Ch.2304-Year Crop Rotation (1)

After the hospital visit concluded, it didn’t take long for Charlotte to return to her duties, and the village’s recovery proceeded smoothly.

Having half the village’s population unconscious for a full two days meant all sorts of work had piled up.

While regular laborers simply faced a shortage of available workforce, the collapse of artisans meant that the only people capable of performing certain specialized tasks were incapacitated, bringing those operations to a complete halt.

Fortunately, since people were only unconscious for just under a day and a half, the backlog wasn’t too severe.

Thanks to this, as I mentioned earlier, the village’s recovery progressed much faster than expected. By the time Charlotte recovered and returned to her post, the village had long since returned to normal.

For me, this was actually a situation worth celebrating—let Charlotte struggle a bit with the paperwork she couldn’t handle all at once.

Anyway, as the aftermath of the crisis gradually faded and the village regained some breathing room, I decided it was time to launch a project I’d been planning.

More specifically, I resolved to implement the new farming method I had been planning since last year.

The current mainstream agricultural practice in the village is the three-field system, which divides farmland into thirds—one third for spring crops, one third for autumn crops, and the remaining third left fallow, reducing the amount of unused land.

In spring, they plant spring wheat, oats, or barley to harvest in autumn, while in fall they plant winter wheat or rye to harvest the following summer. The remaining third is left fallow in rotation. This is supposedly the “latest farming method.”

…Even though I’ve heard it’s been nearly a hundred years since it was first introduced.

Still, the three-field system has established itself as the mainstream approach in our territory, with the vast majority of farmers using this method except for a few stubborn holdouts.

In contrast, the farming method I want to introduce now is the four-field crop rotation.

As the name suggests, this method divides farmland into four sections, rotating crops on a four-year cycle, completely eliminating the need for fallow land, making it more advanced than the three-field system.

The four crops rotated across the four sections over a four-year cycle are barley, clover and ryegrass, wheat, and turnips.

Since each crop consumes different nutrients, there’s no need for fallow periods. Plus, each crop has its own uses and value, which is clearly a positive factor for me.

Grains like barley and wheat are obviously staple foods. Wheat is particularly valuable—even poor farmers can survive by selling wheat and buying rye or oats with the proceeds.

Given the enormous demand for food crops, there’s little need to worry about their use. Additionally, barley is a precious ingredient for brewing malt liquor.

Especially now that Magni is enthusiastically pushing forward with plans to establish a proper brewery, supplying surplus barley would have such a significant impact that it’s not even worth separate consideration.

Turnips are naturally easy to grow and require little maintenance, making them versatile vegetables that further reduce labor requirements.

While turnip soup serves as a decent meal for the poor, the true value of turnips lies in their excellence as feed for the increasing livestock population.

English ryegrass grows up to about one meter tall, making it excellent fodder for livestock, while clover, being a legume, has bacteria in its roots that fix nitrogen and restore soil fertility.

Additionally, when fields growing ryegrass and clover are used as pasture, these plants become food for livestock, and the animal manure serves as fertilizer, theoretically allowing continuous farming without fallow periods, maximizing agricultural production.

Clover can also be substituted with soybeans, the main ingredient in the village’s specialty products like soy protein and dried tofu, making it adaptable even for households that don’t raise livestock.

Thus, the four-field rotation is an excellent farming method that increases agricultural production while strengthening connections with animal husbandry. I’ve already tested this method last year, working through trial and error until it was mostly perfected.

In short, I’ve established at least the minimum foundation needed to implement it starting this summer, but…

‘…Will they actually listen if I order it?’

The problem is the critical issue that inevitably accompanies this process—whether the farmers will actually listen if I try to implement the four-field rotation.

※ ※ ※

From a modern perspective, anyone can see that the four-field system is more efficient and superior to the three-field system, so one might wonder why farmers wouldn’t adopt this new method.

But this is really only a suggestion that can be made from the distant future, where the correct answer is already known.

To people of this era, this four-field method would just look like one of countless farming methods that appeared throughout history only to disappear without leaving a name. Without clear certainty, they would naturally be reluctant to adopt it based on orders from someone ignorant about farming.

Moreover, while this is true in almost any era, pre-modern farmers especially tend to have conservative mindsets.

Agricultural production fluctuates wildly with climate and natural disasters—far more than city dwellers realize—so blindly adopting a new farming method and ruining that year’s harvest isn’t just a distant possibility.

While farms growing cash crops would suffer tremendous losses if their harvest failed, most farmers in this era grow subsistence crops—if they ruin their harvest, they starve to death.

Considering the number of people who have failed after being seduced by words like “innovation” and “novelty” into adopting strange farming methods, their conservative approach becomes somewhat understandable.

The farming methods they use are literally the crystallization of knowledge accumulated over decades or centuries of consistent data gathering. It would be more foolish to blindly replace them with some mysterious method conceived by someone in authority.

Even on Earth, there’s a similar example in the story of Mao Zedong, the “God Finger” who killed the most Chinese people in history, as proven through the anecdote of Chen Xueshen, a doctor under his command.

The “deep plowing and close planting” method implemented according to Chen—a rocket specialist with absolutely no connection to agriculture—directed that plants grow with water, sunlight, and fertilizer, so they should be planted as densely as possible if given enough fertilizer.

Naturally, this considered only mathematical calculations with no relation to biology or agronomy. To make matters worse, this absurdity was implemented alongside the “Kill the Sparrows” campaign declaring certain birds harmful.

Combined with the ridiculous “backyard furnaces” initiative, Mao Zedong became the man who killed the most Chinese people in history.

Anyway, with such extreme examples existing even in another world, how could people possibly view favorably whatever new farming method I might suddenly introduce?

Most would see it as unnecessary interference from an ignorant superior, no matter how positively I present it. This sentiment is essentially like a company president suddenly announcing the implementation of a new OS he claims to have developed himself.

When someone tries to forcibly introduce something new despite the existing system working perfectly fine, discontent is inevitable, but…

However, no matter how carefully I consider all these factors, I keep arriving at the same conclusion:

‘…It would be good to implement it.’

The number of animals in the vicinity has been noticeably decreasing lately, so we need to find new avenues beyond fur. It would be foolish not to farm in this village, which borders vast and fertile plains.

In this situation, implementing the four-field rotation could maximize agricultural production, and it would be a shame to abandon the research I’ve already done…

‘Then… Ah! That method!’

After pondering how to proceed, the conclusion I finally reached was to use the same approach I used when introducing the seeding technique.