Upon hearing Xiao Changyi say she could decide, An Jing looked up at him with a smile, beaming for quite a while before she said, "Tomorrow will be October, and in October, we have to harvest the rice again."
"Mm," Xiao Changyi responded, while bringing the teacup in his hand to her lips.
An Jing smiled happily, then opened her mouth, took the teacup’s edge between her lips, and drank some tea.
Then, Xiao Changyi, without changing his expression, drank the rest of the tea from the cup.
An Jing continued to gaze fondly at her husband, smiling joyously.
An Jing and Xiao Changyi first harvested the potatoes from those three parts of land before they started harvesting the rice, and by the time they began with the rice, it was already mid-October.
This one acre of land yielded over six dan of early rice, but the late rice did not reach six dan, almost six dan actually, which wasn’t much less, and she was quite content with the harvest.
You should know if the paddy did not have rice-field fish cultivated, this one acre would have likely produced just three or four dan of rice.
Now, having harvested nearly six dan was an increase in production.
The fields of An Village also saw increased yields, and because those fields also cultivated rice-field fish, by this time, the neighboring villages came to realize that raising fish in the paddies can help increase rice production.
Everyone had mentally decided that next year, when planting rice, they would also cultivate fish, provided, of course, they first learned from the people of An Village the knack of keeping the fish alive in the fields.
They had previously seen the people of Jiuping Village try, but nobody in Jiuping Village managed to keep them alive.
The people of An Village had not anticipated that raising fish would increase production, but once everyone noticed that the whole village yielded more late rice, they discovered this fact. In the beginning, everyone just wanted to raise fish to sell for money, but they never expected it would also boost rice production, which made them even more grateful to An Jing and Xiao Changyi for selflessly sharing their knowledge on how to cultivate fish in the paddies.
In this way, they could not only make money by selling fish but also harvest much more rice.
The rice-field fish in that one-acre field of An Jing and Xiao Changyi was also intended to be sold to Wang Youbao, who had placed a reservation with them in advance.
All the rice-field fish raised in An Village had also been pre-ordered by Wang Youbao, who paid everyone a down payment of one tael each.
Although Wang Youbao was a businessman, he knew that some money could be earned abundantly, while some should not be. The people of An Village were all poor folks, and he couldn’t bring himself to profit from them unscrupulously. Therefore, he generously offered fifty coins per jin for the rice-field fish from An Village, the same rate he had originally paid to An Jing and Xiao Changyi.
The villagers of An Village were stunned when they realized that a jin of rice-field fish could sell for fifty coins, and it took them a good while to come to terms with it. Once they did, they all regretted not having raised more fish.
You should know, when they initially learned the secret to cultivating rice-field fish in the paddies, everyone was somewhat uncertain, so they all raised them tentatively, only a little and not too much, probably around forty to fifty jin of fish in each family’s paddies.
Only the families of An Fu and An Quangui placed great trust in An Jing and Xiao Changyi, raising quite a lot, with each of their fields housing about two hundred jin of fish now.
Since it was the late rice that had been harvested, the fields wouldn’t be plowed and replanted until next year; thus, An Jing and the people of Jiuping Village were not in a hurry for Wang Youbao to take the fish away. Wang Youbao could come whenever he needed to catch them.
However, on this day, while An Jing and Xiao Changyi were drying rice grains in the courtyard, Wang Youbao arrived in a huff.