After finishing, the Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration "deleted about three tenths and increased by two tenths", which is divided into 12 items, with a total of 60 volumes and more than 500,000 words. 12 includes: 3 agricultural books; Field system 2 volumes; Farming 6 volumes; Water conservancy 9 volumes; 4 agricultural tools; Tree art 6 volumes; Sericulture 4 volumes; Sericulture 2 volumes; Planting 4 volumes; Animal husbandry 1 volume; Manufacturing 1 volume; Famine policy 18. The Encyclopedia of Agricultural Administration can be roughly divided into two parts: agricultural administrative measures and agricultural technology. The former is the outline of the whole book, and the latter is the technical measure to realize the outline. In the book, I saw unusual contents such as reclamation, water conservancy and famine relief, which accounted for nearly half of the book's length, which was rare in the previous generation of agricultural books.

In the Complete Book of Agricultural Administration, "famine relief" is an item, with as many as 18 volumes, which is the most 12 item in the whole book. This paper summarizes the opinions and policies of preparing for famine in past dynasties, makes statistics on floods, droughts and insect disasters, and analyzes the disaster relief measures and their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, 465,438+04 kinds of plants with plants and wild vegetables can be used to satisfy hunger. As a project, water conservancy has 9 volumes, ranking second in the book. Xu Guangqi believes that water is the foundation of agriculture. Without water, there would be no fields. At that time, the situation was' on the one hand, there were large areas of wasteland in the northwest that were left uncultivated; On the other hand, the capital and the army need a lot of food, but also from the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the cost is amazing. In order to solve this contradiction, he proposed that land reclamation in the north needed water conservancy construction. The purpose of his reclamation experiment in Tianjin is to explore the feasibility of reversing the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, so as to consolidate national defense and stabilize people's lives. This is the starting point of the book "Farming Water Conservancy", and in a sense, this is also the purpose of Xu Guangqi's writing this book.