I See through Everything

Qin Hanming brought up another point. "We should definitely consider growing this type of strawberry. After all, cultivating vanilla beans is too much trouble. The manual pollination alone makes it impossible to scale up production."

The company’s strawberry cultivation techniques were certainly more mature than those for an unfamiliar crop like vanilla beans.

"Actually, I have two ways to get rid of most of the strawberry flavor in this variety," Jiang Miao added. "One is to use a special nutrient solution, which can reduce the accumulation of certain flavor compounds in the strawberry. The other is a rapid processing method using a specific temperature, similar to the flash pasteurization of milk, which can instantly destroy some of the ester compounds that produce the strawberry taste."

"Boss, can these two methods be combined?" Jiang Haibo asked curiously.

Jiang Miao nodded. "Yes. One method reduces the synthesis of the strawberry-flavor compounds, and the other destroys them. It’s a two-pronged approach that should eliminate about 90% of the strawberry flavor. Unless someone has an exceptionally sensitive palate, it would be difficult to taste what little remains."

"Boss, I think we can invest in this project, but we should start on a small scale. After all, this kind of strawberry powder hasn’t been validated by the market yet," Qin Hanming suggested cautiously.

After a moment of consideration, Jiang Miao felt the company had ample funds and there was no need to be timid. He made his decision. "Then let’s lease another plot of land in Red Grass Town and build a planting base dedicated to this strawberry. While we’re at it, let’s acquire a nearby factory to serve as the processing plant for the strawberry powder."

"Boss, how large should the planting area be, roughly?" Jiang Haibo asked quickly.

"The yield of this strawberry is similar to the Aromatic Strawberry, about 4,000 to 5,000 kilograms per mu annually. Let’s start with 100 mu to test the waters!"

"Sounds good."

Suddenly, Jiang Haibo thought of the naming issue and quickly asked, "Oh, right, Boss. What should we call this strawberry?"

After all, ’Stinky Strawberry’ was just an internal nickname and completely unsuitable as a commercial name.

"The name Aromatic Strawberry is already taken," Jiang Miao said, rubbing his chin in thought.

Shuya was looking at some information on her phone when she saw a description of vanilla beans. A flash of inspiration struck her. "Why don’t we call it the Vanilla Strawberry? After all, vanilla beans come from the vanilla orchid."

Hearing this, Jiang Miao’s eyes lit up. He thought the name was excellent. "The Vanilla Strawberry? That’s a great name. It’s settled. From now on, this variety will be called the Vanilla Strawberry."

Now that the decision was made to mass-produce the Vanilla Strawberry, Jiang Miao instructed the tissue culture lab to begin cultivating its seedlings.

At the same time, he promoted Su Zhiling, the agricultural technician who had discovered the first-generation Vanilla Strawberry, making him the head of the Red Grass Strawberry Planting Base. Of course, Jiang Miao wouldn’t forget his contribution in discovering the original plant and decided to give him a cut of the product’s profits.

This profit-sharing was a type of compensation for technical staff. As long as a research project yielded results and was suitable for commercial mass production, the relevant technicians could receive a certain percentage of the product’s profits.

This was equivalent to an internal royalty, with the cut typically ranging from 0.1% to 1% of the product’s gross profit.

Considering Su Zhiling had discovered the original Vanilla Strawberry plant, Jiang Miao gave him a 0.3% share.

If the Vanilla Strawberry sold hundreds of millions a year in the future, Su Zhiling could receive hundreds of thousands annually, possibly even one or two million.

This kind of profit-sharing also served to encourage the researchers to work hard.

When Su Zhiling heard the news, he was initially in disbelief. After all, he had only discovered the mother plant; the subsequent research and breeding weren’t his work. He had thought the boss would give him a bonus of a few thousand yuan at most.

He never imagined he would get a share of the profits *and* be appointed as the head of the Red Grass Strawberry Planting Base.

Once it sank in, Su Zhiling’s body began to tremble uncontrollably with excitement.

His colleagues shot him looks of envy and jealousy. This was a meteoric rise; no wonder the others were green with envy.

But being envious and jealous was useless.

After all, discovering a new variety was sometimes just a matter of luck. When your luck was in, you could stumble upon something amazing. When it wasn’t, you could spend over a decade and find nothing.

And no one should think that the mother plant Su Zhiling had saved was unimportant.

Without that mother plant, there would be no seeds and no Vanilla Strawberry. It was, one could say, the origin of the entire Vanilla Strawberry lineage.

Jiang Miao, for his part, was also rethinking some of his breeding strategies.

He was particularly focused on spice crops. Many spices were expensive simply because the plants they came from were subject to various constraints that limited production capacity, thus driving up the price.

If he could use other crops that could be mass-produced and already contained the same flavor compounds, he could breed highly similar spice-type crops to replace the original, expensive spices.

The Vanilla Strawberry was a perfect example.

It was a low-cost substitute for vanilla beans, with a flavor so similar that it was nearly indistinguishable.

Among other high-end spices, saffron was another target worth tackling. The core component of its aroma is safranal.

And in nature, quite a few plants contained safranal, such as cornflowers, gardenias, and green tea.

He also thought about pharmaceuticals. Many of the complex organic compounds extracted from plants and animals for certain drugs were difficult to synthesize artificially and could only be refined from harvested crops.

Therefore, by using breeding to obtain varieties with particularly high concentrations of a certain compound, he could increase the value of that crop.

In fact, Jiang Miao was already attempting this with his Egyptian Catfish farming, specifically targeting an increase in protein content and an adjustment of its various fat ratios.

By using Feed No. 4, the protein content in the flesh of the Egyptian Catfish could be raised from 22% to between 24% and 25%. The unsaturated fatty acid content in its oil would also increase from 45% to between 50% and 53%.

This enhancement caused the value of the Egyptian Catfish to rise accordingly. After all, every percentage point increase in protein content meant that more fishmeal could be produced.

Similarly, a higher content of unsaturated fatty acids meant greater value after refining, which would also increase the price of the crude oil.

And this was an improvement achieved just through scientific feeding.

If they were to use targeted breeding, a new variety might show even more prominent results in certain traits.