Liu Dongqi: Organic isn't just about being free of toxins; pruning, root care, and sod culture have their finer points - grow trees with vitality
"First, treat the tree as a friend, as your family. Have you gotten to know it? Only when you know it can organic farming hold true."
When he talks about trees, Liu Dongqi's tone carries both warmth and erudition. Having been around trees since childhood, he comes from a horticultural family whose heritage is growing trees, and a hoe is nothing unfamiliar to him. Thus his path from old-tree conservation into fruit trees and tea trees, from tree doctor to farmer, though he jokingly calls it "going astray," is in fact a continuation of the same lineage.
To understand trees from the perspective of organic cultivation, Liu Dongqi believes one can start by looking at two major directions.
The first is the tree's energy. Energy comes from the sun and is turned into glucose through photosynthesis. Who makes the glucose? The leaves do, so heavily pruning away the leaves will absolutely never make a tree healthy.
Also, as mentioned in the previous article, all disease-resistant substances are carbohydrates - catechins, tannins, flavonoids... all of them are carbohydrates, synthesized from glucose. So without leaves to make glucose, where would disease resistance come from?
A persimmon tree suffering from sunscald
Farmers generally believe that pruning can enhance sunlight and ventilation, thereby reducing pests and diseases, and can promote flowering and fruiting. But excessive or incorrect pruning may backfire. Huang Zhaozhi, who grows sweet persimmons in the mountain area of Taichung, Taiwan, China, has firsthand experience of this.
Huang Zhaozhi's persimmon trees were originally under conventional cultivation. After he took over, he transitioned to natural farming, but within a few years he encountered a sharp drop in yield and weakened tree vigor, and some trees even developed severe sunscald.
Liu Dongqi came to assess the situation and determined that the main cause of the sunscald was excessive pruning of the leaves. He explained that a tree absorbs water, and 95% of its driving force comes from the transpiration of the leaves, but when the leaves are pruned away, the tree cannot lower its own body temperature through transpiration. Under the blazing sun its temperature keeps rising, and the plant cells develop lesions, rot, and die.
To do organic, you must look at problems comprehensively
Liu Dongqi laments that academic disciplines in schools are divided by rigid boundaries and cannot train generalists. A professor can focus only on soil, or only on pathogens, but as a farmer, one cannot look only at soil or only at pathogens - one must solve problems from all directions.
"When I treat an old tree today, I don't just treat the old tree's pests - I want it to come alive, so I can empathize with a farmer's feelings." Liu Dongqi gladly takes the various problems farmers raise as challenges, helping to consult books and run experiments to seek scientific answers. He believes that to do organic, one must understand science even more - understand tree physiology, understand the principles of soil, of nutrition and energy. Only when you understand the principles can you properly take good care of the trees.
Moreover, no one can tell you the correct method - you must create a method yourself. "Is it hard? Yes! Even I find it hard, so of course farmers find it hard too." Liu Dongqi says that since you choose to do organic, you are a pioneer, and more people must join in research and technology development.
"Organic isn't just about being free of toxins - if you have no toxins, you need to have energy!" He hopes that the organic of the future will all be organic with vitality - trees healthy, people healthy too.