The busy wasteland reclamation continues in the Gyeonggi area because the food supply is relatively good, and there is also a temporary "hospital" that ensures the medical treatment of farmers, and farmers are extremely enthusiastic in the reclamation process.

The Huangzhuang settlement activities quickly spread to the entire Hebei region. The recruited tenant farmers and refugees quickly exceeded 200,000 households. The settlement area also expanded to 6 million mu.

However, the funds are very abundant. The amount of deposits collected by Royal Bank of the Ming Dynasty in Beijing has quickly exceeded 8 million taels of silver. Among them, nearly 5 million taels are paid, and the five-year long-term deposits are all provided.

A lot of these funds are the money of those officials, and the corruption situation made Zhu Youxiao shocked. However, Zhu Youxiao has not been able to fight corruption for the time being, after all, the position of the emperor has not yet been firmly settled.

After waiting for the position to settle down, the anti-corruption campaign is obviously very prosperous!

Raise pigs now!

Let them get a little fatter and kill them together when the time comes.

The gift tickets issued by the bank made a lot of money. First of all, these gift tickets allowed the bank to obtain funds that could be used, and these funds did not need to be paid interest. At the same time, a 3% fee was charged for redemption of gift tickets, and a hundred taels of gift tickets could be earned 3 taels of silver. In just half a month, the gift tickets exchanged by the Royal Bank of the Ming Dynasty reached more than 300,000 taels, and the bank made nearly 10,000 taels of silver.

Currently, gift tickets are the only business that banks make money directly.

The loan business is not very popular. The first batch of loans only 130,000 taels of silver were all mortgaged with assets. Businessmen these days are not willing to owe others money. Moreover, the bank's loan interest rate reaches 15%. Although it is not as high as usury, it is also quite scary.

If those businessmen were not desperate, they would not come to the Royal Bank of Ming Dynasty to borrow money.

But this doesn't matter. The investment of the Royal Bank of Ming Dynasty requires a large amount of funds, and the funds of the Royal Bank of Ming Dynasty can be digested. Soon, the funds of the Royal Bank of Ming Dynasty were added again to 2 million taels, reaching a scale of 5 million taels.

Such a huge amount of funds is equivalent to the court's fiscal revenue for half a year.

Before reclaiming wasteland, the Royal Agricultural Company of the Ming Dynasty first conducted cost estimates and risk estimates according to the investment rules formulated by Zhu Youxiao.

If the cost investment per mu exceeds 0.5 taels of silver to be reclaimed, it falls within the category of "cost exceeding the standard". First, reclaim land with a reclaim cost of less than 0.5 taels per mu.

Risk assessment is mainly about disasters. After the water conservancy project is completed, if there is still a wasteland with a high risk of disaster, it will not be reclaimed, and land with a lower risk will be reclaimed first.

Anyway, there are so many wastelands in the north. It is estimated that the wastelands in later Hebei Province would exceed 20 million acres.

In terms of predictable disaster risks, it is relatively small. After all, there are no big rivers in Hebei, and the floods are not too poor every year. Although there are droughts and floods, they are in the unpredictable range, unlike the floods in the Yellow River.

The cost of reclaiming land per mu is controlled below 0.5 taels of silver, and the investment risk is relatively small. After three years, there will be roughly 1 stone of grain income. If 1 stone of grain is sold to a grain bank, there will be a profit of about 0.7 taels, while the repayment will be 0.555 taels of silver, and there will be 0.145 taels of silver per mu. If each tenant farmer is provided with an interest-free loan of 10 taels of silver, and after three years, it will be 0.033 interest. This means that each acre of land can make a profit of 0.112 taels of silver after three years.

Adding interest-free loans is equivalent to investing 0.8 taels of silver per mu. 5 million taels of silver can be reclaimed 6.25 million taels of land. The profit generated in three years is 700,000 taels of silver, plus the loan repayment by farmers is 1.875 million taels, which is equivalent to a profit of 2.575 million taels.

After three years, the profits that can be generated each year are 1.45 million taels of silver.

If factors such as natural disasters are included, then in three years, 2.57 million taels of silver are enough to resist the risks of natural disasters.

After Yang Ruiguo calculated the result at a price of 0.7 taels per stone of grain, Zhu Youxiao was quite satisfied with it. It was equivalent to waived the tenant rent and interest-free loan of 910,000 taels of silver every year. The farmers of Huangzhuang were able to resist risks. They did not have to pay their talents or rush to repay the loan when they were affected.

Regarding how to improve farmers' ability to resist risks to natural disasters so as not to require relief from the court, Zhu Youxiao immediately thought of sweet potatoes, that is, sweet potatoes.

For 30 acres of land, you only need to take out 3 acres of sweet potatoes every year to plant sweet potatoes in spring. Moreover, sweet potatoes are very drought-resistant. When it is really dry, you only need to put water once or twice. In other words, even if the remaining 25 acres of winter wheat pellets are not harvested, farmers can survive until the next year by eating sweet potatoes.

In later generations, sweet potatoes had a per mu yield of 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms. Even if they were not well managed these days, the varieties were not very good, and the fertilization and insecticide techniques were not good. There would be a per mu yield of 500 kilograms! 3 mu can produce 1,500 kilograms. A family of five could not finish eating for half a year. After half a year, winter wheat could be harvested again.

With sweet potatoes, even if they are affected, the court does not need to provide disaster relief to the imperial village.

"Sweet potatoes? Sweet potatoes? Sweet potatoes? I seem to have heard of them. They have been planted in Fujian and other places, but there are very few in the north." Sun Chengzong thought about it and replied after hearing Zhu Youxiao's question about sweet potatoes.

"That's how it is!" Zhu Youxiao felt a headache. I still need to introduce it to Fujian? However, in terms of planting technology, it still needs to be explored for a while.

Before Zhu Youxiao traveled through time, he had come into contact with this thing in the countryside when he was a child, but he really didn't know much about the specific management technology.

But even if it is difficult, it needs to be promoted!

The problem facing the north now is that there is insufficient food, and the price of grain has increased to one tael of silver per stone. With sweet potatoes, at least the people don’t have to starve to death.

Isn’t it just to eat sweet potatoes in the Kangxi and Qianlong eras of the Qing Dynasty?

In the late Ming Dynasty, sweet potatoes were actually promoted, and some officials even promoted sweet potatoes in Shaanxi, where the peasant army was the most terrifying thing.

It’s just that the original intention is good, but the promotion methods are too rough. The people have never been exposed to this thing and suddenly asked them to grow sweet potatoes, but they simply turned against it.

Promoting sweet potatoes also caused civil unrest, which was indeed embarrassing, and finally made the Qing Dynasty get cheaper. The harvest of farmers in the Qing Dynasty was much higher than that in the Ming Dynasty, but the reason why the Qing Dynasty could maintain it was mainly due to sweet potatoes.

Zhu Youxiao did not want the people to be poor and could only live on sweet potatoes. However, the Ming Dynasty had reached a special and dangerous period at this time, and the use of sweet potatoes for transition was a very good choice.

After you overcome this difficulty, you will find a way to make the people rich.

Just when Zhu Youxiao was worried about introducing sweet potatoes, Xu Guangqi had already arrived in the capital in a dusty manner, and also solved the technical problem of promoting sweet potatoes for Zhu Youxiao.
Chapter completed!