Inside Rice Contract Farming: Taiwan, China's Largest Contract Manufacturing Industry Beyond Wafers

Many people say farmers live at the mercy of the heavens, but besides the heavens, what farmers fear most is offending a certain kind of person. This person can decide who gets to harvest first, the order in which grain goes into the dryer, and even whether the rice from a farmer's season tastes good or not is controlled by them; typhoon days are the time when they are most in demand, and farmers will visit with bento boxes, beer and Paolyta, and even if the wait is two hours, at three in the morning, in wind and rain, they must not utter a single word of complaint.

Who exactly has such power? The answer is the "contract cultivation operator."

Finding a contract cultivator: personal connections are the key

A single iron-ox cart costs over 2 million, and a harvester 4 million, which is simply unaffordable for small farmers with fragmented farmland. It can be said that behind every small farmer there is a powerful contract cultivation operator. Many large-scale harvest operators, besides doing contract work in their original areas, will also follow the rice maturation season and harvest all the way north, going out for three to five days at a time.

Li Han-Chi belongs to the small and medium-sized contract cultivation operators, only assisting nearby areas, and can dry about 30 tons of rice a day, which is one-tenth of a large factory's capacity, but operators of his scale have gradually declined in recent years.

He said with feeling that there used to be over a dozen small and medium-sized grain drying plants in nearby areas, but with the development of large-scale machinery, the amount of grain going in at one time increased, grain drying plants needed to upgrade their equipment, and many small and medium-sized old plants gave up and stopped operating.

But what troubles him most is still the labour problem. The work at a grain drying yard is heavy, workers cannot be found, and the next generation has no willingness to take over; his seedling nursery, because unlike large factories it cannot invest in automated conveyor equipment, has to rely on manual handling, and the labour shortage problem creates a vicious cycle. He said bluntly that one day when he can no longer keep going, he might just shut down altogether.