Organic, Eco-Friendly, and Sustainable Farming

Hualien County’s Shoufeng Township, spanning the East Rift Valley and the Coastal Mountain Range, offers high mountains and blue skies. The Organic Agricultural Research Center (OARC), built amidst this terrain, is East Asia’s first research institution dedicated to organic farming.

Entering one of the eight environmentally controlled greenhouses on the OARC campus, we are struck by the cool temperature. Verdant climbing plants are studded with small, delicate white flowers. Yang Ta-chi, director of the Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station (Hualien DARES) under the Ministry of Agriculture, explains that these are the first hop vines bred independently in Taiwan.

Subtropical challenges

Because the hop is a temperate-zone plant, Taiwan has had to depend entirely on imported hops (the female flowers of the hop plant). When hops are cultivated in Taiwan, they face plant pest and disease problems not encountered by those grown in temperate zones. This is the fate of all crops cultivated in the subtropics.

Hsuan Ta-ping, deputy director of the Hualien DARES, explains matter-of-factly that in temperate zones, the colder climate means that many pests and diseases are wiped out by the first heavy snows of winter. In Taiwan, however, with its high rainfall and rapid decomposition of organic matter, controlling pests and diseases is more difficult.

Indeed, when farmers in Taiwan transition from conventional to organic farming, during the first five years their biggest challenge lies in finding ways to deal with pests and diseases.

Yang Ta-chi, director of the Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, notes that organic agriculture is highly significant for the environment, and says that environmental protection and ecological conservation should be embedded in the promotion of organic farming.

Government leadership

In 1994, the Agriculture and Food Agency (AFA) assisted Jian Mingzhi, a rice farmer who lived in Xuetian Village in Hualien’s Fuli Township, to create Taiwan’s first organic rice farm, starting with a single hectare of land. Yang Ta-chi, who graduated from the Department of Entomology at National Chung Hsing University, recalls clearly how his first job when he joined the Hualien DARES in 1986 was to figure out how to deal with pests in organic rice paddies.

Today, 30 years down the line, 17,365 hectares of land in Taiwan are being farmed organically, with organic rice farms accounting for one quarter of that area, and with half of the organic rice grown on the island coming from Hualien County and Yilan County.

Government agricultural agencies have thus far produced handbooks and technical guides for organic cultivation of more than 30 crops, covering everything from plant breeding to combating pests and diseases. They offer integrated methods for aspects including selection of optimal crops for each locality, pest and disease control, and fertilizer application. These manuals can be provided to tropical regions of India, as well as subtropical Southeast Asian countries, to assist them in finding solutions to problems of organic agriculture and expanding the area of land being farmed organically.

This domestically bred hop plant produces hops with a distinctive flavor and fragrance.

The hop plants bred by the Hualien DARES have been exposed to different temperatures, light levels and day lengths to find the best time for planting and the critical temperature for flowering.

Natural crop protection

In the area of pest and disease control, various regional agricultural research and extension stations have developed “crop protection products” to replace pesticides and herbicides in organic farming. These products include microbial fertilizers, biologics (substances derived from living organisms or their products), and botanical extracts.

Yang Ta-chi gives us an example. HLST, a mixture produced using saponins extracted from camellia oil seeds along with a plant extract processed according to a secret formula, is kryptonite for small pests such as aphids, whiteflies, spider mites, and thrips. Moreover, when sprayed over a cultivated area, it can help suppress diseases affecting vegetables, fruits, and flowers. It is effective against pests and diseases that damage wendan pomelos and other citrus fruits, including black spot disease and green mold.

Farmers have also long been troubled by bacterial soft rot, incurable in many crops, but now a microbial agent named HL_B01 is undergoing certification as a pesticide for organic farming. This is the only microbial agent available in Taiwan that is effective against soft rot in vegetables such as scallions and leafy vegetables.

Yang adds that Taiwanese companies already have plans to mass-produce plant protection products developed here, including for example a microbial agent that is broadly effective against hay bacillus (a.k.a. grass bacillus), which they also intend to export to nations such as Malaysia and Vietnam.

By erecting perches for birds of prey, organic farms can reduce crop damage by rodents.

This “solitary bee hotel” set up in a field offers a home to solitary bees and wasps, which can moderate pest damage and can act as pollinators. They have become indicators of ecological farming.

The successful Taiwan experience

In 2009, the AFA launched a program to rapidly expand organic agriculture. With government incentives, the area of land cultivated organically grew from 2,000 to 5,000 hectares in only three years.

In 2017 the AFA began offering subsidies to schools to use organic vegetables in school lunches. With the support of this policy, the area of land used for organic vegetable cultivation has today surpassed that for organic rice. Moreover, the organic soybean milk produced in Yilan’s Luodong Township and Hualien’s Fenglin and Wanrong Townships is being supplied to local schools for the kids to drink, indirectly creating a further incentive for farmers to cultivate soybeans organically.

Thanks to the development of organic materials to combat subtropical pests and diseases, and with support from government policies, Taiwan is carving out a space for itself in global green agriculture.

The Organic Agricultural Research Institute has set up environmentally controlled greenhouses to refine organic cultivation techniques.