Chapter 824 Threat (1)
The holiday had just ended, and the temperature still hadn’t risen; farm work was not in abundance, so it could be attended to a bit later without issue. Thus, when the Mo Family sought people to reclaim mountain land, paying able-bodied laborers thirty wen per day, women twenty wen, and even older children could earn ten wen, news spread rapidly throughout the village. Adults and kids alike eagerly descended upon the homes of several village heads, scrambling to be the first to sign up for land reclamation in Liu Yang Village.
Some families had numerous members capable of working, so sending three to five people to reclaim land was no trouble at all. As a result, the combined total of men, women, and older children able to spare the time for this task from several villages reached roughly one thousand two hundred people.
Although village heads hoped that everyone from their own villages would be selected, as this would substantially increase local incomes, the wasteland wasn’t theirs to control, nor were they the ones paying the wages. It wasn’t possible to meet every single one of the Mo Family’s demands, so after recording the names of those who had signed up, the village heads handed over the lists to Mo Yan.
MO Yan indeed didn’t need so many people for the reclamation, but apart from the villagers from Liu Yang, she was unfamiliar with those from other villages and didn’t know who was hardworking and who was prone to skiving. In the end, she simply let all of the twelve hundred volunteers work on the reclamation.
On the twentieth day of the first lunar month, villagers set aside their thick cotton clothes, wore worn-out shoes suitable for fieldwork, and armed with sickles and hoes, they arrived at the Mo Family’s more than twenty barren hills, rolling up their sleeves and busily starting the hard work.
The barren hills were covered with withered yellow grass and shrubby trees not worth timbering. Burning them would be easy, but that would not only pollute the air but also risk uncontrollable fires due to strong winds, potentially spreading to deeper woods. Fire was absolutely out of the question.
Therefore, it was necessary for people to manually remove the grass and shrubs using sickles and axes, then dig out the roots, and prepare pits for trees. Once the weather warmed up, the fruit seedlings would be planted.