Chapter 343 Agricultural Urbanization

Chapter 343 Agricultural Urbanization

Chapter 343 Agricultural Urbanization

Inside the scientific research base of Jiexi County.

After the typhoon passed, Jiang Miao returned to the urban area of ​​Shanmei, leaving Ahai and others to continue to preside over the previous series of scientific research work.

Except for the project of brainless cloning experimental subjects.

At this time, most of the researchers inside the base were not actually exposed to the project, but were studying various newly created plants.

Although it is a bit difficult for Ah Hai and others to create a completely new plant, it would not be a problem for them if they just copied the original model.

For example, they imitated the genetically modified rootstock technology created by Jiang Miao before and reproduced many new genetically modified rootstocks.

These genetically modified rootstocks are called "new" because they have their own unique features.

One of the more obvious features is that these new genetically modified rootstocks are secondary rootstocks specially designed for Babel.

You just need to connect these secondary rootstocks to the main stem of the Lotus japonica, and they can survive and grow stronger using the nutrients of the Lotus japonica.

There are many types of these secondary rootstocks, covering most species of crops, which means that a variety of crops can be grafted onto these secondary rootstocks again.

Of course, for the convenience of harvesting and operation, the main grafted varieties of these secondary rootstocks are those fruit-bearing crops.

For example, Cucurbitaceae, Rutaceae, Rosaceae, and Solanaceae are almost the four major families of fruiting vegetables and fruits.

It is also the secondary rootstock species that the researchers mainly developed this time.

Inside one of the indoor growing sites.

An eliminated variety of Tobira japonica with a relatively balanced nutritional synthesis was cultivated among them. Researcher Ding Xianyu was the initiator of the project. He had seen Jiang Miao eliminating these varieties of Tobira japonica with a relatively balanced nutritional synthesis, so he felt that they should not be wasted. After thinking about it for a few days, he applied for this project to the scientific research department.

At this time, many genetically modified rootstocks of the Rutaceae family have been grafted onto the main stems of these clematis plants, and a hybrid scented lemon has been grafted onto them.

"How did it turn out?"

Hearing Ding Xianyu's question, Chang Shaohua, a recent graduate who came here for internship and research assistant, quickly replied: "Brother, I have counted the results of the past few days."

As he spoke, he pulled up a statistical table from his office tablet.

Ding Xianyu looked at the data on the statistical table: "After the first batch of fruits matured, the average harvest per acre was about 80 kilograms per day? What about the flavor substance detection results?"

"Here…"

Flip through another folder.

"The accumulation of various flavor substances in mature perfume lemons is about 1.3 to 1.7 times that of ordinary perfume lemons?"

Another researcher, Yi Tongshu, picked a yellow scented lemon directly from the branch, then rubbed it gently with his hands, and a strong fragrance came to his nose.

"It really smells good."

"It seems that the nutrients provided by Tongtianlian are too abundant. Not only has the amount of fruit produced by these perfume lemons increased greatly, but the accumulation speed of flavor substances has also increased."

However, Yi Tongshu refuted: "The accumulation of flavor substances is not only a matter of nutrients, but also the stimulation of the external environment."

“That’s right…” Ding Xianyu didn’t deny this, but he still reminded: “Environmental stimulation is related, but the most critical point is sufficient nutrient supply, otherwise the accumulation speed of flavor substances will not be so fast.”

Why do many people think that watermelons and honeydew melons from the Western Regions are delicious?

The answer lies in the accumulation of flavor substances.

The temperature difference between day and night, the strong ultraviolet rays during the day, and the dry climate in the Western Region will constantly stimulate the plants, causing them to develop self-protection mechanisms and secrete various substances to resist environmental changes. Among these substances, there are some special flavors.

Why do ordinary greenhouse watermelons have a slightly worse flavor?
Ultimately, it’s because the environment is not stimulating enough.

In traditional greenhouse agriculture, flavor substances, growth rate and yield are actually contradictory.

Choosing flavor means sacrificing growth rate or yield.

Choosing growth rate and yield will inevitably sacrifice flavor.

The root cause of this contradiction is that the current nutrients of the plants can only guarantee excellence in one or two dimensions, and there is no way to support them becoming hexagonal agricultural products.

By using the lotus as the primary rootstock and exclusive genetically modified crops as the secondary rootstock, combined with environmental control of indoor planting sites, it is possible to increase yields, shorten harvest time, and ensure flavor.

For example, the Tianxiang pomelo cultivated by Yitongshu can accumulate aromatic substances in the oil cells of the peel that are more than ten times that of ordinary citrus in about three months.

Moreover, the yield per mu of Tianxiang pomelo is very high. About 3000 kilograms of Tianxiang pomelo can be produced every three months.

There is also the Japanese grapefruit introduced from Japan, which is one of the raw materials for making spices and has a unique flavor.

This kind of pomelo is a specialty of Kochi Prefecture in Japan, with about 4 tons of fresh fruit produced each year, and it only bears fruit once a year.

The grafted planting in the base's indoor farm can yield four harvests a year, with each yield of about 3000 kilograms per mu. The annual yield per mu has almost quadrupled.

What’s even more amazing is that the flavor substance content of the Japanese grapefruit produced in this way is about 1.5 to 2.4 times that of the Japanese grapefruit grown in the open air in its place of origin.

This is the power of technology.

The yield of any crop that uses the Bamboo Shoot as the primary rootstock will soar by about 4 to 6 times.

It is precisely because of this surge in production capacity and the ability to over-deliver on flavor substances that this new agricultural model has become a key focus of the Business Research Center.

Look, the typhoon has just stopped.

The Business Research Center formed a research team to inspect the project.

Researchers Ding Xianyu and Yi Tongshu also received notifications from Pang Ding, the base’s daily supervisor.

Ding Xianyu and others, who came and went in a hurry, came to this indoor farm where scented lemons were grown again, but this time it was not just them, there were also five or six inspectors from the Business Research Center.

Han Huitai, the leader of the inspection team, looked at the abundant fruits on the grafted branches, turned his head and asked in a low voice: "Researcher Ding, how much does it cost to grow one acre of fragrant lemon every year?"

Chang Shaohua, a research assistant at the side, quickly took out his office tablet and called up the internal cost statistics table: "Team Leader Han, this is our cost statistics table, but this is the cost of the research base, which may be different from the cost of an ordinary indoor farm."

Han Huitai took the tablet with a smile: "I know that under normal circumstances, the farm costs of a scientific research base like yours will be higher than normal farms. I will take the conversion factor into account."

As professionals, the inspectors of the Business Research Center are certainly not useless. They have special estimation formulas and estimation models, and together with various internal reference data, they can easily evaluate the overall input cost of this crop under normal indoor farm conditions.

The investigators worked hard on the estimate for more than twenty minutes.

"It takes about 8300 yuan per mu per year, and each mu can produce 1.2 kilograms of perfumed lemons per year? The average cost of perfumed lemons is 0.69 yuan per kilogram?"

"This cost is acceptable if the current market retail price of perfumed lemons is 4.3 to 6.7 yuan per kilogram."

"It's not that simple. We also need to consider the costs of picking, transportation, packaging and retail, plus the price reduction after large-scale production."

"With the company's channels, when it reaches the retail end, the final cost is about 1.2 yuan per kilogram. The retail price must be at least twice the final cost price, which is about 2.4 yuan per kilogram. Taking into account discounts and losses, I think the final retail price cannot be lower than 2.8 yuan per kilogram." Han Huitai and others discussed in a low voice.

As for whether the large-scale promotion of this agricultural model will lead to a large number of farmers losing their jobs, the answer is naturally no.

Because the number of employees needed by various farms is also increasing day by day.

Hailufeng Company has always hoped to change the traditional agriculture that relies on the weather and transform it into comprehensive indoor agriculture.

Especially vegetables, fruits and some specialty crops, many vegetables and fruits are not suitable for large-scale mechanization and are often grown in mountainous or remote areas. In addition, their dependence on the weather makes it difficult to fundamentally change farmers' lives.

For example, if you grow medicinal herbs in the Dabie Mountains, you may not earn too little money, but the other things you can get are definitely less than in big cities.

Small cities and towns form a very helpless and embarrassing social structure.

The educational resources, medical resources, development resources, and service resources it can provide to local residents and farmers are often high in price, poor in quality, and limited in supply.

This is an inherent upper limit determined by the size of towns and small cities.

Not every city is called "Shanmei". Jiang Miao will do its best to arrange industries and employment for them and provide various services.

The various resources of ordinary small cities are far behind those of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, let alone those of local provincial capitals.

Why do people in many small cities often don't like to see a doctor in their local hospitals? Instead, they try to go to the provincial capital.

The root cause is that small cities have too few resources.

If the population can be further concentrated to form urban clusters with a size of about 500 million people, these urban clusters can form huge markets, thereby stimulating economies of scale.

By then, there will only be 280 urban clusters left in the country, which will allow us to further expand the internal market.

Many people in rural areas and towns do not want to consume, but sometimes the products or services are not available in their local area.

To achieve this, the prerequisite is to expand the scale of urban employment?

How to expand urban employment?

The answer is to move agriculture indoors, into high-rise buildings.

With Hailufeng Company's current technical reserves, it actually has all the conditions to move agriculture indoors.

Photosynthetic crops with more efficient energy utilization.

A controlled nuclear fusion device that has been secretly mass-produced.

Huge photovoltaic films and photovoltaic airships.

High efficiency and low energy consumption water circulation technology.

Technology that can graft various traditional crops.

There is also the booming field of agricultural robots.

A cheap and strong building material.

These conditions together form the foundation of indoor agriculture, allowing agriculture to move fully indoors and becoming a model that is very worth trying.

Only by moving agriculture indoors can rural areas be integrated into cities, avoiding long commuting times and allowing farmers to live and work in cities, rather than living in cities and working in rural areas and towns.

As for such a large-scale concentration of population in cities, will it lead to big city diseases?

The so-called big city disease is actually not a fixed concept, but a concept that keeps changing with the development of the times and technology.

For example, in ancient times, to maintain a city with a population of one million, it might require the entire country's resources to barely support it, and the living conditions there were very poor.

In modern times, the population ceiling of large cities quickly soared to around five million.

Today, in the 21st century, the population ceiling of large cities has been raised again, reaching tens of millions.

Therefore, as long as various technologies and designs are well considered, an urban cluster with a population of five million will not suffer from big city diseases.

Five million people is also the relatively suitable upper limit of a city's population, as analyzed by the Social Research Center of Hailufeng Company through various models and data.

At present, the domestic planting area of ​​vegetables, fruits and specialty crops is about 6 million mu.

If all indoor cultivation is adopted, mainly in standard 20-story indoor agricultural buildings, and new technologies are used to increase the yield per mu by 4 to 6 times, then the country only needs to build agricultural buildings covering an area of ​​about 600 million mu to maintain the current production capacity of vegetables, fruits and specialty agricultural products.

Is 600 million acres too much?

However, it is only about 4000 square kilometers, which is less than 0.4% of the country's area, and is almost the land area of ​​4 Hong Kong Rivers.

If all vegetable and fruit cultivation in the country can be moved to indoor agricultural buildings, the contradiction between population and land in many parts of the country will be easily resolved.

This will also fundamentally expand human living space.

As long as this idea can be realized, the upper limit of the population that the earth can accommodate will increase to more than 100 billion.

Although this only calculates the agricultural potential and does not take into account industry and mineral resources, if the population simply doubles, it would be very easy for the Asian Union at that time to maintain.

However, this large-scale and complete urbanization will inevitably bring about another consequence, which is that the fertility rate will decline again.

This is a highly probable result of urbanization.

We need to solve the problem of declining fertility rate caused by urbanization, which is also a project that many social research institutions are exploring.

However, the Social Research Center of Hailufeng Company has proposed several more special solutions to try to solve the problem of declining fertility rate caused by urbanization.

One of the plans has been planned to be piloted in some cities.

The plan is the "Garden City".

The so-called garden city breaks the previous pigeon cage model and increases per capita living space by expanding the three-dimensional space.

The standard housing space per capita should be no less than 50 square meters, and the accompanying private gardens, gardens, lawns, etc. should be guaranteed to be 100 square meters per capita.

Under this standard, how can we ensure that high-rise residential buildings achieve this?
That is naturally through the use of indoor planting technology, artificial lighting technology, etc., coupled with better buildings, to ensure that greenery can be maintained indoors.

Although this model will lead to a surge in indoor electricity consumption, the Asian Union at this time has too much power generation to use up.

With the increasing number of photovoltaic films and photovoltaic airships, plus the three secret nuclear fusion power stations connected to the grid this year, the power generation scale within the entire Asian Commonwealth is 27 trillion kilowatt-hours, which is almost 2024 times that of 2.3.

If the Antarctic photovoltaic system is also connected to the power grid next, the scale of power generation will continue to soar.

Therefore, there is no need to worry about electricity consumption.

(End of this chapter)