Stony ground
“When I first came here two years ago, the land was so stony that it would have been impossible to grow vegetables.” And there was absolutely nothing here, says Lee, so he had several containers shipped to the farm to serve as temporary offices. The land belonged to the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC), and was originally a flat-topped rocky hill, so cultivators digging the soil came across stones everywhere. However, the farm had its advantages: it was a large area close to Great Love Village where most of their potential workers lived. And with all the difficulties of finding an alternative, they had to bite the bullet and go ahead with cultivation.
“The only effective way of dealing with the stones was to remove them by hand,” explains Lee. A cultivator would only make the situation worse by burying the stones deeper into the soil. So all the stones had to be picked up by hand. Workers loaded stones into buckets, and then unloaded them onto the road to be used as roadbed. The villagers working on the farm were wondering: “Why do we come here every day to pick up stones? Aren’t we here to do farming?”
The villagers had just moved into their new community from their mountain homes, so they were feeling anxious about their then uncertain future. Some compared their work on the farm to the temporary government jobs provided to others displaced by Morakot, both earning the same wages of NT$800 a day. But the temporary government work looked much easier than what they were doing on the farm, so there was some discontent.
After the task of removing stones was completed, they used machines to plow the fields and spread organic fertilizer onto the soil. If they found stones under the soil, they had to remove them, and then, plowing and fertilizing, repeated the process again and again. Eventually, they were able to transform the rocky land into fertile ground. But some areas still have countless stones that are impossible to remove completely, so they are used for growing fruit trees.
Soil and water are the two basic requirements of organic agriculture.
“Composting is the most efficient way to improve the land,” says Lee. To enrich the soil, they first grew sesbania and rapeseed, then knocked the plants down and turned them into the soil. This was followed by an application of cow dung compost. Producing the cow dung compost is done by mixing dung that is free of antibiotics and heavy metals with organic plant matter. Molasses is added, and the mixture is continually turned over while it ferments. It’s the best way of providing nutrients to nourish and enhance the soil.
Water supply was also a tricky issue to solve. The farm was originally a sugarcane field belonging to TSC, with water drawn from the Qishan River. Although the water was clean and uncontaminated, the supply system had been lying abandoned for nearly three decades. So they had to dig out the old waterway map, and repair the pumping stations, underground pipelines, and reservoirs.
With the efforts of farm director Lee Wei-yu (front, center) and its employees, Yongling has been transformed from a virtual wasteland into Taiwan’s leading organic vegetable farm.