Chapter 750 Battle to Save Famine! Warehousing, Livestock, Fisheries, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium!
The sails on the mast of the grain ship were swollen, and it slowly crossed the strait and sailed into the harbor of the Kingdom of Kent. The amount of food entering the port every day will be recorded by the local magician and reported directly to the Magic Council through the information transmission system of the Mage Tower.
As for the parliament headquarters, there is a dedicated magician and a group of accountants, who are sweating profusely:
“500 tons of wheat arrived at the Port of Nevis!”
"200 tons of wheat and 100 tons of oats have arrived at Inverness Port!"
"800 tons of wheat, 300 tons of barley, and 150 tons of oats have arrived in the royal capital!"
"Arrived at Blister Port..."
These data are continuously aggregated upwards. After analysis and judgment, batch after batch of instructions were quickly issued:
"There are not enough warehouses! Within half a month, Mage Towers in various places will speed up the construction of grain storage cellars! The construction standard is 3,000 tons for small towns and 10,000 tons for county towns!"
"Open cement firing authorization! Open access to learn spells such as [Magic Missile], [Force Field Impact], [Earth Fissure], [Dragon Breath Hand], etc.! Mages who redeem this spell for free rush to various places to participate in the construction of granaries !”
"Deploy the prophecy mages! Go to the mage towers in each area, locate the depth of the groundwater, and find a suitable location for building a warehouse! If you determine that this area is really unsuitable, report it quickly and make another plan!"
"Tell the Black Crow Swamp gang to stop living in the tombs, get out quickly, and take their skeletons to help dig the cellar for the Mage Tower! It's busy farming time, and it's not convenient to hire people. The skeletons are idle anyway!"
"What about fishing? How much consumption can the fishing sustain? Herring? Cod? Mullet?"
"Only 2,000 tons a year?! What is 2,000 tons enough! Just enough to fill the bellies of Nevisians! - Find a way to expand fishery production! What do they need? More ships? More salt? Or lower taxes? "
"Vigorously import marine fish! Where is the most prosperous fishing area nearby? The Netherlands? Can it produce 300,000 barrels of herring a year?... How many pounds is a barrel of herring?"
No one dared to laugh at him. In fact, no one from the great magician who asked the question to this group of aloof wizards knew how many pounds a barrel of herring weighed. Someone immediately rushed out to ask, and after a while, the number was reported:
"The barrels are different sizes, the dimensions are different, the weight of a barrel varies greatly - cod, herring, pike, moray eel barrels are all different sizes, between 200 pounds and 500 pounds float."
The Archmage immediately glared. The clerk turned the page of information in his hand and quickly speeded up:
"However, the Duke of the Netherlands unified the rules for catching, salting, and packaging herring, as well as the size of wooden barrels more than fifty years ago. If herring is imported from the Netherlands, a barrel is 360 pounds. .”
The Archmage finally breathed a sigh of relief. There are 300,000 barrels of herring a year, and one barrel weighs 360 pounds, which is almost 50,000 tons. If we could eat them all, each person would be able to get almost 1 pound of fish per month——
A little is a little, but it is not so little that the splashes of water cannot be seen.
"Import large quantities of salted fish from the Netherlands! Don't let them be sold to the Carolingian Kingdom, sell them to the Rhine Kingdom! - Exempt them from tariffs! Parliament subsidizes! Or, use penicillin, use pain relief scrolls, and use various export restrictions Exchange the supplies with the lord!"
"Increase sea salt production! Find new salt fields, find rock salt mines, and increase refined salt production!"
"Let some of the navy change their mission and go to sea to hunt whales for me! Boil whale oil! Hunt seals and walruses, boil the oil and bring it back! These are very good foods. A spoonful of whale oil will fill your stomach better than a pound of bread. !”
"Open up the pastures and let farmers raise sheep and pigs..."
Orders were recorded one by one, then divided into various departments, and passed on in a streamlined manner. One problem is solved here, and another pressing issue arises over there:
"The manure is still not enough! The entire Kent Kingdom has about 8 million hectares of cultivated land and about 14 million hectares of pasture. If we don't fertilize the pastures now, all the manure, river mud, and biogas residues added together will only be enough for the fertility of the cultivated land for one season. half!"
"What about in the city?"
"Mage towers in various places have communicated with the lords and asked them to collect feces in various cities. However, the progress is relatively slow. Except for those that are already implemented in Heartland City and Newster County, it is expected that the compost collection work will be completed by It’s the second half of the year.”
"Where's the replacement?"
"I've tried peat, but it doesn't work. It needs to be treated. The specific treatment method, the change system cooperates with the prophecy system, and the God of Nature priest is still trying. The best solution has not been tried yet..."
"Let them speed up! Get 1,000 basic version of the mental potion and ask them to try to process it within half a month!"
"Based on the paper submitted by Master Nordmark, the Alchemy Guild tested 13,785 minerals in stock. The conclusion is that carnallite and wastewater from sea salt production can be used as potash fertilizer after treatment."
Now we finally have good news. The jury member who asked the question breathed a sigh of relief:
"How are the domestic mineral reserves? Are they enough? Are there enough manpower to process them?"
"The amount of mineral reserves is not bad. The result of communication with the royal capital is that there are several large rock salt mines with mountains of waste rocks. The royal family is willing to provide them for us to use. The local mage has already rushed there. After elemental determination and concentration measurement, it is determined that the supply can be One season of potash.”
Thankfully, one-third of the problem is solved. In the large conference room, a review member next to him raised his voice:
"What about phosphate fertilizer? What about nitrogen fertilizer?"
"The best source of phosphate fertilizer is struvite. Farmers have been mobilized to scrape as much as possible from the rocks on the seaside, but the stock is not estimated to be enough. However, we have found several desert islands in the Storm Islands that are piled with struvite... "
Several archmages frowned. The Storm Islands is the territory occupied by the Glorious Holy See. Going there to dig out struvite means that there is a possibility of encountering the Glorious Holy See.
Although they are all deserted islands, it is unlikely that a ship will pass by, but... excavation and loading are not about catching some exotic beasts, and the duration is quite long. The longer it takes, the greater the chance of hitting another ship.
Several people exchanged looks with each other. Finally, the protection mage at the head of the seat coughed lightly:
"What's the alternative?"
"Bone spurs, bones, and fish scales can be replaced by decomposition and fermentation, but the quantity is not enough." The magician who came to report turned a page of information and spoke faster:
"We made statistics and found that based on the meat and fish consumed in Nevis every year, the phosphate fertilizer produced from these items cannot even supply one percent of the demand. And sorting and sorting is a very big problem."
"Where's the sea fish?"
"The shipping capacity of sea-going ships is not enough. When the sea-going fish is brought back, it has been salted, and the waste is not washed and used rashly, which will cause soil salinization."
...It seems there is no other way. Several magicians looked at each other, and it was the protection mage who made the final decision:
"Then work hard to mine struvite. Allocate 10 ocean-going ships and try our best to transport it. Let them transport less beaver skins, carmine and other things. They can't eat or drink. The great famine is coming soon! "
"In addition, when a purchase order is issued, you can estimate a suitable purchase price and submit it. In addition to the parliament's navy, let the maritime merchants also help with transportation."
"What is the mining method... Digging golems? Digging insects? Magic missiles? Prepare a batch of them all. You can estimate the quantity."
"For the magicians on board, increase your contribution points and increase your authority. The council will open a batch of mid-level spell permissions, and by the way, dynamite! Make a batch of dynamite too..."
"We cannot increase the production of explosives!" Beside the reporter, another magician suddenly raised his head and his voice broke:
"The main raw material of explosives, saltpeter, is also the raw material for the production of nitrogen fertilizer! Now the saltpeter gap is very big! Very, very big! The output of the kingdom's saltpeter mine is very small, which is just enough to make explosives. To make nitrogen fertilizer... we have..."
The sound went from a loud roar to a normal value, from a normal value to a squeak, and then from a squeak to silence. The Archmage frowned and asked:
"Already what?"
"Already..." the reporter hesitated, the red color spreading from his chin to the roots of his ears. Obviously, after seeing the method reported below, he also felt that his outlook on life was a bit shattered:
"We have already had people scraping the walls of various toilets, the chair legs and floors of the temple, and the outer walls of the pig pens and cow stables..."
"..."
The protective mage in white robe turned his face silently. On the other side of the long table, the transformation mage showed no change of expression. He had obviously heard of this kind of operation before:
"Still not enough? So what's your solution? Where are the larger saltpeter mines? Can it be imported from the nobles on the mainland? Have you asked the dwarves and barbarians?"
"I asked." The reporter said with a bitter look on his face.
"The information given by the barbarians is of no use. There is no saltpeter in the mines they explored on the dwarf side. As we know now, the largest saltpeter mine is in the south of the New World, and it is in the southwest, very far away..."
The judges were silent. If it is the struvite in the Storm Islands, a ship can be sent to steal it, and then run away. The southern part of the New World is completely the traditional territory of the Glorious Holy See.
The Rhine Kingdom, the Carolingian Kingdom, directly under the Parliament, and the four viceroyalties divided up the Southern Continent, as well as the Storm Islands between the Southern Continent and the Northern Continent. Every port is their territory, and they can’t pass it by sea or land...
"What about spending money to acquire it?"
"The quantity is not enough... Saltpeter is mainly used to make ice. The annual demand is not large, and very little is shipped from the New World..."
The storms are treacherous and there are limits to shipping capacity. Only gold, silver, and high-priced goods can more than cover the cost of shipping goods from the New World, and still make high profits. Transporting saltpeter or something like that, tsk...
Unless the output and performance of ships further increase and the risks further decrease, no one will spend precious shipping capacity on transporting large quantities of saltpeter.
"We have gained something from this." Next to the white-robed mage, old Sam from the plasticity department calmly added:
"After a lot of experiments, we found that using lightning to strike moist soil can introduce nitrogen elements in the air into the soil. Now we are trying to achieve the maximum efficiency of element guidance. We may need to set up more lightning platforms..."
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The content of this chapter on fisheries refers to "The Development of Marine Fisheries in Western Europe from Medieval Times to Early Modern Times - Mainly Taking Britain and the Netherlands as Samples", Tianjin Normal University, Liu Min, 2014 Master's Thesis