Lai Ching-Sung / Exchange the time of one rice-cropping season for a new vision of life! Everyone is invited to Slow Island Academy, to help one another, live together and grow old together

If half-time farming can sustain a living, and half-X can revitalize a village, could we found a school of half farming, half X...?

The van driving toward the beautiful plains of the back mountain

Twenty years ago, driving a third-hand van, I packed in all my belongings, loaded up my beloved wife and our little kindergarten-age daughter, and just like that, swaying and rattling, drove up the Beiyi Highway, over layered mountain ridges, setting off for the back mountain, and beginning a life of living side by side with rice paddies and the countryside...

Looking back on life then, I had indeed hit an intractable bottleneck. I had returned home from an internship at the Japanese Consumers' Co-operative Union, only to get stuck in the mire of the green consumer movement. After leaving my job, I turned to online translation for a living, only to fall into the trap of cheap labor day after day! But I was unwilling to sell my time by entering a dull workplace, and on top of that, my young child was growing day by day, and the cramped apartment could no longer contain her surging vitality. In the end I finally decided to take the plunge: if what I wanted was an easy, unrestrained life, then I might as well leave Taipei and move to the Yilan countryside and give it a try!

Unexpectedly, this seemingly impulsive decision opened an unexpected and wonderful chapter in my life... Had it not been for this beautiful Lanyang Plain, which allowed my weary body and mind to rest and recover, a life trapped in the city might have turned out quite differently...

A fallow period of life in reverse migration back home

Choosing to come to Yilan back then, the hope of sending our child to a Waldorf school was an important trigger; of course, the fact that Yilan is the hometown of my wife Mei-Hung was also an important consideration. Standing at the threshold of thirty, classmates and peers around me were all striving to be first, charging into battle in workplaces across industry, government and academia, while I alone felt utterly exhausted, unable to see the future in life just as I could not see it for the Earth... It was this land beneath my feet that gave me redemption!

At the time I did not realize that at the very moment this world was entering the internet age at the speed of light, everyone was focused on the infinite future of the internet economy, and no one cared about the impact the internet might bring to farming and fishing villages. Yet my life, at this point in time, quietly seeped into the Lanyang Plain along with the undercurrents of the era, and I witnessed with my own eyes the transformation of rural villages in the internet age, as well as the alternative life options that rural villages offer...

A pioneer of half farming, half X - the Gudong Club

After picking up the hoe and actually working the land, I quickly discovered that sales are the key to whether farming can sustain a living! Fortunately, drawing on past experience from Japan and with the help of friends, the Gudong Club successfully gathered a group of consumers willing to support farmers through action, producing rice that is safe and environmentally friendly.

There were several key factors here. First, Taiwan's rice-farming industry has a finely detailed division-of-labor system, allowing even novice farmers to get started smoothly. Second, the internet infrastructure that reaches everywhere without limit allowed farmers and consumers to stay closely connected. Finally, the immediacy and completeness of the home delivery system gave farmers and fishermen at the tops of mountains and the edges of the sea their most important means of transport! This also raised the curtain on community-supported agriculture in Taiwan...

Liangbaijia - a gathering of half farming, half X actors

The Gudong Club took root in the Yilan countryside, and in the blink of an eye more than ten years passed. Under the influence of a shift in fallow subsidy policy, large amounts of previously fallow farmland began to be released, attracting a wave of urban people who yearned for rural life, including retired teachers and military instructors, middle-aged engineers changing careers, designers and office workers just out of school, and even a female university student who had not yet graduated!

In just a few short years, this group of volunteer farmers put down roots in the area around Shengou in Yuanshan Township, and among them, Liangbaijia, initiated by Yang Wen-Chuan, was an important organization that helped this group of outsiders smoothly connect with the local rice contract-farming system. Although it is called an organization, in fact Liangbaijia is more like an open system with blurred boundaries: as long as participants are willing to follow the basic rules of the game, they can obtain farmland through Liangbaijia and become part of the new farmer community.