章節 121: Learning about Paul (Part 1)
The next day, Becca and I got ready early and were waiting in my office for the peanut merchant to arrive. I wasn't worried about the negotiations with him being too difficult, so I was casually chatting with Becca while waiting.
Soon, James knocked on the door before entering with a young man. James introduced him, "my lord, my lady, this is Paul Jackson, the owner of the only peanut farm in the Duchy."
I was surprised at how young Paul was. He looked even younger than Becca. He also looked very skinny, like he did not have enough food to eat normally. This was especially strange since he was the owner of such a lucrative farming business.
I was curious, "how old are you, Paul?"
Paul bowed, "Duke Harrison, I turned 21 this year."
"Wow, only 21 and already the owner of such a successful business! How did that happen?"
"My father past away 3 years ago in a carriage accident, so I took over the farmer when I was 18."
I felt bad from accidentally bringing up a traumatic memory. "Oh, I'm sorry to hear about your Father."
Paul chuckled, "don't worry about it. My Father was a horrible alcoholic who beat my Mother every time he got drunk. I was glad when he died."
Now I felt bad for this young man and his mother. "Those type of people should be put in jail…anyways, it must have been a lot of pressure for you to take over the family peanut farm and soon after have to deal with some difficult disease that killed most of the crops."
I wasn't sure exactly what type of disease it was that caused Paul to be the only peanut farmer left, but I knew it had to be pretty devastating.
Paul corrected my assumption, "actually, we were originally an almond farm. I only switched our farm to a peanut farm 2 years ago…"
It seemed like there was more to the story then I orginally though. "Oh, so you must have found some ingenious way to overcome the disease that no one else knows about…are you a farming expert?"
Paul shook his head before asking, "may I tell you my story, Duke Harrison?"
I nodded, "of course, I am very curious."
He cleared his throat before beginning, "it all started when I first took over the farm after my Father died. The day of my Father's accident, he got especially drunk and beat my Mother so bad that she now has permanent damage to her body. He then tried to drive a carriage while still extremely drunk and ended up running off a cliff and dying. My Mother can no longer leave the bed and walk around without being in extreme pain.
At the time, I desperately wanted to pay for my Mother's medical expenses to help her get better, but our almond farm was pretty poor. My Father drank away any savings that we could have had and the price of almonds was always low, so I was not able to afford the expensive medical expenses for my Mother.
For a whole year, I tried desperately to come up with a way to earn a lot of money. That's when suddenly the peanut market was devastated by the peanut disease that was sweeping the Duchy. This disease made it so that the normal crop yield of 80% suddenly became only 10%. Peanuts were a cheap crop like almonds, so the drop in yield was a disaster for farmers who were now stuck in the red with no prospects of the disease going away.
This is when I made a risky decision, I decided to buy peanut seeds from all the peanut farmers by trading them my almond seeds. My Mother was against my decision because it had a chance of making us completely broke and she didn't want to make me suffer because of her, but I knew that I needed to do something unprecedented to change from a poor farmer to a rich businessman.
I traded whole farms worth of peanut seeds for only a fraction of the almond seeds I had on hand. Peanut farmers were desperate to change their crops at the time, so they took whatever they could get for their presumed useless peanut seeds.
A lot of other farmers laughed at me when they heard I was trying to buy peanut seeds, but they didn't know that I had a plan. I realized the problem was that the crop yield had dropped by 8 times, but what if the price of peanuts jumped by 10 times? Wouldn't I still make a profit?
But the question then becomes, how can I get customers to pay so much for cheap peanuts, especially when almonds were such a similar substitute? That's when it hit me, rich merchants and nobles spend ridiculous amounts of money on things that I consider a waste. They pay for the prestige of saying they have something rare. The rarity of the thing sparks their greed, not the intrinsic value of the product itself.
Now the problem is, how do I jack up the prices and focus only on nobles and the rich without getting undercut by other peanut farmers?
The key is that I needed to buy up every last peanut seed in the entire Duchy. Luckily, the other Duchy in the Kingdom does not have a suitable climate for growing peanuts, so I didnt have to worry about them having any peanut seeds.
Also, I didn't need to scour the entire Duchy to get every last peanut seed because the crop yield was now only 10%. Even if someone found a small bag of peanut seeds, they would not be able to continually farm them for long before they died out. The only way to succeed in the peanut business now, was to have the scale that I was looking to have.
I don't think it has ever happened in the history of the Kingdom that a single farmer owned all the seeds of a crop, but I knew it was my only chance to secure my business and help my Mother.
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