The Prince believed that as soon as he was able to implement his ideas, the serfs could be turned into farmers, and combined with Leaves’ improved seeds, the area around the Redwater River would soon become a golden wheat ocean.
Regarding the high priority of the toilet, it also had to do with the development of the agriculture — with enough people, land and seeds, the last thing he still needed was the right kind of fertilizer.
Roland certainly knew how troublesome it was to produce fertilizer out of human and animals’ excrements, they had to regularly clean the storage pond, but they also had to rely on human manure, in the end, it was clearly inconvenient. But for now he didn’t have any clue of how to produce it on industrial level, so for the present, he had to rely on this pure natural and organic fertilizer — at least human-animal manure had already been used for a long time, even during the twentieth century some of the rural areas were still using this traditional fertilization.
Many people only had very little knowledge about fertilizer, the vast majority of them just thought that a stool was a dirty thing, and that they should never believe that besides of spreading nausea it could ever have any useful effects. Thus, to cultivate the fields each year, the farmers were still using the three-rotation system. For it a piece of arable land would be divided into three parts, taking turns for spring sowing, sowing in autumn and resting phase, all this was done to avoid the depletion of soil fertility due to constant use.
For villages and small towns, it didn’t matter whether or not they used the rotation farming system. However, for big cities where the surrounding land was scarce, this system wasted a lot of land. For example, Silver City, Fallen Dragon Ridge, and King’s City were such places, so every month they had to import a large amounts of grain from other cities.
The first step in using fertilizer was to collect the manure. This was also the reason why Roland decided to establish the public toilets as soon as possible. With the toilets, he could reduce the spreading of disease and even beautify the living environment; it was such as simple action but it offered so many improvements.
His goal was for the toilets to already be constructed by the time the rest of the new citizens have been shipped over. As for teaching them how to use compost and cultivate the arable land, Roland decided to select a small group of experienced farmers during the next few days and teach them the system first. After all, the land was still in its clean-up phase, and it would still need at least a week before it would be useable.
After finishing all the work at hand, he decided to go meet Leaves at the back garden and take a look at her experiments.
Since Leaves improved all categories of seeds, there could be seen many different kinds of crops in the garden. She has also followed Roland’s suggestion and divided her farming area into several small blocks which were all given a number. With this, she could compare the developments of two groups of test crops.
When Roland stepped into the yard, he was stunned by the picture of golden and dazzling wheat swaying in the wind in front of his eyes.
“Your Royal Highness.” When Leaves, who was squatting beside one of her fields became aware of the Prince, she immediately stood up and bowed in greeting.
“Are these the results of your improvements?” He waved his hand trying to stop Leaves from going through the ritual greeting went then to pick one of the wheat plants, feeling the caryopsis with his fingers.
Previously he had no idea what the wheat would look like, but in contrast with the wheat fields in the prince’s former memories, those were not only smaller than the ones in his hand, they also had a lot fewer grains.
Leaves nodded in acknowledgment, “I let the wheat grow with my magic, then I harvested the ripe seeds and then planted the seeds once more, what you have in your hands is the result I got out of it. However… I repeated this process several times, but after two or three rounds of planting, it became difficult to grow the wheat as long and large as before, and I just can’t understand where the problem lies.”
