Chapter 68 - 68 Rise! Salted Fish Elder_1
Chapter 68: Chapter 68 Rise! Salted Fish Elder_1
Translator: 549690339 |
A quick calculation would reveal that Zhuwei Lake isn’t that big and covers about ten thousand acres of area. Dredging to an average depth of one meter would yield six or seven million cubic meters of sediment.
Wang Shouzhe had seen dredging boats in this world.
They operated manually, using dredging forks to scrape sediment onto the boat. Each boat can only hold about ten cubic meters of this muck.
Ordinary cleaned sediment is inherently rich in organic matter and makes excellent farmland fertilizer, replenishing soil fertility, once composted and mixed with other substances.
After all, in this era, the silt at the bottom of rivers and lakes doesn’t contain any heavy metal accumulation.
However, the challenge lies in the quantity, as six or seven million cubic meters means six or seven hundred thousand boatloads! If ten dredging boats work without interruption throughout the year, each cleaning and transporting three boatloads daily, it will take approximately twenty thousand days or sixty to seventy years!
After drying, the volume of the sediment substantially reduces. Considering that the marshland is primarily soft mud, it’s estimated that at most it could provide two to three thousand acres of fertile farmland. The entire project is expected to cost more than ten thousand Qian Gold.
Given the extensive investment in human and material resources along with the time spent, earning only three to four Qian Gold per cultivated acre seems uneconomical.