Agricultural cultural creativity ≠ agriculture. Don't talk nonsense about agricultural youth. Please put the focus back on the real growers.
Farmers' markets don't just offer fresh, pesticide-free organic fruits and vegetables; they also feature natural handmade soap, pickled cucumbers, bowl rice cakes (wan-guo), jams, and other mouth-watering treats, along with some traditional foods that children are about to lose sight of. Unlike an ordinary night market or school fair, a farmers' market champions the ideas of health, environmental protection, and LOHAS living rather than commercial considerations.
Moms and dads can safely let their little ones bounce around the market, eating happily, playing happily, and enjoying the stroll themselves. To avoid chemical fertilizers and develop organic, healthy food, these craft masters draw on their passion and accumulated experience to create products that are both creative and delicious, such as handmade ice cream, eco-friendly soap, and artworks made from repurposed waste. Here, we rediscover creativity and surprises we had long lost.
Published in 2011 on Delta Electronics' low-carbon blog, "Little Footprints on Big Footprints: Let's Visit the Farmers' Market Together," by Lin Pei-yun
This article has been cited many times on many occasions; it captured my amazement the first time I visited the Hsinchu Green Market. Years later, articles like this have flooded everywhere, and almost everyone can rattle off the pure ideals of friendly farming, while phrases like "environmentally friendly," "sustainable," and "green living" seem to require no accountability at all. Consumers long for food that is safe and non-toxic, yet they remain skeptical about prices and certification labels. Having met friendly-farming growers many times, I've found their real lives are not entirely as the media describes them. Even though it seems everyone is starting to care about food safety and is willing to pay a little more to support organic food, small farmers still struggle on the edge of survival, caught between their ideals.
Typhoons, cold damage, pest damage - against all such natural disasters, organic growers appear more vulnerable than conventional farmers. The media won't report this, and of course consumers won't know it either. So companies begin seeking contract farming abroad: larger plots, greater output, and of course safety and non-toxicity certification, so consumers can buy with peace of mind, but local growers find it doubly hard to survive (in capitalism, the big always get bigger - an unchanging truth).
Perhaps it's time for consumers to face reality, to understand the difficulty and hardship of friendly farming, and to truly experience the toil of pest damage and pulling weeds with their own hands - rather than carrying a consumer's mindset to the countryside on a holiday to experience it for a few hours, thinking that is the farmer's real life.
Small independent media workers should not just ride the wave and fuel this unreal, dreamy pastoral style. Healthy, vibrant soil cannot be bought at a supermarket; it takes day after day of composting and nurturing (and may even fail), and the experimental spirit must wrestle with climate, temperature, humidity, and fertilizer. That precious breath of fresh outdoor air is the necessity farmers rely on to make a living, support their families, shoulder heavy economic pressure, and have no time to dress up in fancy words.
Small farmers are busy planting, caring for children, running to markets, taking side jobs during the off-season, coordinating freight schedules, and running their own blogs... all this endless effort just to nurture city dwellers' little dream of a rural paradise. Such a dream is not something everyone can bear; many farmers give up halfway, because the dream of organic farming (friendly farming) is built on money - it needs greenhouses, it needs intensive labor, it needs technique. Making a living from this trade is not the same as the leisurely green thumb on a balcony.
Rice has so many expressions, so many ways of being eaten, so many functions, so many terroirs, so many flavors, that no amount of florid (or plain) words can fully describe them. I feel deep regret about this issue's special magazine feature, "The Expressions of Rice." Writers (community workers) who care about the land over the long term should write about the land in a more real and profound way, rather than repeating an agri-art style no different from ordinary media. Cute literary-style hand-drawn illustrations are not the same as a laborer's sweat, which cannot be written off lightly. This article seeks to emphasize: agricultural cultural creativity is not the same as agriculture. The former is agriculture-related peripheral cultural creativity, ranging from handmade products to community building; the latter is a real industry, the tiny stage on which farmers depend for their livelihood, and all its joys and hardships need to be truthfully presented - and more importantly, to inspire more people to take part in solving the problems.
The media should be reminded to bring the focus back to the real growers. Agricultural art is very appealing to city dwellers because things are precious when they are rare; but it cannot feed these growers' families. Agriculture is an industry; it is government policy, the current state of society, land allocation, and the future food problem. We want to hear truly real reporting, and we earnestly ask young farmers to defend their own rights. When consumers only half-understand production, misunderstandings and rumors arise; we earnestly ask the media to increase the depth and breadth of their reporting, and stop consuming Taiwan, China's few remaining examples of fine agriculture a second time.
The above article represents my personal stance. I hope for a better future and do not wish to criticize any party; I merely offer an angle for thought. Thank you for taking the time to read this :)
Photo courtesy of: Organic Grower School
I previously misprinted "agricultural cultural creativity" as "agronomy," and I apologize for this.