Following the flood control efforts, Xia Family Village entered a period of rapid development.
First, an oil press was built to extract soybean oil from soybeans. Then, a large-scale pig farm was established, capable of holding several hundred pigs simultaneously, though it currently housed only a few dozen piglets. Xia Huai'an instructed Zha Zhonghe to send out merchant caravans to other counties and townships to purchase more piglets and fill the farm as soon as possible. The soybean meal left over from oil extraction, combined with the distillers' grains left over from winemaking, and mixed with some rice bran, wheat bran, and bone meal, made for excellent feed.
Meanwhile, the Shen Family officially settled in Xiaoyu Township, leasing a thousand mu of land to cultivate mulberries and raise silkworms for the coming year. In addition to resuming its brocade-weaving business, the family set up a cloth-dyeing workshop and a tailoring workshop, recruiting a large number of female workers from the township alongside their own staff.
Chapter 85