I’m assuming that given me and JD’s shared american education system experiences, he is probably referring to crops like tabacco, cotton, etc.
First that comes to mind is tea. Shortly after that comes coffee & areca palm, and living by Xinshe the big ol mushroom farms up there and the prices of shit up there makes me think those farmers probably do pretty well for themselves… various nuts, historically some have done farming of the Wasabi plant up on Alishan (@Satellite_TV could tell us what’s up with that, surely). Does camphor count? IDK how much of that there is nowadays but there used to be a ton of it during the Japanese era. I know I’ve seen cocoa plants growing alongside the areca palm down south when playing Geoguessr… banana is particularly big among the fruits for export. Given the wine industry, I guess grapes? I personally don’t have much confidence in Taiwanese wines, but what do I know, ig.
The problem with a lot of these high-value crops is that they require arcane knowledge and/or sophisticated post-processing to make them high-value. Which is why they’re high value. Sure, you can acquire that knowledge and equipment and do quite well, but it’s a lot of effort.
Cacao, for example, is really quite easy to grow. I have a few cacao trees. I’ve also made chocolate in small batches - it’s fun and surprisingly easy to make something that rivals commercial chocolate in taste (although the texture was off - again, you need special equipment to make it smooth). The skill is in the fermentation process, which most cacao farmers simply can’t be bothered to do properly. If you can learn, and conscientiously apply, the necessary skill post-harvest, you can probably make good money with stuff like that. But IMO things like salad veg are a lot easier and generate return-on-investment a lot quicker.
well nowadays even MJ is a cash crop in the States
For sure. When I think of the word cash crop though, I mostly think of stuff like cotton, sugar, coffee, tobacco and whatnot. I believe it’s because it comes up in our history classes first - you get small scale lil puritans settling on one end of the Americas and on the other end the Spanish et al. setting up essentially serfdom 2.0 ethically worse edition down south, which too comes to the American south. So I think it’s more how we differentiate those big somewhat specialized moneymaker crops from the normal anyman crop, if that makes sense?
At least, that’s my guess for why I associate it with aforementioned crops.
Yeah, it’s a rather ill-defined word, but in my experience it basically means “stuff that everyone else in your location grows”. Depends where you live, of course. It might be soybeans or corn or barley or tomatoes or tobacco, but the underlying assumption is that you can just go out there with your tractor, do exactly what you did last year and the year before that, and the buying agent will turn up on schedule and give you $x/tonne for a few truckloads of whatever-it-is.
A “cash crop” can also be distinguished by its usefulness - the opposite of a cash crop being something you can harvest yourself and put by for your own consumption. At least in part. Most people growing cash crops don’t bother keeping back even a part of the harvest because it’s useless; it depends upon some further downstream processing for its value.
But I get the impression this is not the sort of thing the OP wants to do. I don’t think it would be even feasible in Taiwan, given the price of land.
’ According to the “State of Indoor Farming 2017” report, about half of indoor growing operations are profitable. By farm type, 75% of glass greenhouse farms are profitable compared to 50% of container-style farms and 27% of indoor vertical farms.’
Yup. In the UK I have a whole lot of berries planted. They need minimal attention, and although I wouldn’t say they’re “high yield” they should yield well enough to make a profit. But I can’t really think of any familiar berries that would work in Taiwan. Rubus niveus, perhaps. And I know some people are growing blueberries.
There are some huge berry farms out towards Dahu in Miaoli, remember riding by the fields when headed out to the Longteng bridge. Those grow in Inglin don’t they? I feel like they’re surprisingly hardy little fruits.
They still produce awful chocolate in Taiwan and sell it for a lot of money. For locals high price means something even when the product is sub standard. I remember my wife paying 300nt for some bad dry noodles.
If I may, and all of these are very helpful and interesting, it would be nice to know which are more (and less) labor intensive.
I saw some above ground strawberry farming going on in Guanshan last week, all in long troughs about four feet above the ground. I have heard though they are tough to cultivate and disease rips through them. I never grew them in NY as they also seemed to need way too much of my attention. I’d consider them now as I have more attention to give .
Also, I have one of those giant rock hard avocados on my kitchen table, waiting for it to ripen a bit. And bacon in the fridge also waiting for it. And a tomato. Mmmmm
I guess so, but they’re kinda pointless. Very little demand for them, possibly because they’re so hard to transport (they just go mushy and start fermenting) and rather “ordinary”. Kinda like apples in temperate climates. If you could come up with a mulberry-based product, it might be a good choice.
I’ve heard that mulberries can be incredibly demanding of soil fertility. I’ve not noticed this myself - I have a vast mulberry tree that seems perfectly happy in an untended position - but perhaps it would be a concern in a commercial plantation.
True that. I suspect someone who actually has a clue, and takes some pride in their product, could take the whole market if they put their mind to it. Just look how (say) Cadbury used to dominate the UK market, and they weren’t doing anything very special. Just turning out a consistent, reasonably-good product.
Just going to ask something that seams to have been missed, what type of land are you looking at and what area. this will affect what crops are easier to maintain, will you be getting the land with the particular crop/rotation in mind or will you be picking the crops to fit the land?
Fence off the land. Then get the berries to grow on/around the fences. My parent’s farm back home has 100 yards or so of wild berries on their fence-line. Would pick them during the summer, so delicious.
Can think of blueberries or huckleberries, too. They had 2 bushes of them in back yard. Easy to handle. Zero labor, but to pick them when bored.
