The farmers' most upscale grocery store! Buy natural agricultural materials as if shopping for fine goods, with a plant clinic on site for immediate consultations
The Council of Agriculture's policy promoting organic and eco-friendly farming has taken root in Meinong! To advance the "Pesticide and Fertilizer Reduction Program," the Meinong District Farmers' Association in Kaohsiung introduced a plant doctor advisory system in 2016, the first in Taiwan, China. Three years later, it has taken a key second step by transforming a 40-year-old warehouse into the "Green Agricultural Materials Center," gathering hundreds of natural materials specifically for organic or eco-friendly farming methods, so that farmers determined to "reduce pesticides" and "reduce fertilizers" no longer have to search far and wide for non-chemical pesticides or fertilizers.
In addition, the plant doctor measures already implemented in Meinong for three years have been further expanded with the establishment of a "plant clinic" inside the "Green Agricultural Materials Center." From now on, whenever farmers have any questions about pests or diseases, they can bring crop samples to the clinic, where a plant doctor will immediately diagnose the problem and write a prescription, and they can buy the medicines, preparations or fertilizers recommended by the plant doctor directly at the "Green Agricultural Materials Center."
Converted from an old fertilizer storage room, the Green Materials Center is laid out like a supermarket, with spacious aisles and air conditioning, and people can ask the plant doctors questions on the spot. Zhong Qinghui, director-general of the Meinong District Farmers' Association, said: "The materials center is over 200 ping, bright and clean, and is the farmers' most upscale grocery store in Meinong."
Zhong Qinghui, director-general of the Meinong District Farmers' Association, said that the production area of the Meinong Plain is about 4,000 hectares. In his childhood, he could dig up many earthworms from the soil under banana trees and then use the earthworms to catch frogs, but now there are fewer and fewer earthworms and frog calls are rarely heard. Therefore, the opening of the "Green Agricultural Materials Center" is intended to protect the natural environment through reducing pesticides and fertilizers. Dai Shunfa, director of the Kaohsiung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, also said he hopes that "one bottle less pesticide per fen of land" can become a concrete goal of the "Green Agricultural Materials Center."