Farming in the Northern Song Dynasty: Dr. Nong's Self-Rescue Manual in Disaster Years

As soon as Lin Yan, a doctor of modern agriculture, opened his eyes, he was parachuted directly into the disaster year of Qingli in the Northern Song Dynasty - locust plague gnawed away fertile fields, drought cracked the land, refugees chewed tree bark and ate Guanyin soil, and he himself was a member of this desperate situation. At the beginning, there was no land, no food, no support, and only a fragment of "Nongsang Ji Yao" mixed with modern breeding notes. Faced with the existential crisis of "if you don't eat Guanyin soil, you will starve to death", and faced with the double squeeze of the government's forced requisition and the hoarding of grain by the gentry, Lin Yan took out his old profession: using salt water with a concentration of 120% to double the germination rate; digging U-shaped ditches to bury locust eggs, raising ducks to kill locusts, fumigating adults with mugwort and sulfur; improving agricultural tools, building water conservancy projects, and turning saline-alkali land into granaries. He is not a time-traveler who cheats with his cheating skills, but a pragmatist who uses science to overcome the disaster years: he establishes a life-and-death military order with the county magistrate to produce three hundred kilograms of crops per acres in three months, battles of wits and courage with the grain-hoarding squire, and digs a way out of the dirt with the refugees. There are hard-core agricultural knowledge here such as saltwater seed selection and multiple planting of rice and wheat, institutional thinking that "it is better to promote agriculture through science than to force the people to rebel against the government", the human warmth of refugees holding together to survive, and the passionate feeling of "saving the world with one seed". Humor resolves the heaviness of disaster years, science illuminates the fog of survival, and deeply analyzes the dilemmas of ancient people's livelihood. From a refugee shack to a prosperous world, from being alone to becoming a farmer, Lin Yan used modern agricultural wisdom to write the most hard-core farming legend on the land of the Northern Song Dynasty - a three-month life-and-death bet. Can he use science to break the situation and turn the years of starvation into a prosperous age of abundant grains?