Chapter 172: Feed

“Will this kind of crossbreeding lead to degradation?”

“A little, but it’s not a major issue. The existing Holstein-Friesian cattle in China are essentially the product of crossbreeding a few Dutch Holstein-Friesians from the 19th century with local cows. Their milk production is quite good, and they are resistant to roughage. The downside is that the butterfat content is a bit low.” Yang Baogui said with a smile, “People often say that domestic milk tastes bland and not as rich as foreign milk. Besides adulteration, this is also a factor.”

“With a lot of dairy cows, we can implement the ‘student milk’ program, which will greatly improve the physical fitness of the next generation! At the very least, every transmigrator can have milk to drink every day.”

“Actually, I think making dairy products like cheese has more potential,” Yang Baogui said. “Chinese people are not very tolerant of lactose, but dairy products are fine. And dairy products are easier to preserve—our conditions here are poor, so preserving fresh milk might not be feasible.”

They then walked past the stalls of several other cows. Besides the one pregnant with a dairy calf, there were others bred with various other breeds. The frozen semen of several different bull breeds in the liquid nitrogen tank had now been used to inseminate local cows. Some were for pure meat production, while others were dual-purpose.

After the cattle pens came the sheep pens. There were very few sheep in the enclosure, only a few dozen. These were Changhua sheep that had recently been transported from Changhua Fort. It seemed they were not yet accustomed to being penned; from time to time, a ram would try to ram the fence.

These sheep were to be raised for a period, after which the better-quality ewes would be selected for artificial insemination. The Agriculture Committee also had semen from several superior breeds of goats and sheep. However, Yang Baogui was not sure if sheep were suitable for Lincheng—it would be better to wait until they had conquered regions with higher latitudes before breeding them.

The nearby sheepdog ran out, barking loudly to restore order to the flock.

“Beibei, stop barking!” Yang Baogui shouted, and immediately a group of dogs ran over, wagging their tails furiously at him. Among them were some puppies.

“Look, ‘Huanhuan,’ ‘Yingying,’ and ‘Nini’ are all hero mothers. They’ve given birth to over twenty puppies in just half a year.” Seeing Wu Nanhai pick one up and not want to let go, he said, “I’ll give you one.”

“Forget it. Raising a dog gives a bad impression to everyone,” Wu Nanhai said, putting it down reluctantly, even though he felt it was a pity.

“That’s true. Several girls have asked me for a dog, but I didn’t give them any,” Yang Baogui said. “We need to train them well before distributing them to various departments. Ma Qianzhu even wants to form a military dog team, and the General Security Department wants some too.”

“Having a dog guard the door would be much more reassuring,” Wu Nanhai remembered. “Are there local dogs? I might as well just get a local dog to guard the door.”

“Of course, there are. I’ve caught a few to see if I can create a localized crossbreed. The dogs here are typical Chinese rural dogs, with a very low level of domestication. They’re more likely to be beaten and eaten as meat dogs. Cats are a bit better,” Yang Baogui said. “Although cats and dogs don’t produce direct benefits themselves, they are a great help to agricultural production. When the sheep flock gets bigger, I’ll have to arrange for grazing, and I’ll need dogs to help.”

Yang Baogui proposed that, in addition to poultry, promoting sheep farming would also be a good project in the promotion plan. Sheep are resistant to roughage, easy to care for, don’t require special feed, and take up very little labor. Women and children can herd them, making it a common poverty alleviation project.

Wu Nanhai shook his head. “Sheep are too destructive to the vegetation.”

“That’s in the arid and semi-arid regions of the northwest and north China. Here, there’s abundant rainfall and rich ground cover. A few sheep won’t cause much damage. Besides, a single farming household can raise at most a dozen sheep; the land’s carrying capacity is very small.”

Wu Nanhai was tempted. “Let’s wait until this chicken promotion is successful,” he said. “We have to give them to responsible farmers—dealing with ten eaten chickens is one thing, but if they eat a few of our sheep, it will be difficult. If we hold them accountable, they’ll go bankrupt. If we don’t, this program can’t continue in the future.”

The last part of the livestock farm was for rabbits. At first, the rabbits were very unhappy living here—it was too hot. At that time, among all the livestock on the farm, the rabbit hutch had the best cooling conditions—built directly under a large tree—but the rabbits were still listless and refused to breed. This gave Yang Baogui a headache—did he need to get them an air conditioner or something? It wasn’t until the late autumn in Lincheng that their passion was finally kindled. Rabbits have a formidable reproductive rate. They can go into heat and mate at any time, with a gestation period of only one month. A mature domestic rabbit can give birth to 6-10 kits per litter. The rabbit plague in 20th-century Australia, which the government and farmers could not eradicate, was the result of just five pairs of European domestic rabbits breeding for 100 years.

Rabbits are herbivores with low feed requirements, making them a very suitable source of fast-growing meat.

Now, in this rabbit hutch that had been expanded once, there were more than 30 rabbits, including 10 Angora rabbits—Wu Nanhai recognized them at a glance. To help the Angora rabbits survive the summer, they had been shaved.

“Rabbits don’t breed in the summer, so we’ll have to wait for autumn,” Yang Baogui said. “By the end of the year, we should be able to provide everyone with rabbit meat. Our Ministry of Health also needs rabbits.”

“Let the Ministry of Health dissect them first, and then we can eat them.”

“They can be used for physiological dissection, but not for pathological experiments.”

“Naturally,” Wu Nanhai suddenly remembered. “I recall there are wild rabbits in Lincheng. Have you ever thought of using local wild rabbits to improve and expand the population?”

“It’s not very suitable. And wild rabbits may carry viruses. It would be a disaster if they spread.”

Finally, they came to the wasteland near the river. This area was close to the highest water level of the Wenlan River in summer. Peanuts and watermelons were planted in the sandy soil. A little further away were several large ponds, connected by channels, emitting a foul smell. Wu Nanhai knew this was the biochemical sewage treatment system that Tian Jiujiu had built. The breeding farm was a major source of sewage. Washing the cages produced a large amount of wastewater rich in organic matter. A simple biogas digester was not enough to treat it, so a biological treatment system was built. The wastewater first passed through a sedimentation tank, then into a treatment pond where aquatic plants were grown to absorb the excess nitrogen and phosphorus.

The surfaces of several ponds were densely covered with duckweed. Laborers were scooping it out—duckweed is an excellent source of green fodder and compost. Not far from here was the farm’s silage pit.

“The duckweed in the ponds is also a source of feed,” Yang Baogui asked Wu Nanhai very seriously, “The Agriculture Committee seems to have high hopes for the livestock industry. I just want to know, have you considered the feed issue? You know, without grain, there is no livestock industry.”

“Of course, we’ve considered it.”

Wu Nanhai explained the feed solution, which they planned to solve through three channels.

The main source of starchy feed would be solved by expanding the cultivation of sweet potatoes. This included the sweet potatoes themselves and the by-products of their deep processing, such as starch water and pulp.

Second was green fodder. In modern agriculture, this is mainly corn silage. In China, because grain is precious, the practice is to use corn stalk silage. In Lincheng, the Agriculture Committee didn’t even have corn, so they used silage made from alfalfa and other leguminous fodder crops, as well as sweet potato leaves. In addition, high-yield vegetables like pumpkins and zucchini planted on scattered plots of land like the “ten-side” lands could also provide some feed.

The most important protein feed would come from, one, raising earthworms and maggots, and two, recycling by-products from oil pressing operations, such as soybean cake, peanut cake, and coconut oil cake. The seafood factory in Bopu could also provide some fishmeal made from miscellaneous fish and fish offal.

As for feed additives, calcium could be directly recycled from eggshells and bones, or stone powder could be added. They were not short of salt, and if necessary, they could get some trace element supplements from kelp and seaweed.

By-products of agricultural processing such as rice straw, rice bran, and sweet potato skins were not ideal as feed, but they could be used as a supplement, especially after processing, to be better utilized by livestock.

Calculated this way, the sources of feed were quite extensive, and at the current scale of farming, there was not yet a situation of feed scarcity. According to the estimates of Fa Shilu and others, the feed supply would be quite abundant after the sweet potato harvest in the second half of the year, which would also coincide with the peak birthing season for livestock in the autumn.

“Last time, Fa Shilu told me we need to use our brains and not always think about corn and sweet potatoes. We can also get a lot of supplements from wild plants—in the past, children in the countryside had to go out and cut grass to feed the pigs.”

“Are there such plants in Lincheng?”

“Of course. They are common plants found everywhere. Wild grasses of the Poaceae family like cogon grass, foxtail, goosegrass, saltgrass, and barnyard grass are all good for making pulp or silage to feed pigs. Needless to say, wild legumes are well-known to everyone. Wild vegetables like lamb’s quarters, Russian thistle, thistle, purslane, wild amaranth, sow thistle, oxtongue, and cleavers can all be fed raw or after fermentation. Then there are green tree leaves, like poplar, willow, elm, and mulberry leaves. Although not everywhere, they are not uncommon. We can mobilize students and semi-laborers in the commune to collect them as a side job and get a lot.”

“To be honest, I was very tempted to bring water hyacinth back then. You can scoop it out of the rivers by the ton. During a summer outbreak, it can pile up like a dam. It’s much more efficient than using a human wave to collect feed.”

“Let’s forget about such invasive species. In the long run, the trouble is endless. We shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. Duckweed is enough. We also considered bringing tilapia and crayfish, but they were all rejected in the end.”

This issue had caused great controversy during the material preparation phase before the transmigration. Tilapia, crayfish, and others were all shot down in the debate. In the end, it was decided not to bring any controversial species. Since they all exist on Earth, if they were needed one day, they could just be farmed locally.

“Crayfish are delicious. What a pity. Everyone loves them.”