Chiayi farmer Huang Hui-yu: A medical laboratory scientist who retreated into farming, using agriculture to care for family and ecology

Text / Veggie Pickup Station

The farm of Huang Hui-yu is located in the hilly area of Ziyun Village, Zhuqi Township, Chiayi. She previously worked as a medical laboratory scientist. To care for her aging father, she switched from medicine to farming. After several years of cultivating with the Shumei farming method, the ecological environment of her fields has become increasingly rich, and she has also begun to produce small quantities of good vegetables and fruits that can help more people eat healthily.

Her farming life began when her father gradually developed dementia, and the nature of her previous work as a medical laboratory scientist made it impossible for her to accompany her father, who often needed to see a doctor. After thinking it over, farming seemed to be a kind of work with both high flexibility and autonomy. "When I have time, I work hard in the fields; when I don't, I just let the grass grow." Huang Hui-yu began her daily life as a farmer in a spirit of governing by non-interference and letting nature take its course, and followed the spirit of "Shumei Natural Farming" to cultivate her fields and produce crops without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

In the beginning, Huang Hui-yu started with a 10-ping garden and took courses such as the young farmer course at Chiayi Community University and the Council of Agriculture's Gardener Program to learn farming and cultivation knowledge. At first, she adopted organic farming with organic fertilizer. Later, as her agricultural knowledge system gradually became more complete, she shifted to producing agricultural products for consumption without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and learned from several seniors in the friendly farming circle, including Lin Hui-wen of Happiness Farm, Taitung farmer Lin Yi-lung, and Chen Pei-yun of Batian Green Farm, planting various seasonal vegetables and fruits by following the changes of nature.

Though the crops are small, the ecology is rich

Because the Shumei farming method advocates no pesticides and no fertilizers, and also avoids using artificial intervention to awaken the soil's natural fertility, Huang Hui-yu's fields suffered severe rodent damage before the ecology reached a balance. She once had an entire cornfield gnawed bare by moles, and the crops that luckily were not eaten by animals were also not large. "Everything I grow is small. The taro is small, the pineapple is small. I'm simply too embarrassed to sell them, so I can only eat them myself or give them to relatives and friends."

Looking at these petite crops, Huang Hui-yu said that she had never been able to grow results with good appearance and large fruit, which was truly embarrassing, but at the same time she carefully packed these small taro into boxes, preparing to cook them and freeze them to eat slowly herself. In the eyes of others, it seemed a bit like the feeling of a mother who loves her child immensely no matter how the child grows up.

She frankly admitted that the biggest difficulty on the farming path was "Why are the things I grow always so small?" And this doubt remained the same all along the way. After many years, it was still small taro, small radishes, small potatoes, no matter what, everything was small. However, adhering to "a simple life is enough," she did not panic, and continued to face the land with the principles of the Shumei farming method, cultivating with a peaceful state of mind, letting the originally hard soil gradually become softer as organic matter increased, and the ecology become much richer.

Life cannot have it both ways, but there is always a better side

Besides the crops growing small, Huang Hui-yu had another problem: she did not know how to sell them, and because she did not know how to sell them, she stopped selling them. "Sometimes I really don't know how to sell them, so I eat them myself or give them to friends." She once spent more than 2,000 yuan on seedlings, and after a season of hard farming, the final sales income was more than 1,000 yuan. She lightly brushed this off with "As long as life is sufficient, that's enough," and said that her current life, close to nature, was already ideal enough, beyond comparison with the sense of security brought by money.

Huang Hui-yu always seemed to see only that the time from 0 to 0.5 was very long for her, but she did not realize that she had always