Agriculture in Taiwan

Hello. Was wanting to have an in depth conversation about all aspects of agriculture in Taiwan with those interested in economy/ecology/environment etc.

I study a lot about this general field of biology and am wondering if anyone else is looking at our little island and as shocked, scared and angry as me? Lots of topics can be discussed, so lets pick some and see where it takes us.

I will be to the next little while photographing various species, but for now wanted to maybe discuss about commercial fruit contamination (albeit intentional). i also want to touch on the topic of “organic” not being “organic” but that’s along one and i am kind of rushed at the moment. So Taiwan was hit by a BIG fly infestation on mangoes last year, at least in the south. This year i was thinking they must be bagging and/or spraying to beat hell, and to my surprise i only see spraying, far fewer bagging, which says to me they are trying to hit the flies hard this year. The other issue being the weather this year really hit the mango industry hard (i suspect lychee will be bad this year too). So there is going to be a LOT more pesticide and hormone use on mangoes this year, as one example.

personally i wont be eating any mangoes anywhere unless i know the trees they came from.

What i am really interested in reading, but suspect anything of the nature wouldn’t get published in a country like this, is studies that show relationships with various long term contaminants (be it food, air, soil or water) and long term animal health issues. there are a few with lower animals.

Health i feel is Taiwan’s biggest issue of today and the future. And our food here is tragically poor quality and in fact often contaminated with toxic substances. I dont like it, and want to discuss in depth and work out solutions with anyone interested.

Personally, I think this is the wrong way to look at things. From a practical viewpoint, why are we even using methods and materials that, whether they are “contaminants” or not, result in lower productivity and economic loss?

The solution is pretty simple, I think: create a farming business model that can deliver proper food at lower cost than subsidised, processed, polluted garbage. Reality is that most people have been trained to only care about price. It’s not going to be easy because of the massive subsidies poured into practices that don’t even work (if they did, they wouldn’t need subsidy). However, I believe the inherently higher productivity of chemical-free methods can result in cost parity, at least. Some businesses have already achieved that. I think the low-income tropics is an easier target: 1) the efficiency of chemical-fed methods is laughable compared to well-designed polycultures 2) subsidies are relatively low 3) there is huge scope for disruptive innovation in the supply chain. Offset against that is 1) a consumer base that have been trained to accept and enjoy pigswill and 2) a generally protectionist attitude to foreign “interference”.

I think your second paragraph answered your question in the first paragraph :slight_smile: I think it is important to show very simply, and with as few words and as many simple diagrams and pictures as possible why these contaminants are bad, but they should be backed up by real science. Practicality and reality rarely are parallel forces.

People will not change their traditional ways and hard habits until there is a very real and convincing reason to, and in the case of polluted food you must show people that many are dieing or someone miserable due to it, or they wont care enough to change. Some people don’t mind paying 40% for food that isn’t literally poisonous, but others either don’t know, don’t care or think they cannot afford actual food (in contrast to the garbage marketed as food).

I suppose there may be 3 levels of issues. farmers, distributors/retailers (=marketing) and consumers. consumers care mostly about aesthetics and price. Farmers care mostly about end kg of salable product. and the distributors care most about buying cheap, selling high. I think that greed far outweighs health when it gets right down to things. and as you hinted at already, growing food that is clean is actually cheaper. And better in infinite ways, but Taiwan has one thing that many countries don’t need to worry about as much. Population density and land mass available. With land expensive and returns on small lots important, its no wonder everything from farmed marine/aquatic meats, to plants to mushrooms are all contaminated with something.

I’m not sure the answer, but i am starting to think it will simply be farmers taking the initiative somehow and growing clean food for a price comparable to polluted foods, which i do not see happening soon.

one other problem is that Taiwanese government does nothing at all to help smart agriculture practice. the subsidies here are often aimed at old styles of very literally retarded agriculture systems that make little sense. If there is interest i can scan/take pictures of some official papers form the government here about such matters, but its all Chinese and i wont be translating it (sorry). My point in saying all this is that clean food wont come from government initiatives, it will come from consumer demand. i think anyway. so what can be don on that end?

i think soil remediation, along with the obvious pollution controls, should also start being taken seriously as do seemingly many people, but little is ever done about it. but on a personal level, anyone here can own land and remediate it, which is what i am doing now. Interestingly, many AG extensions here will not test pollutants for you, you need to go pay at private institutions (universities). every time i try and get answers that have to do with pollution they get very very strange. I know its truly embarrassing the situation, but hiding wont fix it.

Try farming here, then get back to us.

I dunno. Most people have no clue about “real science” and aren’t interested in parsing complex research results. And really, why should they? They just want to eat their dinner.

I suggest modern farming practices should be backed up by bullshit, meaningless drivel, and overwhelming PR. Ever watched Idiocracy? That’s where we’re at, right now, in most of the world. 99% of the world’s population will glaze over if you use lots of long words and logic, but they’ll happily believe buzzwords if presented in the right way.

I was in the Philippines last week, where this approach is wildly successful - in all the wrong ways. The TV commercials, I swear, have been lifted straight out of the Idiocracy movie. They’re that dumb and unsophisticated. I watched one advertising red slop, allegedly containing tomatoes, with a smiling housewife and a voiceover that declares ‘Acme Red Slop: with lycopeeeene!’. That was pretty much the whole pitch. Nobody knows what lycopene is or what it might do for them, but they’ll buy said slop regardless because the word ‘lycopene’ has three syllables, and scientists say it’s good for you.

In the UK, Tesco (a supermarket that controls about 40% of the retail food market) has a big slogan that reads: “everyday low prices!”. That’s a bit more clever. The implication is that they’re the good guys, on your side, keeping prices low so that you, the hard-working wage slave with a meaningless job, can afford to eat well. Except, if you go to the farmer’s market down the road, you can buy top-notch produce for the same prices, sometimes less.

We need more bullshit and less over-intellectualising. More pointing out that the factory-farmers, the supermarkets, and the politicans/lawyers/economists who make it all possible are bad people - because they are. It’s ugly, but it’s what people respond to. Emotional pitches, not rational ones.

A lot of people don’t seem to care about this either. It’s not real until it happens - I’ve heard people laugh and say, oh well, you gotta die of something, and I like my coke and fries. They only find it a bit less funny when they end up on the liver-transplant list or diabetic.

I have wondered if a concerted PR blitz with a simple message (“eating junk food will make you miserable, fat, impotent, poor, and eventually dead”) would have an effect if repeated often enough. There would be a backlash from TPTB, obviously, but I don’t think it would work. They can’t plead libel because libel has to be (a) untrue and (b) directed at a legal person, not an idea or a range of products.

Yes, I think this is the important point. The market is not homogeneous; there will always be people who eat themselves into an early grave, but there are plenty of others who actively seek out the good stuff and refuse to buy shite. A farmer who grows proper food will find a market for it.

Only because that’s what distributors want. It’s really up to farmers to start telling the big disti’s to fuck off, but of course they’ll only do that if they can sell elsewhere.

I don’t think farmers will take the initiative. It’ll be new middlemen. I’ve met a lot of farmers and 95% of them have a victim mentality, believing they have no control over their own destiny. They choose to sell their produce to big ag, even though they know they’re getting fucked over, because stable poverty (or the perception of stability) is better than unstable prosperity. They have no interest in learning new things. The other 5% will respond to distributors who offer alternative business models and will adapt production to suit, as long as the disti shoulders the risk. This is, at least, the way I’m approaching it. Experience may prove me wrong.

Same in virtually every country on the planet, because agriculture policy is set by the sort of dull people who end up shuffling papers on government desks. Nothing you can do about that; the only option, I think, is put the whole lot of them out of business. Not easy when the deck is stacked, but I think it can be done. I’m toying with the idea of alternative distribution chains and retailing models, and alternative currencies that (by their nature) bypass government lever-pulling.

Even gov’t research labs know it’s all bullshit. I recall reading a Taiwanese gov’t-funded paper that estimated the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus dumped in pig manure exceeds by a factor of two or three the amount imported as artificial soil amendments (which are, of course, subsidized).

I agree. From what I have seen, there are many governments that deliberately engineer things so that people are malnourished. For example, in the Philippines, farmers are punished (with land taxes) if they develop their land with irrigation, roadways, trees etc.; that is, you are taxed on what the government thinks you ought to be earning, rather than your actual income; and then it taxes you on your income as well. Food riots are avoided (price volatility normally results in social unrest) by artificially stabilising food prices.

Same here. I’ve got about 5 years of experience behind me and I’m now confident enough to try it on a larger scale. The numbers look good on paper, but reality is often different, of course!

What are you trying to say? Both I and the OP are doing this. Are you? In any case, the problems aren’t related to farming per se - they’re more a result of faulty business models further up the chain.

Knowing I can’t solve the ag mess here I bought land and will grow my own fruits and vegetables. What I do not grow I will source from the organic farmers we are meeting nearby.

Soil testing for pesticides? Water testing as well. If anyone knows a reliable organization please share…that would be great. The local govt ag office here tries to avoid providing any information about where to test. They just ask me where my land is and say that area is okay…no factories in that area before. I was hoping for more information than that. :doh:

Where are you? Your local ag extension does this for free.

Live near Hualien. We can go ask our local ag office again. We heard from others that we need to inform the testing office exactly what pesticides to check for. Well, I really don’t know what I am doing.

I am not very concerned about pesticides as the land was dormant for the last 9 years. I do worry about the groundwater or heavy metals from any stuff which might have been dumped there. We have owned the land for 7 years and did not notice anything strange dumped there recently but in the past who knows…

Find your local ag extension and go to the Farmer Service Center with someone who speaks Chinese and knows what you want checked beforehand. Wost case scenario is have it google translated. I would suggest it be short, concise and to the point. If you knwo where it is then I don’t have to hunt down the address and website.

The guys are top notch where I am and they can usually offer a load of useful info on organic practices. The ag extensions are big into organics like most farmers here who grow their own food.

[quote]A lot of people don’t seem to care about this either. It’s not real until it happens - I’ve heard people laugh and say, oh well, you gotta die of something, and I like my coke and fries. They only find it a bit less funny when they end up on the liver-transplant list or diabetic.

I have wondered if a concerted PR blitz with a simple message (“eating junk food will make you miserable, fat, impotent, poor, and eventually dead”) would have an effect if repeated often enough. There would be a backlash from TPTB, obviously, but I don’t think it would work. They can’t plead libel because libel has to be (a) untrue and (b) directed at a legal person, not an idea or a range of products.[/quote]

I think we should clarify before we side track too far. there is a huge difference between unhealthy food and contaminated food. The former being a a lifestyle choice by the consumer, to be blunt they opt for cancer and can suffer the consequences on their own for their decisions. The latter is a whole new ball game because people are unknowingly, or sometimes straight up lied to, eating contaminated foods. Heavy metals was just one such example that is hard to deal with as the soil here is so polluted. But things like herbicides/pesticides, various quarantine measures etc all can be potential issues.

Agreed, is not a nice thought but it’s reality.

Yes, but herein lies the problem, where can we get clean food and how do we know its clean? i know there is a point where we cant do anything, and some people, most actually, think its pointless to care. but accountability with things like our diet should be as top priority as our health care system, in fact i treat the 2 as one in the same when it comes to need for quality control and accountability.

it goes further down the ladder, its want the end user wants, not the distributors. there are plenty of aesthetically shit looking plant foods about that are very healthy and clean, but they end up rotting on the shelf, often even if discounted. Similar arguments are made all the time. Whose responsibility is it to change? Well form my perspective if people are getting shit quality they should be buying better. Thats a personal choice again, and isnt really of huge concern to us as its more of a freedom of choice thing. The issues again come into play when people who do not wish to come into contact with certain toxins are forced to. other issues arise in places like Taiwan where flooding occurs and polluted farmlands contaminate clean organic ones.

As with all foods i think more transparency is needed. We should have access, easily, to what foreign materials have come into contact with our foods, not unlike allergy information.

AG extensions probably wont do any real meaningful testing here. they tend to do the simple stuff like basic nutrition and heat test for organic content. maybe some do it, but many seem to stick to the basics unless you really press them. You should really go to agriculture/science universities for these tests, they (probably) wont be free though.

i think most pesticides will blown in or wash in with floods, but they will also likely be leached out with said rains as well. as you mention, heavy metals and other touch things that tend to get stuck in the soil will be the big issue. phytoremediation with the squash family could help get a good chunk out if you have LOTS. just plow once and do a heavy heavy cropping of it then dump the left over plant material in an appropriate location (industrial park entrance for example;) ) its a good time now with the rainy season, you wont really need strange irrigation setup and if rains damage the fruit you wont be eating it anyway. phytoremediation is slow and inefficient though, so if you have heavily contaminated land you will be SOL for a while. I’m really not sure how mycelium would work out on metals…

for me the first thing i would do now with new land is build up perimeter and a fence with concrete base to avoid much flooding from outside farms. I bought my land now specifically because it is raised above the surrounding farms, makes cleaning up the soil a level battle field.

Edit, I forgot to add why i wanted to come here and post. Responsible farmers will also be placing at least a few of the empty bags of chemicals around their farm, to warn people of their use. This is unfortunately not too common, but good farmers will know to do this. The biggest reason i feel is that in many parts of Taiwan, agriculture theft is really a big issue. big and small, but the small stuff is the issue here. there are many poisonings every year because people pick from fields that are sprayed. One of many things that is likely very much under recorded as it is quite embarrassing how frequent it happens, especially in the past.

Okami…and others who have posted here…thanks for sharing your information and thoughts. I need a few more months before I start planting my vegetables but appreciate your postings about good farming methods and related.

Well … technically there is, but I think they both arise from the same mindset. The people who bring us apples covered in pesticides and the people who bring us cheez-wiz are one and the same, or at least inextricably bound together by a master-slave relationship.

Yes, we do have the choice, at least, to buy from small producers who refuse to use incorrect methods. The puzzling part (for me) is why so few people make that choice, especially since the cost difference is (often) minimal.

I’ve been thinking about this myself for very practical reasons: I will need PR for my products. Most of the organic labelling schemes are just a blatant scam, putting money into pockets of overpaid consultants and inspectors, so small farmers can’t afford the overhead. Their rules are often overly rigid, enforcing a certain type of organic farming and offering little or no leeway for innovation. I dislike the word ‘organic’ anyway - it’s really quite meaningless.

I was wondering if something like the eBay model might work, whereby small producers auction what they have (or what they know they’re going to have) to a multitude of buyers - middlemen, possibly, but in practice anyone who can afford to buy and ship a reasonable amount (say, hotels, residential co-operatives, corner shops…). Each supplier would be rated for quality, and buyers could conduct whatever tests they want and post the results. Basically, people would post “feedback” exactly as on eBay, Amazon, and the like, without the need for anyone to spend a shitload of money on formal certification. Individual consumers would be able to go to the site and see aggregate data on the produce their retailers are buying. They key would be well-designed data collation/analysis/presentation so that people could tell at a glance if the restaurant they’re eating at tomorrow is buying all-natural produce … or not.

IMHO, most people are stupid. They buy whatever they’re trained and told to buy and shove it in their pieholes without tasting or assessing. The upside is, I think, that there might be a market for basic food education. Just as fashion houses “educate” their customers about what’s fashionable, it might be possible to generate and spread cultural memes about food - not just aimed at people with money, but for people who might normally think exotic cuisine is a plate of beef tacos. Cooking shows are massively popular and always have been. A lot of people are, basically, “into” food. They just need their ideas reshaping a bit to exclude mass-market, chemical fed produce from what they normally classify as “food”.

Look up ‘hyperaccumulators’. If you know what’s in your soil (if anything) there are certain plants that will suck it up.

:laughing:

I’m signing the contract for my new plot this Thursday, and the first thing I’ll be doing is planting a living fence. I’m going for multiple rows, most likely with some aggressive, tall, stoloniferous grass on the outside (doesn’t matter what it is - something local), L. leucocephala (which grows like a weed into a nice, dappled-shade hedge), and vetiver (which looks unimpressive but has a massive, thick root mat). All I need to do is keep the grass short for a year or so to give the Leucaena a good start, and I should then be able to leave it alone. Nobody nearby is really doing any farming, but if they do start, that lot should create a nice barrier.

Perhaps, but we cant lump 2 very different causes together because there is a similarity in the outcome. Unhealthy food can be sugar, but one can obtain very clean and “organic” (i hate that term too :slight_smile: ) sugar from sustainable sources quite readily. It is not contaminated and is still “unhealthy”. lots of natural foods are naturally unhealthy for a human diet, but thats a nutrition issue not an agricultural one. The contamination can be an agriculture issue and its a huge thing. I think maybe the term contaminated, or tainted, can also be used to describe products that contain added substances unknown to the user. I know it is perhaps ridiculous to label all the chemicals the farmer used on his field, but then I feel its ridiculous that they use all those chemicals in the first place then pass it off as orally beneficial.

And in any society that claims freedom and equality, one should be allowed to eat themselves to death. The debate might be more aimed at whether they should be covered and/or by whom. That is why i wanted to distinguish the terms above. This is about shotty farm land management/practices and a hugely inefficient system run here in many regards. One will never convince everyone to eat healthy, if it can even be defined, nor should one, but we definitely should be aware of what is tainting our food when we are (based on labels) buying clean food without foreign shit all over them. I have a commercial mango on my table, bought i tripe 10 days ago…still looks great…im not eating it. Not because it lasts, but because i have no way of knowing, really knowing, what they used. TO em its like buying heroin off a bum in the alley way. There is about that much transparency and dignity involved.

i started a marketplace like that a while ago, though not an auction more like ebay but only shops/buy it now. There is a lot of stuff behind the scenes you learn about fast. I wouldnt call them unions in Taiwan (are they?), but they are more or less the same thing…For something like this to work properly here one must have some weight behind them or know someone who does I think. Plus there is going to be more and more regulations, which at first thought might be good but it will more than certainly be totally ass backwards and designed entirely to make corruption reign supreme. Clearly i do not posses the heavenly amount of patience needed to deal with bureaucrats.

people are not necessarily stupid, at least its not PC to say it, but we are generally very ignorant. I think that ignorance is no excuse to be poisoned for profit, and a relatively low profit at that…

hyperaccumulator, new word for me thanks. Seems to be it is just the general term for plants that are used in phytoremediation. Actually i really dislike using plants to remediate soils, due to speed, but i think for things like heavy metals, which are not digestible, one can only suck them out with plants or replace the soil…both painfully slow and labor intensive. you still run into the problem of disposal. Heavy metal contamination i think needs to be look at carefully first to see which ones and their possible health risks (if any), then go from there. some metals dont seem to be too nasty, but it still seems wrong to be eating them once you know they are there.

For me i personally suggest against those species you listed for the living fences, unless you have specific reasons to use them. I think that you may be using the L. leucocephala for its nitrogen fixing? if so i would use almost anything else strictly because of how bad it is as a weed. They are such heavy seeders sometimes they have actually attracted attention from governments as fodder…Dont quote me, but i would not be surprised if that was why it was originally brought here. I wonder. Its a terrible plant though with little use other than firewood. There are lots of replacements, many of which have many more uses. Even lots of native Fabaceae that can be grown as L. leucocephala. On that note, Tamarind fruit are being imported to Carrefour now from Thailand, and seeds are easy. They grow int o lovely trees, can be pruned down to hedge height and have fruit. they will also not invade your farm. there are numerous other species too. Inga species might be a nice one for you if you can find it here.

The grass, i have read about it but i always tend to stay away from any grass, just dont like it personally. I have made many fences like you wish with others though. Lots in the ginger family work. Alipinia have great ones, and edible. Bird of paradise and many ornamental species as well. I like the living fences idea too, your system seems great but having used the tree before i dont like it anymore, better substitutes. I assume its mostly for weeds? lemon grass works well, but takes a year to get thick enough. plant it every 1-2 feet and nothing but vines will grow through, which will grow through literally any barrier you put in place. For me i like using the heavy weave type black plastic. i know its not great for environment, but compared to without it i think the footprint is far less. i will lay a 6’ wide piece on the border, slightly into the neighbors if they are OK with it. then plant your thick live barrier in that, makes it super easy to weed through and let them establish.

Does anyone know how chlorates react after entering the soil? I am trying to figure out if there might be any risk with bleaching soils to induce fruit flowering in some trees. I think obviously it will be bad for the air, but i wonder just how it will effect the final fruit. would love to read any papers on it if you guys know any.

Fascinating … and not surprising in the least. There’s always someone who’s making a shitload of money out of the status quo and doesn’t want to see it change. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the fuckedupness on the planet can be traced back to a couple thousand individuals, who get virtually nothing out of it except a few fancy cars and houses, and have no qualms about the damage they do to acquire them.

I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to establish something like this in the face of concerted opposition; my feeling is that you would have to build a certain amount of critical mass behind-the-scenes, without making too many waves. You would have to make the “unions” irrelevant without them noticing, and then “go live” with a fully-debugged system ready to take over a large segment of the agricultural market. Creeping competition would be instantly stifled; what you need is a bit of shock-and-awe.

Haven’t quite figured out the details, of course :slight_smile:

My experience is that the regulations are not merely to provide mindless jobs for otherwise unemployable people. There is deliberate and malevolent purpose behind them. This is more obvious in low-income countries. I’ll leave it at that because, frankly, I’m getting a bit paranoid.

Phytoremediation is really just the lesser of two evils. The best solution, of course, is not to contaminate the soil in the first place, but try explaining that to a politician and watch him blue-screen.

Three reasons:

  1. They’re growing on my land; they’re free. The grasses, I can just cut pieces of 'em, replant them, and they’ll grow like, um, weeds. Likewise with L.leucocephala. All I need to do is collect a load of seeds, dunk them in water and inoculant (handful of soil from existing plants) and they’ll grow. Vetiver is marvellous stuff. Yes, lemongrass is good too, and I’ll probably grow that as well. I just don’t have a source for it at the moment, and I’ve found it can be quite fragile - you can’t cut it as aggressively as other types.

  2. Weediness doesn’t bother me. I generally let weeds grow to a certain height and then cut them down. I grow alleys demarcated with vetiver and lemongrass, so I leave cut grass over the top that slows regrowth. Rinse and repeat.

  3. leucaena makes pretty good mulch, and I may get animals in future that will browse it or eat cut branches. Most native grasses grow really, really tall and dense, which is an important characteristic in a country where people steal anything that isn’t nailed down, and take slightly longer to steal anything that is.

I’d only use L.leucocephala for the fences. For more general use I’ll be planting gliricidia sepium and sesbania sesban. I’ve not had much success with tamarind (it grows very slowly!), and I’ve heard it suppresses other plants around it. I’d love to get inga edulis, but the seeds are very short viability and I have no idea how I’d obtain them.

It’s really just to keep people and animals out, and mitigate runoff/flooding. Trees, IMO, don’t work well by themselves for fencing because the lower end is naturally quite open, unless you have any suggestions.

Personally I wouldn’t want to try it. AFAIK chlorates are highly water-soluble, and toxic, and will therefore cause all sorts of unpredictable problems.

This is, in fact, my main objection to using chemicals on farms: you can never really be sure exactly what they’re going to do. Sure, they’ll do what they say on the tin. But they’ll also do 100 other things, and you might not want that.

Chlorates are about 200 times more poisonous to plants than the equivalent chloride. They are used as weed killers for that reason. They are also somewhat dangerous as in combustible… get some solutions on a cloth, and with enough friction it will light! Exposure to acid will also make chlorate/fuel (fuel could mean sugar, clothing, or anything that normally burns) auto ignite. Though I tried deliberately putting potassium chlorate on some weeds on the sidewalk and they are just way too robust to die…

By the way potassium chlorate is used to cause longan trees to blossom, but overuse of it will kill the plant. Keep bleach out of plants you want, only use it on plants you want to die (like weeds on the sidewalk)

[quote]Chlorates are about 200 times more poisonous to plants than the equivalent chloride. They are used as weed killers for that reason. They are also somewhat dangerous as in combustible… get some solutions on a cloth, and with enough friction it will light! Exposure to acid will also make chlorate/fuel (fuel could mean sugar, clothing, or anything that normally burns) auto ignite. Though I tried deliberately putting potassium chlorate on some weeds on the sidewalk and they are just way too robust to die…

By the way potassium chlorate is used to cause longan trees to blossom, but overuse of it will kill the plant. Keep bleach out of plants you want, only use it on plants you want to die (like weeds on the sidewalk)[/quote]

There is no way i use these thing son my land, but as you mention it is used a “lot” in some areas for difficult to flower trees. I am not sure but I wonder if it is used for lychee here? I am aware of its environmental impacts, but i wonder if there is anything that carries onto the fruit due to it beig a relatively long time after application that fruit is harvested…?

Finley you are right. But the MASSIVE problem with any kind of retail outlet, and a bigger one for fresh produce stores, is always staying stocked. We can talk and praise buying looal in season food all we want, but business doesnt grow like that here so it must be made similar enough to the norm for people to really utilize it. So more exotic hard to stock things need to happen. But keeping stock is VERY hard, especially if you have ag associations against you. Like you say, needs to be a splash not ripples, and that requires good farmers behind you, not always easy…and REALLY not easy if your aim is healthy and clean food. I gave up and never looked back personally. But farmers are in easy positions here. for one they often have small plots. so selling to niche markets such as specialty markets, restaurants, caterers etc is actually very profitable and way easier to manage and keep consistency in the products. If i ever try it again, thats how i would start.

Regulations are as good an idea as the justice system. Really are good I agree. But everything is only as sane as the people signing the papers. Here, that is not awesome for most.

If you like those species go for it. But i have had to pull out and eradicate the stuff on many occasions, its really not fun. Even in the beginning of a farm we always think its easy to run down the weeds every couple weeks. Like you say there are lots of voids under trees, so they make posts. The Alpinia (zerumbet is local and useful) are what i was thinking instead of your grass. You get healthy rhizomes to eat/make tea, leaves to make zhongzi, pretty flowers, showy foliage and its growth habit does the exact same purpose as the grass in terms of building a living fence for weeds. Its harder to walk through than grass too, but it is slower. you just plant it densely. IT is grown everywhere, should be able to source for free. There are many plants that can fill those spots. That is how i am designing my new farm as well, the idea being fill each area that is unused with something useful. a wood chip layer may be helpful if its convenient to deliver. I am debating doing that after typhoon season. spend some quality knee time getting the m out by the roots then cover in sawdust. terrible for big trees, but great in the beginning.

the plants under my tamarind dont seem suppressed at all, until its weeding time. Even simple stuff like coleus i have grown around them. Granted they are not as fast as the weedy legumes, but my trees reached 4 meters in 3 years… i hack them down to 2-3m every year simply because i planted them in a bad spot and want to move them. very pretty trees though, and great shade trees. I personally also want to include some of the more rare native cinnamon trees, slower still although still fast trees.

If you find Inga, let me know i want some too. I can import it legally if you know a reliable source that can arrange phytosanitary certificates reasonably. I havent done it yet, but i was thinking of contacting forestry service in brazil and have a friend mail them.

One other aspect i think gets far too little attention is water efficiency. Given the fact that large areas of Taiwan are literally sinking, it probably deserves some serious consideration. My old farm i didnt water for about 5 years, though it was more a large garden than a small commercial operation. So what do you guys think about irrigation. the whole pump n flood method, although cheap and easy, seems to be about the most wasteful thing a farmer could do. Especially when there can be long periods of no rain, even up to 6 months. just seems very poorly thought out. My new farm i have not watered yet, but its not a farm yet either. So far i just set up some rain collection barrels, so have a few thousand liters on standby from rain. but that doesnt last long in the sun. I was actually thinking about experimenting with cisterns, but i dont currently have an excavator. I wonder though how good an idea they would be, thinking earthquakes mostly.

I got my first cashew fruit this year :slight_smile:

So … I bought the farm. Literally, if not yet metaphorically. It’s not actually a farm. It’s 8ha of wilderness in a subhumid tropical area (1600mm/year, 28’C avg. temperature). It has a river that runs more-or-less throughout the 4-month dry season, and a spring. It’s nice. I’ll maybe post photos later.

I’m evolving my ideas about the fence, but haven’t thought a whole lot further than that. I’m now planning to use trema orientalis for the bulk of the fence biomass. I have a couple of these on my land in Taiwan and they seem to be available near (although curiously not on) my new plot. They’re awesome. Nitrogen-fixing, loads of wood and leaves for mulch and hugelkultur-style composting, they’re unfazed by aggressive pruning, and apparently insects like them. You can climb things up them - I have chayote and passionfruit scrambling up the ones in Taiwan - but no doubt my fence will end up swamped in ipomoea eventually. I’m also going to try acacia tortilis, which has some impressive barbs on it - I need to discourage the local retards from casual trespass (see below).

Some kind of zingiber might be a nice idea as an understory - I’ve noticed they are perfectly happy in deep shade. I do like zerumbet (I have some already), especially the weird red flowers, but they’ll disappear and go dormant for several months of the year, and anyway I have no idea where to source it from locally. For phytosanitary reasons I can’t import it from Taiwan. For now I’m thinking galangal, which is more easily available, or cardamom if I can get it. One of the main reasons I’m using grasses is their C4 photosynthesis: they’ll maybe stop growing in the dry season, but they will at least survive. Rainfall in that area is not nearly as generous as in (say) Northern Taiwan: the dry season gets 30-70mm/month.

I’ve found a source for lots of native species (tree/shrub seedlings) which can be used for alley cropping, and are productive in their own right. Some legumes, fruit trees, timber trees, bee/pollinator plants … I have a list of about 20. No doubt some will fail, but that’s OK. I’ve located a supplier for vetiver just down the road, and I’ll be using a lot of it for slope control. I expect to leave contours pretty much as-is (no major earthworks). I’ll just stabilize them.

There are a few cashew trees on the land, but they don’t look happy. I know nothing about cashews. Besides, everyone else is growing them so I don’t see them as a very useful crop. I’ll probably just prune them back and then leave them alone. Any suggestions for keeping them productive, Biota?

Large areas of the land have just been damaged by idiots discarding cigarettes and setting fire to it. There’s been a lot of erosion and just fire-tolerant grass coming back. I’m thinking this area would be best blanketed with tough mulch-generating plants (probably trema again, possibly some pigeonpea and a climbing/sprawling legume understory). I’ll just leave it to its own devices for a year or so; hopefully it’ll then be ready for more productive crops. But this does underscore the need for keeping fuckwits away.

Apart from the agriculture aspect, I’ll be using the land for various items of “appropriate technology” I’m working on, such as composting toilets, earth architecture, and alternative energy sources. It’s like stepping back into the stone age: literally nothing is available. There is not much resembling a functioning economy, and imports are effectively blocked by an irredeemably corrupt Customs. So you have to make do, improvise, and bring stuff in in a suitcase (not illegal, just likely to be subject to massive bribes). Think North Korea, except with better weather. It’s going to be a challenge, but hopefully an interesting one.

I agree. Water waste is the norm worldwide. The guy next door wants to grow rice, because that’s what everyone else does. Apart from the complete lack of economic logic, the place is completely unsuitable for rice: it inevitably means robbing peter to pay paul, because there just isn’t enough rainfall.

The area I’ll be working in isn’t exactly water-stressed, but the sun is relentless all year and it does get VERY dry in the dry season. The question is, what do you do about that? I figured I would need to collect and store at least one-fifth of the total rainfall to irrigate throughout the dry season, which necessarily implies depriving that much land area of water. All things considered, not much point. Better to plant infrastructure crops that will make it through (very deep roots) and simply don’t bother with any demanding annuals for four months. Let the land rest and let some mulch accumulate (some of the trees will lose their leaves and go dormant in dry weather).

The only time I’ve needed to add water in Taiwan is during the establishment phase, and even then once or twice a week does the job. I use deep-pipe irrigation, which gives better root development than surface drip. I’ll probably do the same thing on my new plot.

That sounds like an awesome project and congratulations finley! We had a huge vegetable garden where I grew up. It totally sucked having to pick weeds as a kid, but looking back I realize it was a great experience: build character, work ethic, eating healthy food, etc.

Reading through your back and forth with Biota does raise concerns about the food quality here in Taiwan. I have zero knowledge about which pesticides or chemicals are used on the food that I eat. Is this something that I might want to look into further? I’d venture to say that like everyone else, my expectation is that the food I buy is safe.

I like the idea of disrupting the traditional food distribution network, and a small country like Taiwan would be a great testing ground. I agree that an eBay or Groupon type of platform would be the way to go. A direct B2C business model would cut out the distributors and give the farmers a higher margin to play with. One of my coworkers organized a lychee group buy last month. We bought directly from the farm in the south and they delivered to our office.

Thanks, raccoon. Yeah, it’s going to be fun. Challenging, but fun.

I cut weeds about once a month, less in the dry season. They make the best living mulch you can hope for, and a lot of plants really aren’t bothered by them. With a few exceptions, they’re helpful rather than harmful. You do have to stop them self-seeding, though.

Unfortunately, your level of knowledge is roughly on par with the average farmer. From what I’ve seen they spray without any real understanding of what they’re doing or why. Some of them no doubt take the “more is better” approach rather than adhering strictly to what’s on the label. Official advice is completely blasé about herbicides. And as far as I know there are no controls on purchase: I can buy lethal stuff OTC at the supply store down the road (if I wanted to). You will never find out what’s on your food because they farmer probably doesn’t know either.

Having said that, Taiwan’s pesticide inspection regime is fairly sound, but I guess they can’t check every vegetable on the shelf. Growing your own, or buying from a reputable farmer who doesn’t use chemicals (yes, there are some!) is about the only way to guarantee untainted food.

It would. In general, the Taiwan government welcomes innovation, or at least doesn’t try to sabotage it. Unfortunately, agricultural land prices have been pushed up into the stratosphere by shortsighted economic policy, so it’s pretty much impossible to make a profit anymore in Taiwan. I’m going to have to try it in the Philippines instead, which is … complicated, and risky. It’s hard to convey in words just how fucked-up things are there.

[quote=“finley”]
Unfortunately, your level of knowledge is roughly on par with the average farmer. From what I’ve seen they spray without any real understanding of what they’re doing or why. Some of them no doubt take the “more is better” approach rather than adhering strictly to what’s on the label. Official advice is completely blasé about herbicides. And as far as I know there are no controls on purchase: I can buy lethal stuff OTC at the supply store down the road (if I wanted to). You will never find out what’s on your food because they farmer probably doesn’t know either.

Having said that, Taiwan’s pesticide inspection regime is fairly sound, but I guess they can’t check every vegetable on the shelf. Growing your own, or buying from a reputable farmer who doesn’t use chemicals (yes, there are some!) is about the only way to guarantee untainted food.[/quote]

Glad that it’s not all fire and brimstone! So my first question is: how does one find a reputable farmer who doesn’t use chemicals? I shouldn’t make generalizations but I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that farmers in Taiwan aren’t organized to promote themselves in such a way. If that’s indeed true, then perhaps there’s an opportunity for an organizing body to test and/or certify those farmers that do follow “best practices”. (Consumers would believe that easier than a self-printed sticker that says “organic”.) I’ve worked with different standards/protocols in the tech industry so I don’t see why there couldn’t be a TUV or UL sort of certification process for healthy food production.

Based on the comments I’ve read about the food industry here, those in power have nothing to gain from such a standard. Distributors have their fingers in many different pies and I’m sure their guanxi controls legislation to some degree as well. Of course this is all wishful thinking, but it would seem our best bet would be at the university level. They could create some sort of feel-good, emotional rationalization to gain public support and awareness of exactly why such a standard is necessary. I can’t help with much but I do have a good media/PR agency here in Taiwan. A story about the lack of control over food quality would definitely have legs.

[quote]
In general, the Taiwan government welcomes innovation, or at least doesn’t try to sabotage it. Unfortunately, agricultural land prices have been pushed up into the stratosphere by shortsighted economic policy, so it’s pretty much impossible to make a profit anymore in Taiwan.[/quote]

When it comes to disrupting distribution, the only path that I can see would be direct farm-to-consumer sales. Hard to think of another distribution model that would actually put more profits in the farmers pockets. The workflow wouldn’t be complicated: farmer creates a profile on the platform, uploads how much inventory he has, sets the price and then sells it out. The product gets packed, shipped, and then received anywhere in Taiwan within 36 hours. The business opportunity would be in building a lightweight and scalable IT infrastructure to support this method of distribution. It would be niche and small volumes, but together with some sort of certification process I have a feeling the market would take notice.