Romanticizing
It is human nature to want to get close to the land. However, the COA camps last only three to five days and it quite often happens that in a sudden burst of enthusiasm people get a romanticized notion of rural life, and sometimes even make large investments they later come to rue. Thus the COA, beginning this year, plans to offer 30-day internships (with priority given to unemployed persons below the age of 45) so that rookies can work side by side with veteran farmers to see whether they can tolerate a life of exposure to the elements. They will also get a chance to consider what direction they will go in if they decide to stay in agriculture-crop cultivation, recreational farming, or processed agricultural goods-and to take their first steps toward renting land.
Would-be farmers must also become familiar with the realities of the agricultural economy. "Until you have a handle on markets and transport, you shouldn't quit your day job or risk too much money investing, especially in vegetables, which are subject to large fluctuations in prices," warns Cheng Shui-ho, director of the Taoyuan ARES. "Newcomers who want to plant vegetables should start with small and simple facilities." When the market conditions are right, you will make money, and even bundles of money during sudden boom periods, but you will also have to endure unpredictable crashes in market prices.
For example, if you are managing some of the 300 hectares in Taoyuan County devoted to protected cultivation, in typhoon season (late summer and early fall), if southern veggies get drowned, causing a severe shortage in northern markets, your facility-raised vegetables will become highly competitive in northern Taiwan. But when winter comes and southern vegetables come north, prices in the north will fall, sometimes even below the local costs of production. The only solution to this problem is to have regular sales channels and steady clients.
Cheng suggests that newcomers give up any ideas they might have of "going it alone," and join a local Production and Marketing Group (PMG). These have collective power to make purchases and negotiate prices, allowing farmers to acquire seedlings, fertilizer, and equipment more cheaply. However, since newcomers have few personal connections, it is not easy for them to gain admittance to a local PMG.
In 1995, when the Bade traditional market was torn down, Li Chuantian, a farmer for over two decades, rounded up a bunch of people who were complete strangers to farming-street vendors, electricians, whoever-and created the Bade Vegetable PMG #3. Starting with everyone learning together how to cultivate vegetables, they progressed step by step until 10 years later they had become an "extended family" selling their veggies collectively to the Taoyuan area. Currently there are 11 members, managing 31 hectares of land with over 2000 enclosures, and employing more than 200 people in grading, washing, and packaging vegetables. Every summer they produce about 20,000 kilos of vegetables monthly, worth more than NT$80 million.
At the Sanzhi Organic Farm in Taipei County, Ma Wenquan (second from left) and his parents and sisters still work the ancestral land, raising more than 20 kinds of vegetables. They are representative of family farms in Taiwan that do all their own cultivation and marketing.