Lai Chiao-yen: Rice Kissed by the Sun

After your car passes through the Xueshan Tunnel, the view opens out wide over acres and acres of farmland, and you feel that the sky and the earth are especially near. After making a few twists and turns through the Yilan countryside, we arrive at Lai Chiao-yen's home. Ah Yen, wearing a plaid shirt, hair tied in a ponytail, and sporting a baseball cap, is anxious to lead us out to see her crops.

Ah Yen's rice paddies and vegetable plots are on four different parcels of land, none of them very large. The rice land is in Sanxing Township, in two locations totaling about 6500 square meters. The land, which belongs to Lai's family, had been left fallow for three years, until Ah Yen finally persuaded her mom and her aunt to let her have a try; each year she gives her aunt 60 kilos of rice in return. There is a pond fed by a spring in front of one paddy field, where moorhens often come to play; they also frequently fly over the rice paddies, stopping now and then to snack off of rice grains that have fallen in the fields.

Ah Yen insists on sun-drying her rice the traditional way; people who have tried it always rave about the taste.

Sun-kissed rice

"Our land always has weeds, so you have to cut often." Ah Yen doesn't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers, so besides cutting the wild grass, it is necessary also to remove the golden apple snails.

Lai's younger brother Junwang, off to one side, seeing that the rice stalks have grown quite a bit, says to his sister that the "grass crushing" is really working well. As a "city bumpkin," this was my first time hearing the term, so I had to ask what "grass crushing" means. Junwang explains that it means crouching down in the paddies and using your hands to squash the wild grass down into the soil where it will expire from lack of sunlight. This can also stir up and circulate the nutrients in the soil, so the stalks will grow faster. "These days grass crushing can be done by machine, but, although it's efficient, there are still places you can't reach with machinery. The only way to make sure every stalk benefits is to go inch-by-inch by hand."

Ah Yen also reveals a secret weapon for keeping water quality high. She sticks her hand into the irrigation channel at the head of the rice paddy and pulls out a bag of oyster shells, telling us that that these shells not only clean the water, they can add micro-amounts of minerals for the stalks.

The key to delicious rice, says Ah Yen, is "letting it be kissed by the sun." In modern rice production, virtually the entire process is automated, and wet rice is just placed in a dryer where it can be dried out in a few hours.

But Ah Yen insists on sticking to the traditional approach. She spreads the wet rice harvested on a given day, grain separated from grain, under the sun. So that each grain gets even exposure, she has to come out into the hot sun and turn them. From time to time she checks how dry they are, to make sure that one side doesn't get too dry while the other is still too wet. When they have been in the sun until they reach a temperature of 14°C, they can be taken in. When the weather is good, over 6000 kilos of wet rice can be sun-dried in four days.

Although her family has good land, as a child Ah Yen never worked in the fields. After her father died, her mother was not physically up to the hardships of farming, and turned to recycling. Ah Yen, now 37, worked for seven years in a hair salon after graduating from Tou Cheng Home Economics and Commercial Vocational High School, saving all the money she could so that one day she could go to Japan to study film-making. Later she attended a Japanese language school for two years while preparing her application. But she found that tuition at film school was unaffordable, adding up to at least NT$1.2 million a year if you included equipment costs. She had no choice but to change her plans, and she enrolled a less expensive agricultural college in Nagano.

This agricultural college, with over 200 hectares of land, had only 72 students and faculty, and Lai was the only foreign student. They would all gather every morning at 4:00 in the summer, at 5:00 in the winter. Even before it was light they were in the fields learning, and attendance was taken three times a day-it was stricter than a military academy!

Lai Chiao-yen, who graduated from a college of agriculture in Japan, returned to her home in Yilan County where she started up the Enmei Nousan farm with her younger brother. The two, enthusiastic and determined, have overcome soil exhaustion to successfully raise vegetables and rice.

When in Yilan...

In 2002, Ah Yen returned to Yilan, bringing along her experience with Japanese agriculture. She started off by planting vegetables on a plot of riverside land just under the Lanyang Bridge in Wujie Township. In that spot there is a small park and about 10 or so hectares of riverside land belonging to the county government, where the local residents had been planting vegetables on the assumption that "possession is nine points of the law." Ah Yen, being in Yilan, did what the Yilanians did, and carved herself out a plot of 5000 square meters. The first year she planted over 30 types of veggies, but only three varieties survived, earning her a mere NT$3000.

"The soil was exhausted," says Ah Yen. So, via a friend, she managed to gather up dregs from Chinese medicine, which is not contaminated by pesticides or heavy metals, added some weeds and crushed bean dregs, let the mix naturally compost, and then fed it into the earth. It was only then that the soil quality began to improve, and today there are worms winding in and out of it, not only helping her aerate the land, but also providing a natural fertilizer with their excrement. She says that organic farmers in Japan all make their own fertilizers, which is the best way to maintain the ecological balance.

After three years of cultivating, even Ah Yen's mother, who was initially convinced that it was not worth the cost or effort to grow rice even for your own dining table, started to gain confidence in Ah Yen's skill, which is why she decided to let Ah Yen have a go at the family's own land. The first year Ah Yen earned several tens of thousands of NT dollars selling her product.

In 2006 Ah Yen noticed that the Yilan farmers' association was sponsoring a "Piao Niao" agriculture experience camp, and she and her younger brother signed up. (For more on these camps, organized by the Council of Agriculture to train a new generation of farmers, see "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in our last issue.) She thought that perhaps through the association she could rent a big, cheap parcel of land and expand the scale of her operations. Only then did she discover that it costs NT$150,000 per year to rent even just 2000 square meters of land in that area, and she had to abandon her idea.

Ah Yen says straight out that the Piao Niao agricultural experience camp (which is designed for novices) didn't teach an old agriculture student like her much in terms of cultivation techniques, but she applauds the agricultural agencies for the sincerity of their efforts. For example, the Piao Niao website (http://straybirds.coa. gov.tw) has become an information and advertising platform for people who have been through the program.

Ah Yen's farm is segmented into small pieces, and she plants a wide array of crops, taking the "small volume, wide variety" approach to marketing. So far her sales of vegetables and rice have depended entirely upon word of mouth, with customers coming right to her house to buy or hiring private delivery services to go door to door. Besides raising rice and veggies, she also makes processed goods like black-bean soy sauce, Japanese-style miso, Korean-style kimchi, and Taiwanese sauerkraut from recipes handed down by her mother, an excellent cook.

Ah Yen insists on sun-drying her rice the traditional way; people who have tried it always rave about the taste.

Action scientist

Although Ah Yen raises her crops with TLC, she cannot say that they are "organic," because the neighboring farmer still uses pesticides. All she can do is ask him to wait until the wind is blowing away from her property before he sprays, to avoid getting any on her land. "It's lucky in a way that pesticide has become so expensive, so my neighbor doesn't use all that much. Anyway, this is the situation of the land that I have, and all I can do is put my faith in those consumers who are willing to trust me."

Though she has a real passion for farm work, Ah Yen warns that it is impossible to make a living or raise a family with just a small farm. Last year her revenues were only just over NT$300,000, but that's before deducting 40-50% in overhead. You could say that she's still basically living off her mom.

The main problem with small farms is the weather. In November 2007 there was Typhoon Mitag, followed by Typhoon Sinlaku in September 2008. In both years Ah Yen and her younger brother had gotten everything ready to plant their vegetables when the typhoons turned their fields into lakes. Her only option was to leave them fallow and wait for the water to recede, then try again.

Dedicated and optimistic, Ah Yen doesn't take her setbacks to heart. But she does have words of caution for like-minded young people. First, don't quit your job right away, but give yourself a year or two to get familiar with agricultural techniques, the subtleties of the soil, and the vagaries of the weather. Secondly, start by renting land, not buying. In fact the ideal thing would be to try to find some elderly retired farmer and see if you can borrow his land on a trial basis, or else just give him a portion of the harvest rather than cash rent. Finally, you should be psychologically prepared if you plan to farm as a career, because you sure aren't going to make much money doing it!

The farmers of Taiwan have been described as "action scientists" who are always willing to give new methods a try. Ah Yen is likewise ready to try anything to make her rice better, because as long as her customers say that her rice is tasty, she gets a feeling of satisfaction that money just can't buy. This is the source of the determination that keeps her going through thick and thin.

Lai Chiao-yen, who graduated from a college of agriculture in Japan, returned to her home in Yilan County where she started up the Enmei Nousan farm with her younger brother. The two, enthusiastic and determined, have overcome soil exhaustion to successfully raise vegetables and rice.

Lai Chiao-yen, who graduated from a college of agriculture in Japan, returned to her home in Yilan County where she started up the Enmei Nousan farm with her younger brother. The two, enthusiastic and determined, have overcome soil exhaustion to successfully raise vegetables and rice.