Chapter 344 Preconditions

Chapter 344 Preconditions

Chapter 344 Preconditions
Antarctica.

Aurora City.

2029 12 Month 09 Day.

The floating island platform in Area 2 of Aurora City has been here for nearly half a month.

During this period, base director Qi Zhugang, security team leader Lin Guobin, logistics director Ma Feiyun, production director Xiao Rong and others carried out their tasks step by step.

At this time, heavy snow has begun to fall in the high-latitude areas of the northern hemisphere.

However, Antarctica in the southern hemisphere has begun to enter the summer with polar days.

The area of ​​solar photovoltaic film has reached nearly 17 square kilometers, so Aurora City does not need to activate nuclear fusion devices to use electricity.

With the arrival of Aurora Zone 2, a large number of indoor farms in the zone entered the production stage during this half month.

The indoor farms in Aurora Zone 2 are divided into five types: grain farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, mushroom farms, and special crop farms.

The interior of a vegetable farm.

Production director Xiao Rongzheng and technician Zhang Mengqiu, who is in charge of the farm, are inspecting one of the indoor growing rooms.

Looking at the surveillance camera, Xiao Rong looked a little surprised: "Technician Zhang, is this the super stock introduced from Hailufeng Company?"

"..." Faced with the sudden question, Zhang Mengqiu, who was a bit old-fashioned, paused for a few seconds before replying: "Uh... yes."

Xiao Rong didn't feel offended. After all, many technicians have this kind of personality. He asked patiently, "I heard that with this super rootstock, it only takes about 90 days to harvest the first batch of vegetables and fruits?"

Zhang Mengqiu had come to his senses a little, and since this was his specialty, he began to explain: "Well, the variety cultivated in this planting room is white jade cucumber. It has been grafted for 13 days now. In about 77 days, we can harvest the first batch of white jade cucumbers. After that, we can harvest them every week or so."

"That means we will be able to get the first batch of self-grown vegetables and fruits around February next year?"

Zhang Mengqiu shook his head: "No, we can harvest some vegetables and fruits now."

"Oh? So fast?"

"In the past few days, the pumpkin vines in the pumpkin planting room have grown too fast. We must control the growth of the seedlings. We can pick some of the pumpkin vines and use them as vegetables."

When Xiao Rong heard about pumpkin vines, a trace of nostalgia appeared on his face. "So it's pumpkin vines. My hometown also eats this, usually for cold salad or fried with eggs. Since pumpkin vines can be eaten, what about pea tips? We should be growing peas, right?"

"Yes, it's in Room 16."

"It looks like we won't have to eat dried vegetables, onions, potatoes and carrots in a few days."

Xiao Rong has been eating onions, potatoes and carrots these days and is tired of them. Except for the green leafy vegetables during the few days when supplies came, and the peanut sprouts and soybean sprouts they grew themselves, the rest of the time he could only eat vegetables and fruits that were easy to store. Now, when he heard the words onions, potatoes and carrots, he lost his appetite.

The two walked around the corridor.

The area of ​​the entire Zone 2 is not large, but compared with ships of the same tonnage, its internal area is nearly three times larger.

The floating island platform is 60 meters high and has a total of 20 floors. Each floor is about 6 square meters, which is equivalent to an area of ​​about 90 acres per floor. Excluding partition walls, corridors, and supporting areas, the area that can be used for planting on each floor is about 75 acres.

The vegetable farm occupies 3 floors, with a total indoor planting area of ​​225 acres.

In order to avoid opening the growing room frequently, which would lead to a decrease in the carbon dioxide concentration inside, these indoor farms are equipped with professional agricultural robots to replace a lot of mechanical manual labor.

For example, watering, leaf plucking, pinching, pollination, spraying pesticides, thinning flowers, and picking have now been completely replaced by various robots.

"Is this a mechanical bee?" Xiao Rong was looking at a small mechanical bee the size of a fly inside a box.

Zhang Mengqiu nodded: "Yes, this is the mechanical bee."

The mechanical bee operator at the side opened the remote control program on a tablet computer and activated a box of mechanical bees inside the planting room in front of him.

The mechanical bee's small wings flapped at a high frequency, and then pollinated the pumpkin flowers in the planting room according to the situation monitored by the system.

The reason why mechanical bees are used for pollination is very simple, that is, mechanical bees do not need to wear protective clothing or readjust the carbon dioxide concentration in the indoor air.

Moreover, the energy consumption of mechanical bees is not high. More than a dozen domestic companies that research and produce mechanical bees have flourished in recent years because it is difficult for indoor farms to pollinate through natural bees.

If it is an ordinary indoor farm, artificial pollination is barely acceptable.

But for a super indoor farm like the one run by Hailufeng Company, which uses high-oxygen and high-carbon dioxide air, it would be rather troublesome to use artificial pollination.

Either farm workers wear protective clothing and carry oxygen cylinders to work.

Or readjust the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations in the room.

Neither of these two options is a good choice.

After all, it is very inconvenient to work while wearing protective clothing and protective helmets; and readjusting the concentrations of various gases in the room increases the energy consumption of the planting room and also interferes with the growth progress of crops.

Therefore, after much thought, it is more convenient to fully mechanize it.

What's more, who among the young people today is willing to do repetitive and mechanical labor?
If we want to retain people in agriculture and reduce labor intensity and working hours, this is a very necessary measure.

For example, the mechanical bees in front of us can replace farm workers to perform artificial pollination of vegetables and fruits. The cost has not increased much, but the efficiency has skyrocketed.

After all, people get tired easily, but machines don't.

Highly automated mechanical bees, through high-definition surveillance cameras and systematic agricultural AI analysis, can accurately pollinate each female flower.

A mechanical bee can artificially pollinate 2 flowers a day.

If farm workers were asked to artificially pollinate the same crops, even if they were flower types that were easier to handle, the number of flowers a farm worker could artificially pollinate in a day would be around 8000.

It seems that the artificial team is only twice as weak as the mechanical team.

But in reality, the workers are not made of iron. Artificially pollinating 8000 flowers a day is too labor-intensive. It is not only physically demanding, but also mentally exhausting, which will seriously affect the quality of the second half of the artificial pollination.

Therefore, many farms are increasingly inclined to use mechanical bees to replace workers' manual pollination.

This is actually the general trend.

If it is just a few million acres of indoor farms, then hiring migrant workers to do artificial pollination may still be possible.

But what if this scale expands to hundreds of millions of acres?

If indoor farms of this size were to use migrant workers for manual pollination, they would have to employ at least 30 professional pollination migrant workers to perform manual pollination for these hundreds of millions of acres of indoor farms throughout the year.

But indoor agriculture involves more than just pollination, there are a series of other links, so doesn’t that mean we need to employ tens of millions of migrant workers?
What if the scale continues to expand?
Now, if we want to achieve great material abundance, there is a very important prerequisite, that is, personal output must be very large, only then can we achieve great material abundance for the whole society.

For example, if a farm worker produces 1 ton of food per year, his personal output can only meet the food needs of two people.

But if a farm worker produces 10 tons of food per person per year, his personal output can supply the food needs of 14 people. To feed the country's 7 billion people, the former requires at least 0.7 million farm workers, while the latter only requires million farm workers.

Take the Mo'nan Zhelimu Branch of Hailufeng Company as an example. The local soybean farm workers, including administrative and auxiliary service personnel, produce about 200 tons of soybeans per person per year.

This means that Hailufeng Company’s soybean farms can meet the soybean demand of nearly six to seven hundred times the population with very few farm workers.

Only when everyone's output is high, will the possibility of achieving great material abundance in the whole society be higher.

Electricity is now very cheap in the Asian Union, and the production costs of various machines are also falling.

These mechanical bees in front of you, a box of 100 mechanical bees, the centralized purchasing price is 1000 yuan per box, and can be used for about two to three years.

Such a box of mechanical bees can pollinate at least 10 acres of vegetables and fruits in the indoor farm every day. If the vegetables and fruits have fewer flowers, it can even pollinate hundreds of acres every day.

Agricultural machinery and agricultural robots are constantly being used. The fundamental reason is that, on the one hand, the production cost of machinery has actually decreased; on the other hand, the performance of machinery has been improved; and finally, the treatment of farm workers in the entire Asian Union has been continuously improved.

These factors have forced indoor farms to use machinery instead of manual labor.

For example, Zhang Mengqiu, an agricultural technician, has a monthly salary of about 1.5 yuan, plus the special subsidy for working in Antarctica, his total monthly income is about 3.6 yuan.

The income of an ordinary local farm worker starts at about 6500 yuan. In Southeast Asia, it is slightly lower, also starting at 4500 yuan per month.

Faced with the ever-changing wages and benefits of farm workers, if farms and agricultural enterprises do not find a solution, they will definitely be eliminated by the market.

As for the continuous improvement of productivity, will there be serious overcapacity in the future?

This is possible.

But this is not something to worry about right now.

why?
The answer lies in the 24 billion people of the Asian Commonwealth.

If each person consumes 200 kilograms of staple food, 100 kilograms of meat, and 500 kilograms of vegetables and fruits per year.

A population of 24 billion requires 4.8 million tons of staple food, 2.4 million tons of meat, and 12 billion tons of vegetables and fruits every year.

Plus agricultural and sideline products such as vegetable oil, sugar, bean threads, tobacco, and paper.

The entire Asian community will need to maintain at least 1 million direct agricultural workers and about 2 million indirect agricultural workers.

What's more, the agricultural products of the Asian Union are not only supplied internally, but may also be supplied to other friendly regions.

The more agricultural products these agricultural practitioners produce, the greater the supply of materials to society will be.

Instead of worrying about overcapacity.

It would be better to promote retirement at 50, two days off a week, and six hours work on weekdays.

For example, the farm workers in Aurora City only work six hours a day, have two days off a week, and can also travel in groups to Australia and South America every year.

If there is really overcapacity in the country in the future, this method can be used to control the size of the labor force.

After all, lowering the retirement age to 50 and promoting 15 years of compulsory education for all means that the working age will become 21 to 49 years old, and people will only work for about 28 years in their lifetime.

The young and middle-aged labor force in the Asian Union will be reduced by more than one third at once.

If you add in the various extra-long maternity leave, annual leave, and holidays.

Overcapacity is not a concern at all.

Artificially reducing the labor force in this way can also control the negative impact of overcapacity and even turn it into a positive impact.

After all, the future we want to create is not a world where the more developed it becomes, the less happy it becomes.

The future of mankind should be a world where the more advanced the technology, the higher the productivity, and the happier we are.

If this cannot be achieved, then this future world can only be called cyberpunk.

Perhaps the staff of Aurora City are not clear about what the future world is, but at this moment they have already stepped half a foot into the future, but they are in it and have not noticed it.

After Xiao Rong walked around the farm, he returned to the office in Area 1 and met Tang Lianxin, the leader of the scientific expedition team who had returned from the interior of Antarctica.

"Arong, how is the situation on your side?"

"Huh? You guys are back?" Xiao Rong was quite happy to see his old classmates: "Let's have dinner tonight?"

Tang Lianxin pointed at his watch: "Evening? It's early morning now..."

Xiao Rong slapped his forehead after reacting: "Huh? Look at my memory. I can hardly tell the difference between day and night here in Antarctica."

"You can't tell the difference here, and I can't tell the difference even more when I go to the interior of Antarctica. There is a system inside Aurora City that simulates day and night. We are on the ice field, and it is really white."

"How was the inspection this time?"

Tang Lianxin smiled and sat down. "It's OK. This time I mainly inspected the areas covered by photovoltaic films and found some situations, both good and bad."

"Do you need to go back and write a report?"

"It won't take an hour or two."

"That's true."

"Let me tell you, during this expedition, we found that due to the coverage of photovoltaic film, the thickness of some ice sheets has increased. But the downside is that the inland ice sheet in Antarctica has become much colder than in previous years. When I went in, I encountered several heavy snowstorms."

Xiao Rong sighed: "I don't know whether this change is good or bad."

"Don't overthink it. At least it can suppress the continued rise of global sea levels. This is undeniable." Tang Lianxin replied indifferently, and then he remembered something else:

"By the way, Arong, didn't I send an email back a few days ago? So there's no movement from the base commander?"

"Are you talking about the Australian Casey Station expedition team planning to come over for a visit?"

"Yes!"

"This matter is a bit complicated. Since we have a lot of things that need to be kept secret, the base commander has been communicating with the higher-ups these days. As for the outcome, it all depends on what they think!"

Tang Lianxin also thought of the situation in Aurora City. After all, there is a controlled nuclear fusion device here. If outsiders are allowed to visit at will, it will be very troublesome if a leak occurs.

Xiao Rong patted him on the shoulder: "Let's go! Don't think too much, let's go have breakfast!"

"That's good. I haven't had anything really hot in over a month."

(End of this chapter)