Rebirth of Bayi Fishing and Hunting in the Northwest

There was nothing much to say about the early summer in the county town in the 1980s. There were not many fruits on the market at that time. The weather was already hot, but there were no watermelons to quench thirst and cool down. Mosquitoes and flies, these annoying guys, would not treat Li Long specially because he was a reborn person.

Therefore, it would be very troublesome to enjoy the cool air outside in the yard in the evening.

Li Long knew that wormwood could repel mosquitoes, but to be honest, it didn't work very well here. The main reason was that Gu Xiaoxia couldn't stand the smell of smoke, so she couldn't light it and leave it there. The smell of wormwood alone wouldn't have much effect.

So after staying outside for a while, Gu Boyuan returned to the courtyard, and Li Long and Gu Xiaoxia went into the house.

Just now after dinner, Gu Boyuan also talked about the situation of his agricultural supply store. From late March to early May, in just over a month, Gu Boyuan earned enough to buy several bicycles.

It’s really a huge profit!

Gu Boyuan was sighing, and Li Long actually knew that this was not only because it was currently a seller's market, but also because of the household contract responsibility system. After the land was distributed to each family, everyone's enthusiasm for farming increased, and a large amount of agricultural inputs were needed for farming.

Another very important reason is that Gu Boyuan can provide targeted promotions based on the needs of farmers, rather than letting farmers choose for themselves.

As a university graduate, although I am not majoring in agronomy, I want to be a little more professional, and my learning ability is much better than that of ordinary people.

According to Gu Boyuan, there are more agricultural supply stores in the county than just his. There are two more stores targeting the east and south. There are also a lot of farmland in these two directions, especially in the east, where several towns are more prosperous.

After all, it has been a place where post stations have existed since ancient times, and there are many cultivated lands.

Unlike the north, almost all the land is newly reclaimed, as it was previously saline-alkali beach or Gobi desert.

But Gu Boyuan felt that the north had greater potential, because he was from Team 4, and as a veteran he knew very well how much wasteland Team 4 had that could be reclaimed.

Li Long could feel it from Gu Boyuan's slightly reserved and complacent expression, and he felt that he had done a good job.

In fact, it is really good. Gu Boyuan even thought about making more of the seed drills "invented" by Li Long and selling them in his agricultural supply store, because he felt that large machines such as seed drills could not meet the seeding needs of small plots of land.

There is currently no small seeder to balance manual sowing and large seeders, so Li Long’s on-demand seeder is a good choice.

It has to be said that people like Gu Boyuan who were able to get into university in that era, after entering a certain industry and having an in-depth understanding of the industry, could quickly use their keen observation to find a way to win.

Even if Li Long was reborn, he would have to admire him.

When I talked about this feeling with Gu Xiaoxia during dinner, she smiled with pride on her face, but then she said:

"Actually, my dad isn't as capable as you say. When we were chatting while you were away, he also said that he owed his current success to you. He said that you laid a solid foundation for him, and it was much easier for him to work on top of it.

In fact, many times he doesn't say anything to you, but he praises you to us. He doesn't like it when I say something bad about you."

Li Long absolutely believed what Gu Xiaoxia said.

Most parents these days scold their children in front of others and praise them behind their backs. They will definitely praise their children in front of outsiders, but rarely show their appreciation and love for their children in front of their children.

This generation of parents is still reserved and traditional.

After sending Gu Xiaoxia to the Education Bureau the next day, Li Long did not rush to the mountains. He went to the side room to collect all the dried Fritillaria, put them in a bag, stuck it on the back seat of his bicycle, and pushed it to the purchasing station.

The purchasing station has been very busy since the beginning of the year. As an official purchasing department, although the price of the purchased things is not high, and sometimes it is much lower than the market price, at least when selling things here, farmers and herdsmen will not worry about being cheated.

Moreover, unlike the supply and marketing cooperatives, this purchasing station does not limit purchases by quantity. It will buy anything, no matter how much. For example, if someone comes with a rabbit skin to sell, they will buy it.

Supply and marketing cooperatives usually purchase commodities and materials in bulk; they cannot purchase small quantities, mainly because they are difficult to store and manage.

The purchasing station is different. Although there is no particularly large warehouse here, there are almost no restrictions on the purchase of items. Medicinal materials, furs and other sundries are all within their purchase range, even including some recyclable copper coins, scrap iron, etc.

According to what Chen Hongjun had told Li Long before, every few days a transport convoy would take the materials purchased from these purchasing stations along the way to the state purchasing station for sorting and processing.

Today, there was a queue in the yard of the purchasing station. There were at least seven or eight people, carrying various storage tools, baskets, buckets, and the most numerous were urea bags.

They came to sell a lot of things, such as licorice roots, animal skins, goat wool, etc.

Li Long also found another person coming to sell Fritillaria, but the quantity didn't seem to be large.

That person also used a urea bag, and Li Long smelled the odor.

Everyone was queuing up and preparing to sell things, so they were chatting while waiting.

In front of Li Long was a woman carrying a large wicker basket filled with licorice roots, which probably weighed about seven or eight kilograms.

Licorice root is used to make licorice tablets, which is a common medicinal material in the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains. Of course, it is said that there are more in Kazakhstan to the west, and no one uses it there.

Some people once collected these things from there and brought them back, but they had to pay a sufficient amount of tax to go through customs, so it was not easy to make a fortune by buying them at a low price and selling them at a high price.

Li Long was standing at the back pushing his bicycle, but soon another man hurried over from behind.

He was in his thirties, about 1.7 meters tall, which was not short in that era. He had a red face and looked like he was often exposed to the sun.

He stood behind Li Long, looking at Li Long's bicycle with envy, and said:
"Comrade, your bicycle... looks like you bought it quite a while ago."

Li Long has not maintained this bicycle well since he bought it. Although Sister Yang will polish it when she has time during this period, it is still not as good as a new one.

"Two years." Li Long said casually. He half-tilted his body and turned his head to take a look, and asked:

“Are you here to sell cashmere?”

When sheep are alive, you can also make money from them. Goats make cashmere, and sheep make wool. Wool is cheap and plentiful, while cashmere is expensive but less plentiful.

Cashmere is the fine and soft hair that goats produce to keep warm in winter.

The famous movie "Kekexili" tells the story of the struggle between the wild yak team volunteers who protect the Tibetan antelope and poachers. The reason why poachers want to kill Tibetan antelopes is because their cashmere is very expensive in the international market.

The cashmere of goats is scraped off to make cashmere fabric. At that time, cashmere clothing was still very expensive and could not be compared with the things that were called cashmere in later generations.

It is rather troublesome to obtain cashmere. After all, it is done while the goats are still alive and the goats will feel pain. It is different from shearing wool.

In April, the cashmere on the goats begins to fall off and separate from the cortex, but it does not fall completely. If it falls off, it will be lost. You need to use a wire rake that resembles bent fingers to grab the cashmere when it just falls and is still in the middle of the hair layer.

This kind of cashmere extraction from live goats requires tying up the goats, which is painful after all. The cashmere extracted from a goat usually does not exceed 100 grams.

Of course, Li Long didn’t know whether there would be any technology in the future that could promote goat wool production.

The red-faced man had two or three kilograms of cashmere in his bag, which was quite a lot.

Now the price of a kilogram of cashmere is several dozen yuan, and this bag can be sold for less than a hundred yuan.

In this day and age, this is a considerable amount of income. So the red-faced man had a smile on his face.

If farmers do not have side income, they can only get money after autumn. They have no income in spring and summer, but they will definitely have money for family expenses.

We have food and vegetables at home, but we still have to spend money on oil, salt, seasonings, children's tuition and other expenses.

Li Long had heard that in the mainland, the main way to support a family's miscellaneous expenses was to raise chickens and sell eggs. In northern Xinjiang, farmers make money in a variety of ways, such as picking licorice, weaving baskets, selling vegetables, and even the one behind who scrapes cashmere, all of which can make money.

Although it's not much, it's enough to sustain the household.

"What are you selling?" the red-faced man asked again, but he didn't wait for Li Long to answer before he opened his bag to show Li Long: "I'm here to sell cashmere. I heard that the price of cashmere is not low this year, more than 30 yuan per kilogram."

"Thirty-five." A person in line ahead of him heard what he said and took the initiative to say, "I just sold it the day before yesterday."

"Thirty-five - I weighed this cashmere at home, two kilograms for eight, I can sell it for a hundred or eighty."

"It's a lot." Li Long said with a smile, "It's equivalent to two or three months' salary of a state official."

"Hehe, yes, there are quite a few, but it's really troublesome to raise those goats. The pen I built at home is more than one meter high, and some goats just jump over it. I don't know how many times I have to drive them back every day..."

Li Long smiled. This is the trouble of happiness. When it was Li Long's turn, more than half an hour had passed. He put a bag of mother-of-pearl on the counter. The buyer behind the counter asked:
"Fritillaria?"

"Ah."

"You have to do it. Otherwise, we won't allow it." The purchasing staff reminded him, perhaps having seen too many herbalists who brought fresh Fritillaria to sell.

"I'll keep you safe." Li Long smiled.

Since Chen Hongjun was not there, he didn't have much interest in talking.

The buyer poured the Fritillaria into the flat basket beside him, then bent down, reached out and grabbed a handful of Fritillaria, looked at it, smelled it, and smiled:

"Your Fritillaria is good. It is the best one I have ever collected. It is first-class, no problem. Let's weigh it..."

As they were talking, Chen Hongjun walked out.

The man immediately greeted:

"Webmaster..."

"Well, go ahead and do your thing." Chen Hongjun nodded and looked at Li Long with a smile:

"I think you should come. Not bad, the Fritillaria this year is still so good... How about it, can we harvest more this year than last year?"

"I don't know, maybe." Li Long didn't expect that Chen Hongjun would become the stationmaster of the purchasing station after going to the state for a meeting. "Old Chen, you won't treat us even if you get promoted?"

"What's the point of getting promoted? It's all about serving the people." Chen Hongjun smiled reservedly. The main reason was that there were quite a few people here, so it was not appropriate to joke around.

Seeing that Chen Hongjun and Li Long knew each other, the buyer smiled and weighed the Fritillaria for Li Long.

"The current price of first-grade Fritillaria is 48 yuan per kilogram," the buyer quoted the price expertly. "These Fritillaria total 28 kilograms and 400 grams, with a total price of 1,363.2 yuan. Do you want to calculate the price now?"

"Okay, let's issue the tickets now." Li Long said.

After receiving the first payment from mother-of-pearl, Li Long was right in his guess: the price had gone up a bit.

Prices are rising now, and they will rise even more sharply in a few years. Fortunately, when light industry develops, products will be more abundant and things will be much better. The deposit interest rate is frighteningly high these days. Li Long plans to save his extra money after he finishes the work of carrying handles and fritillaria.

Of course, the money for development still needs to be retained.

What is flowing is money, what is not flowing is paper. However, it is impossible for Li Long to circulate all the money in a short time, so the remaining money has to be kept in the bank. It is better to earn interest than to keep it in his bag without interest.

Li Long issued an invoice and took the money. After saying hello to Chen Hongjun, he left the purchasing station and received many envious looks.

After all, getting more than a thousand dollars at once is just a sign of how much an ordinary person would earn.

The buyer asked Chen Hongjun:
"Stationmaster, are you old acquaintances?"

"Well, he comes here every year to sell things. You've seen the Fritillaria, they're all top quality. He also sells deer antlers, velvet antlers, dried wild mushrooms, and so on."

"Do you also collect wild mushrooms here?" the red-faced man selling cashmere asked immediately, "Do you collect all kinds of mushrooms?"

"No, no, no, we only collect the more precious mushrooms here." Seeing that many people were interested in this, Chen Hongjun immediately explained, "We collect morels and black tiger mushrooms from the mountains, but we don't collect ordinary wild mushrooms."

"What is a morel then? And that black tiger... fungus?"

Chen Hongjun entered the room and took out two dried mushrooms to show these people.

Nowadays, wild mushrooms can also be found in the Gobi Desert and red willow beach, so these people want to try their luck.

But they were obviously going to be disappointed. At present, the morels here are still mainly grown in the mountains, and the same is true for black tiger palm mushrooms. However, in the future, in an unknown year, mushrooms will be rampant, and morels can be picked in the poplar forests on the street, and black tiger palm mushrooms will also appear in the red willow beach beside the fields.

Very weird feeling.

Li Long went back to the compound and put the money away. Seeing that Sister Yang had not returned from selling food yet, he started the jeep, went to the oil depot to refuel, and then went into the mountains.

In Qingshuihezi Village, you can smell the smell of roasted noodles on the roadside. It's not a very pleasant smell. Li Long didn't see any acquaintances, so he drove away from the village directly, passed Hongliu Beach, and went into the mountains.

He came to the wooden house, pulled the jeep over, and after getting out of the car, he saw Sun Jiaqiang washing the Fritillaria.

But it can be seen that the quantity is not large, maybe about three or four kilograms.

It's almost noon now, and I haven't changed many Fritillaria today.

Seeing Li Long coming, Sun Jiaqiang stood up from the spring and greeted Li Long from a distance.

When Li Long walked over, Sun Jiaqiang told him the reason before he even asked.

"Those people still don't trust me. They think I have nothing to do with you. They would rather wait for you to come back and then exchange with you than exchange with me." Sun Jiaqiang was a little embarrassed. "You see, I exchanged these this morning. I think I can only exchange about ten kilograms of Fritillaria in a day."

About ten kilograms, according to the wages Li Long paid to Sun Jiaqiang, it was less than ten yuan.

I originally wanted to give this person a chance, but it seems that the herbalists in the mountains are not buying it.

"But I can understand it," Sun Jiaqiang said while washing the Fritillaria. "Think about it, you've been here for the past two years, and we've gotten used to it. When you were here, even if the forest rangers from the forestry team came, they wouldn't arrest us. Now someone else has come, and I don't have that much deterrence. This morning, Bolati came over and shouted when he saw someone..."

Li Long smiled bitterly, thinking it was normal.

This trust cannot be established in a short time. Bolati can consider himself a friend, but he may not consider Sun Jiaqiang a friend. Not arresting him is for his own sake, but it is also normal not to give him convenience.

"Then... do you want to go back and dig for Fritillaria?" Li Long thought for a moment and said, "The money you earn from this job right now is not as much as you would earn from digging for Fritillaria yourself."

"Then I won't go back." Sun Jiaqiang immediately shook his head. "Although I can make money digging for Fritillaria myself, it's tiring. Besides, the food and accommodation are not as good as here. It's okay to make less money. It's comfortable to stay here."

Okay, since Sun Jiaqiang has no objection, Li Long didn't bother too much.

It was not yet time for dinner, but Li Long stayed here with Sun Jiaqiang.

Sun Jiaqiang didn't have much money, so Li Long gave him the task of exchanging supplies for Fritillaria every day. Li Long would pay Sun Jiaqiang the same day based on how many Fritillaria he exchanged.

Sure enough, during the time that Li Long stayed here, most of the people who came to exchange Fritillaria for other things were looking for him. Even if they didn't know him, they could find him by his body shape.

The main thing is to exchange supplies with him.

Sun Jiaqiang was very envious, but he also knew that he couldn't envy her.

Fortunately, for every two or three people looking for Li Long, one would also come to look for him, which gave him some gains.

But the blow to him from Bolati every day was quite big.

Li Long was a little surprised. The four bags that Bolati brought today were somewhat different.

"I have four colleagues, and they collected these." Bolati went straight to Li Long, "They exchanged for different things. One wanted wine and meat, another wanted steamed buns and some biscuits, and this one wanted money..."

I didn't expect that Bolati also started working as a real estate agent.

Li Long naturally met his request - these four bags of fresh Fritillaria weighed more than 30 kilograms, which was equivalent to the usual daily amount.

Sun Jiaqiang could only watch with envy, because Bolati would never bring Fritillaria to him. Even if Li Long was not around, Bolati would rather take the Fritillaria back than exchange it with him.

Very depressed.

Dark clouds are floating in the sky. It is about to rain. (End of this chapter)