Chapter 570 - 351: Farming is a Top Priority

Chapter 570: Chapter 351: Farming is a Top Priority

Make dragons farm the land.

The more Zog thought about it, the more he felt it was a great idea.

If you looked closely at a dragon’s characteristics, it was basically a large, carbon-based piece of agricultural equipment.

It could serve as a powerful tractor, tilling wasteland and loosening soil. Just by digging its claws into the ground, it could plow a field.

If they were planting tall-stalked crops, harvesting would just be a matter of swiping a claw through them. Therefore, dragons should be made to plant things like corn and sorghum.

They could also fly, making tasks like low-altitude crop dusting effortless.

There would be no need for scarecrows, either. With a dragon squatting by the edge of a field, you could guarantee no birds would dare come within dozens of acres.

If it was a dragon capable of magic, it could even learn some agriculturally useful spells, making it even more versatile.

The only drawback was probably that a dragon’s size made tasks like sowing seeds rather difficult; they would have to rely on tools.

And the skill of changing size at will wasn’t something every dragon had mastered.

Besides, neither Deepwater City nor the Northern Domain had that much land for dragons to farm.

The Northern Domain had climate issues, while Deepwater City had been specifically built in a location unsuitable for farming.

Zog had always believed that building houses on good land was an incredible waste.

However, this wasn’t a problem for the clever Zog.

He planned to start an "agricultural dragon leasing" service.

He would lease out dragons that had learned various farming skills, charging by the hour.

If the Deep Research Institute didn’t currently have all its project teams tied up, he would have had them develop some complementary agricultural equipment for the dragons.

As for the question of whether anyone could afford to lease an agricultural dragon, Zog did some research.

The answer was, yes, they actually could.

This was because the vast majority of farmland in Feilin wasn’t in the hands of individual farmers.

It was all monopolized by high-ranking nobles, landlords, and farm owners.

They controlled hundreds of acres of land, with high-ranking nobles often owning over a thousand.

These were the people who could afford to lease dragons.

It was similar to renting large-scale agricultural machinery.

A single dragon should be enough to significantly boost the crop yields of these major landowners.

At the same time, dragons couldn’t replace the entire farming process, so they wouldn’t take away the livelihoods of ordinary farmers.

Overall, the goal was to open up more arable land, not to make existing farmers lose their jobs.

’A good idea should make the pie bigger for everyone.’

Therefore, Zog decided to clear a plot of land, not for actual farming, but to shoot a promotional video showcasing the Dragon Race’s farming capabilities, which he would then market to those landowners.

The only remaining difficulty, then, was to get these young dragons on board with the idea.

Dragons were a proud race.

And it was an unreasonable sort of pride.

If they lived to the age of an Ancient Dragon and had the power to back it up, then their pride was understandable, and others couldn’t really say much.

But most dragons, right from the juvenile stage, believed themselves to be the chosen ones, with all other races being a step beneath them.

Getting them to willingly farm the land was going to be a bit of a challenge.

In a dragon’s mind, being a courier or being enlisted in a legion were both far more high-class jobs than farming.

They had already been bullied enough by those short, lesser races; now they were expected to grow food for them?

’What a disgrace!’

Fortunately, the Dragon Race had indeed been having a rough time lately, so there was some room for discussion.

Besides, the young dragons weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed; they were easy to fool.

Zog had also learned that these dragons yearned for the former glory of the Dragon Race and had significantly romanticized a history they had never experienced.

In other words, they were ancient-era glorifiers.

As a dragon who had personally lived through that period, Zog could responsibly say it wasn’t all that glorious.

At best, they were just one of the more notable races.

It was a far cry from the world-dominating Dragon Race that these young ones imagined.

As for their so-called kingdom, it was a ridiculously loose confederation.

In Zog’s view, it could only be called a slightly larger-than-average tribe; it could hardly be considered a nation.

What kind of nation didn’t even have proper laws? Disputes were settled either by the leader’s gut feeling or by a fight, where might made right.

However, there was one benefit to the young dragons’ unrealistic fantasies: they saw Zog through rose-tinted glasses.

’A Giant Dragon from the "Golden Era"!’

Thanks to this worship born from their own imaginations, Zog had a natural charisma bonus with the Dragon Race. Whatever he said had a +1 to persuasion.

After two days, the census of this batch of dragons was finally complete. During that time, a few dozen more had arrived, pushing Deepwater City’s dragon population over five hundred.

The results of the census were, as expected, another batch of dragons with no real specializations.

They possessed almost no skills applicable in an industrial age.

The few Ancient Dragons who had some magical aptitude and could transform into humans or change their size were assigned to the Deep Research Institute or the schools, starting as entry-level interns.

Although they had decent casting abilities, their knowledge of magical principles was severely outdated, far below the current era’s average.

It was like someone who had studied mathematics for years and figured out trigonometry on their own. You couldn’t say it wasn’t impressive, but trigonometry was still just middle-school-level knowledge.

The car they’d reinvented on their own had been utterly wrecked by a modern vehicle.

Fortunately, their innate abilities were strong enough—discovering "trigonometry" on your own was no small feat—so by starting as interns, it shouldn’t take them long to catch up with the times.

Among the remaining dragons, the ones with the best physical constitution were put into military training, destined to airdrop behind enemy lines carrying anti-aircraft machine guns.

They had no resistance to carrying people on their backs because their military rank was higher than that of the person they were carrying.

So, while it looked like a person riding a dragon, the person was actually the "accessory," and the dragon was the commanding officer.