At the end of May, the harvest is approaching.

In the war-torn Julu County, nearly half of the fields throughout Julu were once barren. Fortunately, since the beginning of spring this year, the refugees have been working hard to replant the barren land with peas, which has somewhat made up for some of the harvest.

Peas are one of the famine-relief crops. Because peas are resistant to waterlogging and drought, and bear fruit quickly, if you plant peas in February of spring, you can see the pods in mid-April. As early as April, the pea pods already have beans, and they can already be harvested.

It's urgent. It's now May and the peas are completely mature.

Peas were being harvested everywhere in Julu. Harvesting was an important matter. Li Mengxi took people down to check. Everywhere they went, the settled refugees were not only happy to see the food, but also more concerned about how much they should pay.

of grain.

The yield of peas is far inferior to that of serious grain. If one acre of land is harvested, the pea seedlings can pile up into a mountain, but the harvested peas are only half a bag.

Li Mengxi asked a farmer, "Can the grain we see last until next summer's harvest?"

The farmer smiled innocently, "Save your food and you can survive."

That is to say, if you are not rich in food, you have to save money to eat, and if you pay more, it will be tight.

The plan for the giant deer is to live for one year, be stable for two years, and be strong for three years. In the first year, it can barely survive without starving to death. In the second year, it will be full, and in the third year, it will have enough food.

, only then can it have the power to expand.

The farmer was very concerned about paying grain, and he repeatedly asked Li Mengxi how much he had to pay.

Li Mengxi turned around and asked the officer behind him, "Cang Si, how much food does our army have?

Will the existing grain reserves be enough to feed the tens of thousands of people in the city until next year?"

Cangsi carried a grain and fodder book with him. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, and replied that the grain stored in the city was not enough to fill the city.

If there is not enough food, it must be confiscated.

In retrospect, since the sunset of last winter, in order to provide food for hundreds of thousands of refugees, the first batch of grain was obtained from Liu Yu of Youzhou, and the second batch of grain was purchased after borrowing money from the Zhen family in Changshan.

In other words, we have supported hundreds of thousands of people for half a year just by borrowing and buying money. Going forward, we will no longer be able to borrow money, and we will have no money to buy. It is no longer feasible to ask for external help. From now on, we can only

Can rely on self-production.

Grain must be collected, but how to collect it is also troublesome.

There are many troubles. First, the year is not good and wars are inevitable, so the grain output is not high. If too much is harvested, people's livelihood will be difficult. Second, the grain production is uneven. As mentioned before, nearly half of the Julu fields are barren.

Half of the land is replanted after spring, and all the land is replanted with peas. This means that some people harvest all peas, while some people harvest all wheat.

Although Li Mengxi didn't understand the nutritional structure, he also knew that something would happen if he kept eating peas. It was also not good to keep eating wheat. The best way to coordinate was to collect all the harvested grain and distribute it according to needs.

.

When the word "distribution on demand" popped into my mind, I couldn't control the idea anymore.

Li Mengxi recalled that when sowing in the spring this year, because the residents in each place had no blood relationship, the manpower was gathered from all directions. He thought that in this way, no one would have any family ties, and this would be a direct dismemberment.

They destroyed the rural order and directly eliminated the foundation of the landlords. However, they never thought that agricultural production could not be done by one person. Production such as sowing seeds and plowing the fields could not be done by one person.

Without dismantling the rural order, farmers can live together according to their clans and relatives and can cooperate in production. However, at the same time, those powerful landlords are also dependent on their clans and their foundation is still there, which is hidden and unstable; but if the people in each village are divided into seven

They are scattered and scattered everywhere, which directly eliminates the hidden dangers caused by the powerful old landlords, but at the same time it also makes collaborative production very difficult.

In order to enable people with no blood relationship to collaborate in production efficiently, the only way Li Mengxi thought of was through collective production.

The significance of collectivization is not only production. Collectivization also includes distribution methods, extremely high manpower utilization and extremely high production organization, which involves fundamental reforms. In Li Mengxi’s view, in the late Han Dynasty,

In an era of weak productivity, it is extremely difficult to improve productivity. If we want to ensure that everyone has a stutter, we can only solve it through distribution.

If the distribution problem is not solved, it will be inevitable that the wine and meat will stink in the wealthy families and the roads will freeze to death.

After thinking about it, Li Mengxi came back to his senses and looked at the farmer in front of him who was waiting for a reply. He grinned and said, "We'll have to go back and discuss how much grain to harvest after a while."

Li Mengxi has decided to start collective production in the next farming season.

It happens to be the summer harvest now, so it's good time to collect all the grain and distribute it uniformly according to needs. It's good time to let the people get familiar with the collectivization model.

After finalizing the next plan, Li Mengxi stopped going on subsequent inspections. He ordered the officials to spread the news that the grain was to be collected. He did not say when it would be collected, and ordered the people to prepare it after collecting the grain.

Li Mengxi's plan was to wait some time, when the wheat was ripe, and when all the grain was harvested, he would collect all the grain produced this year.

On the way back, Li Mengxi covered his eyes with his hands and looked up at the sky. It was already the end of May. Although the weather was hot, there was no feeling of heat at all.

The poem goes, "The Tian family has less leisure time, but people are twice as busy in May." May is the wheat harvest season, but last year, the wheat was delayed until June before it was completely mature, and this year it is again.

The climate is weird, with cold weather year after year, and wheat ripens late every year. It is estimated that this will continue to be the case in the next few years.

——

Back in the city, Li Mengxi was alone in the city lord's mansion, quietly thinking about all aspects of the next grain collection, distribution, and even preparations for starting collective operations.

First of all, let’s talk about collecting grain. Normally, it is not difficult to collect grain, whether it is one tax per ten or one tax per twenty. But this time, all the food must be collected and then distributed uniformly. This is very important to the people.

This is the first time for them, so they are bound to encounter suspicion and resistance. When suspicion and resistance arise, people will do their best to hide the food and try to keep some in their hands. Therefore, if you collect food, you should try to collect every grain.

The people from each village brought all the people and food to Julu, and at the same time, they used the excuse of moving to another place to eliminate the possibility of the people hiding it secretly.

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Then, the people moved to Julu together with people and grain. The grain was collected together, the manpower was consolidated, and the rations were distributed uniformly. After the grain was distributed, equal labor for farming was distributed to various regions according to the number of acres of land in each region according to the old method.

Collecting and distributing grain is not too difficult. The rebels are quite popular. Once the policy of distribution according to need comes out, although there will inevitably be resistance, the people will probably cooperate.

But when it comes to collective production, this is no longer something that can be easily implemented if people have the will to do so.

Collectivization, commonly known as big pot rice, what is the prerequisite for eating big pot rice? There is no doubt that the prerequisite for eating big pot rice is a big pot.

Thinking of the pot, Li Mengxi couldn't help but frown. Iron pots are called artifacts. There are two ways to make iron pots: forging and casting. Forging is too expensive, and you can't forge a pot that is too big. And casting requires coke. Without coke, molten iron cannot be melted.

There is no way to cast a giant iron pot.

We are short of coke and don't know where to find it, so we have to go to Luoyang to find it.

Once you have a big iron pot, you will have the basis for eating a big pot of rice.

At each farm site, work starts every day. Two old and weak people are left to make fires and cook, and a few more old and weak people are left to do some work of cutting grass, feeding chickens, pigs, and collecting firewood. Then, the young and strong laborers go to the fields to farm, and each person is divided into

With the plot of land, centimeters will be obtained after the work is done, and then the centimeters will be exchanged for grain, cloth, and all the necessities of life.

Li Mengxi recalled the various problems caused by the big pot rice system in later generations. The first problem was that after collectivization, there was no charge for eating and drinking, and everything was eaten in one pot. As a result, although the public food belonged to everyone, it did not belong to the individual alone.

, this results in people eating and drinking without feeling distressed at all. Everyone wants to have as much porridge as possible and steamed buns as big as possible.

The result is that when productivity is underdeveloped and food is not enough, people eat and drink too much, and food cannot cope with it.

There is a famous saying that goes like this: "If you want to prevent something from becoming extinct, make it private."

The tiger disappeared because he was not privately owned, and horses were privately owned, so people would protect the horses.

The Song and Ming dynasties were two feudal dynasties whose horse administration failed extremely. The reasons for the failure of the horse administration in the Song and Ming dynasties were the same. In order to obtain war horses, these two dynasties used administrative means to make war horses public. In the Song Dynasty, the government forcibly transferred horses.

They were raised by farmers. In the Ming Dynasty, the government forced horses to be raised by military households. As a result, farmers raised horses that were not their own, would not care at all, and would try every means to torture the horses to death.

Assuming that the Song and Ming dynasties used private ownership to purchase horses, and the government purchased horses from the private sector through economic transactions, then driven by interests, if it was profitable, the people would definitely find ways to raise horses and keep them well.

Tigers in public ownership are extinct, but donkeys are privately owned, so donkeys keep multiplying.

Publicly owned resources will eventually disappear.

Publicly owned food will also be eaten up by the people without any care.

Therefore, the first thing to do when eating a big pot of rice is to strictly regulate the daily ration quantity per person from the beginning to prevent excessive eating and drinking.

The second problem of Big Pot Rice is distribution.

If a group of people eat from the same pot, conflicts will arise if who has one more bite and who has one less bite.

Li Mengxi had a way to solve the unfair distribution. The method was to make the porridge maker be the last one to serve the porridge.

In this way, the porridge maker will definitely try to make every bowl of porridge the same and every steamed bun the same size. It is not difficult to distribute it fairly.

In later generations, the most serious problem of collectivized production was that in the later stages, people found that no matter how much they worked or how little they ate, no one was willing to work harder and everyone was lazy.

As a latecomer, Li Mengxi felt that the root cause of people's slackness may be that the degree of collectivization is too high.

To put it simply, assume that there are 100 laborers and 1,000 acres of land in a village.

The first collective production method is that these one hundred laborers are responsible for working all one thousand acres of fields, and then the total output of one thousand acres of fields is counted as the total output of these one hundred laborers, and the output is evenly distributed among the one hundred people.

In this case, the relationship between personal efforts and personal gains will be too small.

Another method of collective production involves one hundred laborers in the village divided into five groups of twenty people each.

Then, the output of each group's fields belongs to each group. How is this different from the large collective model above? The difference is that in this small collective model, individual efforts are much more closely related to personal gains.

In a small collective production of twenty people, if there are ten lazy people in this group, the remaining ten people may give up their work, but they may also curse and work harder at the same time.

.

This is because, in the small collective model, individual efforts have a great impact on collective production. In this model, even if others do not do it, if you work hard yourself, you will suffer a loss, but in the end you will produce more, and the responsibility will fall on you.

There will also be more food.

In the large collective model, the impact of individual efforts on one's own gains is too small, which makes no difference between working hard and not working hard.

In the small group model, if there are twenty people in a small group, at least one-twentieth of what they do will fall on themselves. The gains that one-twentieth will definitely get can make many people endure it.

The next nineteen-twentieth suffered a loss.
To be continued...