long time and gave him some more instructions before sending him out.

“If it weren’t for erythromycin, you’d be in big trouble!” Shi Niaoren muttered to himself. He knew that many people had recently hooked up with native women. Originally, the Executive Committee thought that the Ming Dynasty was a society of feudal ethics, and the social atmosphere was very closed. As long as everyone was restrained from prostitution and rape, there would be no problems between men and women. Now it seemed that the so-called feudal ethics were just that.

Now Shi Niaoren was in no mood to wait for He Ping. He left a note on his desk, giving him a few things to do, and then went to the farm.

Wu Nanhai was not in the office. According to his office secretary, Chu Qing, “Master is at the food processing plant, processing sweet potatoes.”

“By the river?” Shi Niaoren had never been to this place. He had only heard that there was a mill there that processed rice for the locals.

“Just go out from here and walk south…” Chu Qing’s Mandarin was a typical “Guangpu” of this time and space. It was clear that she was deeply influenced by Wu Nanhai—Shi Niaoren knew that it was not just her, but even the head of the long-term workers here, Wang Tian, had the same accent.

Since Wu Nanhai’s Agricultural Committee moved to Bairen City and opened up the farm, sweet potatoes were one of the first crops to be planted.

As a high-yield and stable crop, sweet potatoes have the characteristics of wide adaptability, strong resistance to adversity, drought and barrenness tolerance, and few pests and diseases. In addition to being used as a staple food, feed, and for making starch, even the leaves can be used as high-quality green fodder—almost no part is wasted. When planted in places with good water and fertilizer conditions, the yield can generally reach 3,000 to 5,000 kilograms per mu, and in some cases, 7,500 kilograms per mu. Compared to hybrid rice, which becomes ineffective after being planted once, it is a more meaningful “transmigration artifact.”

However, in this time and space, sweet potatoes were not quite “artifact” enough. Sweet potatoes were not a novelty here. They were introduced to China from the Philippines during the Wanli era. They were first planted in Guangdong, and Qiongzhou, which was just across the sea, also had them. When the transmigrators went to the countryside, they often saw sweet potatoes.

Before planting sweet potatoes, Wu Nanhai, out of caution, had asked Wang Tian—who was also a skilled farmer—about the situation of sweet potato cultivation in Lin’gao. Wang Tian said that this thing had been planted in Lin’gao for seven or eight years. The seed potatoes were first introduced from Qiongshan, and quite a few people planted them. The advantage was that it was not troublesome; you just planted it and that was it. The harvested potatoes were good for people to eat and for feeding pigs. The growth period was short, and it could be harvested twice a year in Lin’gao. It was an excellent miscellaneous grain—it just couldn’t be stored. The local climate was humid, and sweet potatoes were prone to rot. The growers here did not know the various methods of storing sweet potatoes in cellars. Some people had tried to slice and dry them for storage, but they were also prone to mold during the rainy season.

“The harvest is large, and it doesn’t require much labor or fertilizer. At most, one mu can yield a thousand or so jin. But this thing can’t be stored. It’s useless for small households to plant too much. Only the large and small grain households with many long-term workers and livestock plant more.”

“Master Wu! Now that there are so many long-term and short-term workers on the various farms in Bairen and Bopu, we can plant more sweet potatoes—it’s a bit of a loss to give the long-term workers rice for every meal. In fact, if we mix rice and sweet potato shreds half and half, give them half a bowl more in quantity, and add some pickles and salted fish, it’s already the food for the busy farming season. It saves a lot of grain,” Wang Tian enthusiastically suggested. Then he presented the tricks he had learned while working as a “foreman” for a landlord to save money for his master to Wu Nanhai.

A complex expression flashed across Wu Nanhai’s face. On the one hand, this showed that Wang Tian had the intention of “loyally serving his master.” On the other hand, Wang Tian’s behavior was not much different from that of a “traitor.” Wu Nanhai had often heard people say in the past that when foreigners came to China, they were originally honest, but they were all corrupted by a group of fawning “traitors.” Although this was biased, it was not without reason.

“This, let’s discuss it again, let’s discuss it again,” Wu Nanhai couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Seeing the uncertain expression on Wu Nanhai’s face, Wang Tian didn’t know what he had said wrong and fell silent.

Wu Nanhai thought for a moment and asked, “You said one mu can only yield a thousand or so jin?” He didn’t believe it. He knew from his internship in the countryside that farmers could easily get two or three thousand jin per mu.

Wang Tian said, “It’s only in the first year that we can get more than two thousand jin. Then it gets less and less each year, sometimes as little as eight or nine hundred jin.”

“That’s impossible…”

Fa Shilu, however, nodded and reminded him, “Virus infection.”

“Yes, yes, I actually forgot,” Wu Nanhai said with a look of shame. This was very basic knowledge, and he had completely forgotten it.

Sweet potatoes, as well as tuber crops like potatoes, are propagated asexually for a long time. During their growth and storage, they can be infected with multiple viruses. The viruses will continuously accumulate in the tubers or seedlings, causing serious degradation of the variety, deterioration of quality, and a significant drop in yield. The yield reduction can be from 30% to 70% or more.

During the autumn harvest of 1957, Hongtong County in Shanxi set the then national record for sweet potato yield: the Fenming Agricultural Cooperative in Mamu Township had a sweet potato yield of 5,510 jin per mu.

A yield of five thousand jin per mu for sweet potatoes is no longer a rare thing in the 21st century—with new high-yield, virus-free sweet potato varieties and careful cultivation, the yield in the first year would not be less than ten thousand jin. But in 1957, it was already the first in the country—and this first in the country was somewhat inflated. Without professional technical support, the yield of sweet potatoes is not ridiculously high.

So far, there are no sweet potato varieties with high resistance to viruses in agriculture, nor are there any specific drugs to prevent and treat viruses. Only by using virus-free technology can virus diseases be prevented and the yield and quality of sweet potatoes be improved.

Modern farmers do not need to save their own seeds. It is all handled by professional seed companies. When Wu Nanhai went to the countryside for his internship, what he saw, planted, and talked about were all virus-free sweet potato seedlings. He only needed to consider what kind of soil and climate to match with which kind of seedling, so naturally, he didn’t think of this.

Even specially detoxified sweet potatoes will be infected and degenerate again after three or four years of planting. How to detoxify is a specialized high-tech. Fa Shilu had considered various plans on how to solve this problem in this time and space. He had also brought a set of laboratory equipment specially used for detoxification.

The transmigrators’ first batch of high-yield, virus-free sweet potatoes was planted in December 1628. Generally, in areas with four distinct seasons, sweet potatoes are cultivated from seedlings in February, transplanted in April, and harvested in August. Lin’gao has the advantage of having a temperature above 18 degrees Celsius all year round, and it can be planted in all four seasons. In order to ensure that the seedlings did not leak out, Fa Shilu, Wu Nanhai, and other key members of the Agricultural Committee personally planted them, without using any native workers. With careful care and management, they welcomed the harvest at the end of April this year. The experimental planting of ten mu of sweet potatoes achieved a good result of 4,000 kilograms per mu—due to the lack of chemical fertilizers, this harvest was far from realizing the advantages of the variety. In order to harvest the sweet potatoes, they had to mobilize soldiers from the army and navy and students to help.

The sweet potato harvest on the farm was a great success, with a yield of more than 8,000 jin per mu. This yield not only shocked Wang Tian, but all the employees on the farm were also surprised. The news spread quickly, and many people wanted to come and see what the Australian sweet potatoes looked like. Wu Nanhai had the army soldiers who were helping with the harvest stand guard on the periphery, not allowing any outsiders to enter the farm’s fields until the sweet potatoes were completely harvested.

Eighty thousand jin of sweet potatoes was not too much even by ancient standards. In the countryside, they were often stored in cellars and used slowly. But after April and May in Lin’gao, the weather would soon enter the rainy season, and there was a certain risk of mildew in cellars. Moreover, the various industries of the transmigrator group had an urgent demand for the main product of sweet potatoes: starch. In the end, Wu Nanhai decided that except for a portion to be kept for seed and promotion, the rest would all be transported to the food processing plant to be processed into finished products.

Sweet potatoes can produce many products: vermicelli, glass noodles, maltose, glucose, dextrin, yellow wine, alcohol, soy sauce… In fact, it all boils down to the same thing, mainly starch derivatives. Therefore, Wu Nanhai determined that sweet potato processing would focus on starch production, and the waste residue and materials produced during starch production would be used to make some by-products.

The Ministry of Light Industry was also very interested in the harvest of a large number of sweet potatoes. Mo Xiaoan came to report every day and constantly put forward his own views on what new things to produce. Unexpectedly, the product he was most enthusiastic about was not the “very modern” glucose, dextrin, or instant rice noodles, but dried sweet potatoes—to be precise, Liancheng red heart dried sweet potatoes—one of the famous eight dried foods of Minzhou.

“This thing sells very well,” when Shi Niaoren ran to the bamboo shed that was called a food factory, he saw Mo Xiaoan explaining, “It was an export commodity back then. Even now, sweet potato strips are a very popular snack. In this time and space, sweet potatoes are still a novelty. We can take the high-end route…”

“I think this is unlikely—” Wu Nanhai was not optimistic about the dried sweet potato plan. “The natives of this time and space rarely eat snacks. It’s only some rich and idle people who eat them.”

“There’s no market in Lin’gao, but we can export it to Guangzhou.”