Yes
How do Taiwanese farms mechanise? I always thought there wasn’t enough space for anything other than a small tractor.
I’m more interested in microfarming. But if it turns out that working with the FA helps, OK. If I can do what I want on my own, that’s OK too.
It’s also why I don’t want to buy and build in the middle of ten 800 ping farming lots.
Some Taiwanese are good with it:
Formosa Greena is in Chiayi, run by American guy i think, they grow greens using hydroponics. Seems if you can maybe make a design using pvc pipes maybe and have multiple stories of them like a building then grow more produce on same amount of area.
Were they not talking about actual chocolate from cocoa beans being produced in Taiwan? A ‘chocolatier’ just melts down the, often imported, bars of chocolate and makes pretty little creations, that’s a different thing.
Depends a lot. The wholesale from the farm price is often WAY lower than one may expect. A lot of fruit is between $3-30nt/kg to the farmer.
The chocolate thing is a bit of a misleading. First, pretty much all chocolate in Taiwan is mixed with local and imported beans. It’s a big no no to me tion this, as it’s a trade secret that is well known amongst anyone making chocolate…so not a secret.
The real money in AG products in Taiwan is adding value to it. Meaning, do the processing. Which is getting harder by the day due to stricter regulations. But small scale remains fairly open and easy and quite profitable.
If you grow chili’s, make the sauce. Even though everyone and their uncle have a hot sauce now. But that’s the basic idea. Then figure out your marketing and sales.
The great thing about tiawan is people are far more open to trying local made stuff than some places. So it’s easy to sell a story (and that’s mostly what people are selling) and have a go before investing fully.
The trends now, obviously, are clean and safe. By clean I don’t mean using grandma’s feet, I mean no e. Coli type of clean and no bullshit added to it like preservatives, msg, dyes etc. Natural is big now. But spoils easier, obviously. That’s the issue with Taiwan market, they expect something to be cheap, last forever and still be 100% natural, organic and made with perfection and consistency.
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Wasn’t @Okami a cash crop farmer?
He is dead, and not much point mentioning why in a thread like this that isn’t about mental health issues, medicine nor taiwans political and ethical issues.
Wow. That sounds like a tragic story. But perhaps you’re right that it doesn’t need public discussion.
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Yes.
Back to cash crops. One thing to consider is climate, weather and a farmers timing. Even the lowly cabbage can be a cash crop if the farmer is well versed enough 
My FIL makes and sells pretty good Chinese-style kimchi as a sideline/hobby. It’s a lot of hard work though with tight margins.
Certainly is in my neck of the woods. I’ve been prototyping various systems for climate-controlled greenhouse growing because the market prices for leafy veg are just insane - sometime this year I’m hoping to go commercial-scale.
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That’s fantastic! There is serious money in hitting the timing right on certain crops. Even fast simple ones, their range in price can be extreme! Certainly people that go full on greenhouse, the profits sky rocket. Setup costs are obviously high. But it’s a pretty good gig to take a break during winter and sell ultra expensive crops in summer and fall! Or just rock it year round! All the best in your venture, it is absolutely worth pursuing! It’s even easier than field culture knce dialed in and setup. It’s GOOD money.
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yes, that’s my general experience. Far more predictable and the yields are impressive, even from the few square meters I’m working with at the moment. I intend to maintain some land for biomass/compost and do a more-or-less organic operation, but I’m fairly sure a 50m2 footprint for the greenhouse will be sufficient to generate good money.
I’d have to see it to believe it. I’ve got an 84m² greenhouse here in Hokkaido with fertile volcanic soil and we would consume most of what it’s capable of producing annually once I fine tune my freeze drying techniques for storing produce over the winter.
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Bamboo shoots have had issues so very limited production this year. Also a lot of them either being stolen or being eaten by monkey’s up my way. Pineapples seem to have done fine. Lots of cash crops grown up in the mountains. Beans, grapes, cabbages also coffee and tea of course.
This is a 3- and 4-layer stack with artificial lighting, climate control, and a hybrid “hydroponics” setup; effective total growing area on a 50m2 footprint is ~120m2. Very high plant density and a fair amount of manual intervention (eg., regular transplanting from a seedling area on 60mm spacing to the main 150mm-spacing growing area) to maximize space usage. The plants have a stupid high profit margin (for example one full-size lettuce US$2, or cherry tomatoes US$0.15 each). There’s no local competition - all equivalent produce is being flown in. Very high demand. Should be looking at gross income at least $10,000 per month, I think. Maybe a third of that will be absorbed by cost-of-capital, taxes, salaries, and inputs, but I intend for the really unusual stuff to go into a value-added business rather than direct sales.
These things are commodity “cash crops” anywhere else, but not in the tropics.
I’m extrapolating from a 3-layer 2m2 prototype, but I’m pretty confident it will scale well. I’ll most likely start with 25m2 and then build a second one when the bugs are ironed out.
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That will be a sweet operation once you get it set up and running. You’ve already got the land? Taiwan, right?
No, this is in Elbonia. 30 degrees in the shade, so very difficult to do this sort of thing in field-grown conditions. It’s quite a departure from what I’ve been doing to date, but it seems the most reliable way to make some serious money.