But the harvests of potatoes and sweet potatoes are measured by the ton, often yielding several thousand jin per mu. Even corn yields are much higher than those of grains like millet or wheat, and all three crops do not require fertile land—they can be cultivated on mountain slopes and dry fields where rice and wheat cannot grow. They can even improve the soil, turning large tracts of previously uncultivable land into fields suitable for wheat and rice.

Although these coarse grains may not taste as good, when famine strikes and people are starving, who still cares whether the food tastes good or bad? It’s still far better than eating tree bark, grass roots, or kaolin clay. Moreover, in terms of nutrition, potatoes and sweet potatoes are rich in starch and various vitamins, no worse than grains or wheat.

Regret is regret, and sighs are sighs, but high-yield crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn won’t just fall from the sky. Even if you go to Guangdong or Fujian now to look for these crops, who knows exactly where they are?

With such a vast population and such a wide territory, searching for a few crops is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Who knows how many years it would take to find them? In these times, to walk from Shanxi to Guangdong and back again, and then search for crops that even the locals rarely see—would it take two years, three years, or five years?

Nevertheless, Samuel Howard has decided to send capable subordinates as soon as possible to Guangdong, Fujian, and other places to search for these high-yield crops. If they can’t be found in Guangdong or Fujian, then they’ll go as far as Luzon and other regions. The sooner they are found, the sooner it will be a blessing for himself, and even more so for the people of Ming.

The prospects are bright and promising, but distant water cannot quench present thirst. The most important thing right now is to first solve the food problem for the military households of Wuzhai Fort.

For the common people in the north and the soldiers stationed at the nine border garrisons, the weather in recent years has been strange—if it’s not severe cold, it’s a major drought. It seems as if the heavens never rest.

This year is the 17th year of the Wanli reign. Fortunately, it’s just that the climate is a bit abnormal: in summer, Beijing lacked rain, epidemics spread in May and June, and the drought extended to Shandong. Meanwhile, in Southern Zhili, there was too much rain, causing floods, and after autumn, there was an earthquake in Shanxi. All in all, it was relatively uneventful.

But last year, the 16th year of Wanli, was a disaster—Shaanxi and Shanxi suffered a severe drought. In the spring, during the pod-filling season for beans and wheat, there was a prolonged drought with no rain, and fierce winds blew constantly. The green crops dried up with no harvest, and even the fields that did yield produced only twenty or thirty percent of normal. From June to August, the drought continued with no rain, and the autumn crops withered under the sun and wind, resulting in a total crop failure.

The disaster area covered the three prefectures of Xi’an, Yan’an, and Qingyang, as well as parts of the prefectures of Fengxiang and Gongchang. Farmers everywhere were terrified, taking their elderly and young and fleeing to beg for food in other places.

Faced with such a severe famine, George Washington had no choice but to devote himself to disaster relief, working tirelessly until the end of the year before he could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

To be honest, George Washington had lived with such worries for many years. Since the beginning of the Wanli reign, the weather had become increasingly problematic—if it wasn’t flooding in the south, it was drought in the north.

The result of these frequent disasters was that not only were the people of the north struggling to feed and clothe themselves, but the problems for the military and civilians at the nine border garrisons were also extremely serious. The Ming army practiced the tuntian (military farming) system, with large numbers of troops stationed at the nine major border towns, all in the north, where frequent droughts year after year caused sharp declines in the yields of the military farms, and in some years, there was no harvest at all.

When the military farms could not be self-sufficient, the Ming government had to provide military pay and rations. Coupled with long-term internal and external troubles, military expenditures soared. During the reign of Emperor Yingzong, annual military pay for the border troops was only tens of thousands of taels of silver, but by the early Wanli period, military expenses had soared to over 8 million taels. In the twentieth year of Wanli, during the three major campaigns in Ningxia, Korea, and Bozhou, military expenditures reached 14.6 million taels. From the forty-sixth year of Wanli to the seventh year of Tianqi, over a ten-year period of warfare against the Later Jin, military expenses totaled more than 60 million taels.

Due to worsening disasters year after year and continuous warfare, by the thirtieth year of Wanli, the old treasury was nearly depleted, the capital’s grain supplies were exhausted, and the Taicang granary could not support even a single year’s needs. Never before in history had there been such public and private destitution as there was now. In the thirty-sixth year of Wanli, Censor Wang Ruolin was ordered to inspect the treasury and found only 80,000 taels of silver left, with the outer treasury completely empty, while at the same time, over 1 million taels in military pay were in arrears. From the thirty-eighth year of Wanli to the seventh year of Tianqi, arrears in military pay for the border towns reached more than 9.6 million taels.

The drain on the national treasury from border town military rations reached an extreme. By the end of the Wanli reign, especially after the crisis in Liaodong, the national finances were basically beyond recovery, leading to defeat in the wars against the Later Jin.

As for these larger trends, the military households of Wuzhai Fort did not understand them. They only knew that, due to natural disasters, the military farms under Wuzhai Fort had not produced much for several years. Their current lives depended solely on the meager monthly rations distributed from above each year, and they had no idea when such days would end. The life of the military households that Samuel Howard saw at Wuzhai Fort was just a microcosm of the lives of military households at the nine border garrisons at that time.

The harsh and unpredictable climate left the soldiers and civilians of Ming’s northern regions at a loss. What was wrong with the heavens? Yet Samuel Howard knew that such miserable days would continue for decades to come, only growing worse as time went on.