Chapter 164 Meat
Mwanza Fish Processing Factory.
Workers are pouring the fresh fish they just purchased into wooden barrels and sending them to the workshop for further processing.
This is a factory built purely on manpower, and its main product is dried salted fish.
Dried salted fish can be stored for a long time and is easy to transport. It can even be carried as military rations.
In this era when preservation technology is still immature, East Africa can only produce this traditional product at its current level.
Canning is feasible to a certain extent, but the cost is too high. Canning requires metal or glass as a carrier, and East Africa does not have the production capacity for these two things. It can only be considered after the subsequent ironworks and glassworks are completed.
And this is only the first step. After all, with materials, machines and other processes must be considered.
In this era, any metal, even bones, are important materials. Many places in Europe have to recycle them, and East Africa cannot have the deep pockets to provide cans to immigrants.
It costs money to produce, and it costs money to recycle the materials. After recycling, it has to be sterilized or remade, which is really uneconomical.
If you want to make a profit, you still have to sell it in Europe, but competition in Europe itself is very fierce, and cans are not accepted by the public and are only popular among the military.
The armies of various countries have stable canned food suppliers. Now Ernst cannot get involved, unless during a war, when military supplies are in short supply, the army will have the opportunity to purchase on a large scale.
The main agricultural products currently sold by the Hechingen Consortium in Europe are primary agricultural products such as flour and logs.
In this era, it is basically a fantasy to rely on machines to process fish meat. Just processing the fish scales in the first step is a problem. Therefore, the dried salted fish produced in the East African colonies is completely manual without any machine involvement.
Every day, the Mwanza Aquatic Products Processing Factory collects a large number of fresh freshwater fish caught that day from fishermen.
Workers in aquatic products processing plants first use tools to remove fish scales and other debris, and then workers in the next process will disembowel the fish, remove the internal organs and gills, then rinse the surface with water, put the fish in a large tank, and use Salted and finally hung on poles to dry.
The processing method is simple and unpretentious, but the scale is relatively large, so the production capacity is considerable. The Mwanza Aquatic Products Processing Factory currently has more than 500 workers. It is the largest salted fish processing factory in East Africa and its products are mainly supplied to Interior and arid areas of East Africa.
After the consumption of wild animals was banned in the East African colonies, alternatives to meat sources became particularly important.
In East Africa, the government carried out unilateral slaughter of wild animals and enclosure of land, resulting in a sharp reduction in the range of animal activities and the elimination of a large number of wild animals.
As for the East African immigrants who need protein and supplements to engage in manual labor, there are three solutions. One is to develop aquatic products in East Africa, the second is to raise livestock, and the third is to plant soybeans.
Among the three, aquatic products are readily available. East Africa has a vast water area, especially with many lakes. Whether it is fresh water or salt water, the fishery resources are relatively abundant.
Livestock takes time to breed, and the scale is not large. After all, most of them are imported. It takes more than ten years to breed and grow, and it is basically impossible to count on it.
Soybeans are the most easily available plant protein. They are also widely planted in East African colonies. They are mainly used for crop rotation. The root nodules of soybeans have the function of fixing nitrogen. They are usually rotated with wheat. Tropical plateaus are also very suitable for soybeans. Planting, but it is unlikely to completely replace meat.
So the protein supplement of East African immigrants still mainly relies on the rich fishery resources in East Africa. Fish is inherently safer to eat than other wild animals on the East African grasslands.
After the preliminary pickling process, it can effectively kill bacteria and parasites in the body. In Mwanza and other places, a large amount of fish meat is harvested. After workers manually remove the scales and internal organs, it is salted and dried. The dried fish can be stored in East Africa for several months.
In coastal, lakeside, and riverine areas, residents can obtain fresh fish. In areas lacking water and fishery resources, they can only eat pickled and dried fish.
Of course, eating fish alone will definitely not solve the problem. Animal husbandry (aquaculture) is the real way out for the future.
The East African grassland itself is a natural pasture. Although it is not of high quality, the area is definitely large enough. The uneven distribution of precipitation time is the biggest factor restricting the development of animal husbandry in East Africa. At the same time, cattle and horses and other livestock will be Impossible to be replaced for many years.
Of course, East Africa cannot only have large livestock such as cattle and horses. Chickens, ducks, geese and other poultry must occupy an important position.
However, large-scale breeding of chickens, ducks and geese is not easier than large-scale livestock such as cattle and horses. Free-range and domestic breeding are safer and less prone to plague. Therefore, poultry breeding in East Africa mainly relies on immigrants themselves.
There is also a specialty poultry in East Africa, the guinea fowl, which is also promoted by the East African government.
This thing was brought to Europe by the Ottoman Empire and was called "Türkiye Chicken". The meat is of good quality.
The most important thing is that as a rare local species in Africa, it has much stronger disease resistance, and the guinea fowl will chirp when it sees fire, so it can be used to prevent fires.
This is very important for the East African colonies, especially during the dry season, when the weather is dry and things are dry, it is easy to cause fires.
Poultry farming occupies an important position in East Africa, but it is mainly carried out by immigrants, and the grains it requires also need to be provided by immigrants themselves.
So, the scale of breeding is limited to families. The more you raise, the more you eat, although East Africa does have a lot of wasteland to grow feed.
However, each immigrant needs to complete the tasks in the fields arranged by the East African colony before he has time to take care of the wasteland developed by himself.
The fields allocated to each immigrant in the East African colonies were not small plots, but more than ten acres. Even if slaves were used, it was very laborious to complete.
So after completing the fields owned by the Hechingen Consortium, the immigrants basically have no extra energy to open up wasteland.
Moreover, immigrants have no property rights in the land opened up, and the East African colonial government can take it back at any time. That is to say, the most indispensable thing in the East African colonies now is land, so immigrants are allowed to develop it on their own.
However, if immigrants want to develop wasteland, they can basically only rely on the women in the family. The work assigned to women in East Africa is relatively light, so they can squeeze out time to increase additional income for the family.
Poultry breeding and vegetable garden care are basically done by women and children in the family.
Back to aquatic product processing plants, currently there are basically such factories built near larger lakes and seas in East Africa, providing meat supplements for the entire East Africa.
According to the principle of proximity, we are responsible for the meat supply in this region, and when combined with other meat sources allowed in East Africa, we can basically meet the meat needs of East African immigrants.
(End of this chapter)