How the sweet potato industry integrates a thousand hectares of sweet potato fields with six hundred farmers to achieve consistent quality year-round
Why can a homely, down-to-earth roasted sweet potato occupy the most prominent spot in convenience stores? In recent years, imbalances between production and sales of various crops have been reported frequently, yet our local symbol, the sweet potato, has been steadily advancing, with rising output and, remarkably, rising prices at the same time; annual output value has surpassed four billion, and it has also made a major push into international markets!
So how exactly did the sweet potato turn things around? The sweet potato industry's impressive performance today owes much to the collaboration that began eight years ago between Gua Gua Yuan and FamilyMart. What are the inner strengths and core principles behind this wave of golden opportunity? It is worth other agricultural products learning from.
Depending on the weather and unstable quality and yield are practically the Achilles' heel of all agricultural products, and sweet potatoes are no exception. Yet 24 hours a day, all year round, these "FamilyMart roasted sweet potatoes" can be supplied at any time, selling 23 million pieces a year. Even more remarkable is that the taste of every sweet potato is always the same, which for an agricultural product with no additives at all can be called a miracle.
Behind this sweet potato are one thousand hectares of fields and more than six hundred farmers, embodying over twenty years of relentless pursuit of perfection, with consumer demand placed first at all times. The one orchestrating strategy and integrating contract farming is the agribusiness located in Xinhua, Tainan: Gua Gua Yuan.
Year-round supply: behind a single promise lies a huge challenge for the farm
When whole boxes of unwashed sweet potatoes with soil still on them arrive at convenience stores, staff must wash the sweet potatoes and roast them, and roast them just right, with the taste consistent year-round. The hardest part is supplying without fail 24 hours a day, all year round, across more than two thousand convenience stores island-wide.
"This is the biggest challenge for agricultural products. It's not just about volume, it's about stability. We have to think of a hundred ways to keep it stable," Qiu Yuxiang said, working back from the consumer end to the production end. "A single promise of stable year-round supply means there's a lot to do back at the farm."
Take seedlings, for example. If three hundred hectares' worth of sweet potato output is needed every month in the future, then seedlings for three hundred hectares must be found half a year in advance for farmers to plant. "Ten jia have to be planted a day, that's four hundred thousand plants, every single day!" Are there enough seedlings? Is there enough labor? Everything must be meticulously planned. Qiu Yuxiang admits that at the beginning they lost a lot of money because of seedling problems: too many seedlings were ordered but could not be planted immediately, so the young plants withered and had to be discarded, and new seedlings had to be bought again. Only by redistributing the methods for seedling cultivation, contract farming, and collection and transport were losses reduced.
The cruel reality of depending on the weather is also bound to be encountered. When sweet potatoes are planted, it happens to be typhoon season. "What we fear most is the whole field being submerged!" Huang Xinfeng recalled that in two years, typhoons and floods submerged over a hundred hectares of fields, and the sweet potatoes that later grew had a very poor good-rate; some fields were even completely ruined, so they had to keep replanting and desperately make up for the shortfall in output. (Article not finished, please continue reading)