Growing Organic Loquats for Ten Years: The Story Behind This Commitment

The loquat grower is a gentleman surnamed Xu, a refined man in a striped shirt.

He returned to his hometown of Taichung over ten years ago, going from a tall, slender, smooth-faced boy to a farmer with darkly tanned skin. He is still very young, but now he has a wife and child by his side.

He came home right after finishing his military service instead of making a go of it in the city, because his father's health was not ideal. The family's loquat orchard had been planted for fifty years, starting with his grandfather, and even Japanese visitors had come to see it. Worried that his father would have to manage the vast loquat orchard all alone, Xu went back to his hometown just like that.

After taking over the loquat orchard, the reason he began converting to organic farming was also out of concern for his father's health.

And so this orchard, located at an elevation of 500 m in Xinshe District, Taichung City, and growing loquats for over fifty years, resolutely began the switch to organic farming methods after the eldest grandson took over.

The loquat trees are given organic fertilizer, with no control agents used at all. The nearby loquat orchards all thought this father and son must have had their brains baked by the sun, and half-jokingly wanted to see how their results would turn out.

In the first few years after converting to organic, several decades-old trees in the orchard died from pest and disease damage, and all the time accumulated before turned into dead branches. But since they had already set out on the organic path, they could only grit their teeth and keep pressing on. So they began cultivating new plants themselves, and even after all these years, the cultivation of new plants continues. "They have been organic since birth." Having come through those dark, nerve-wracking transition years, Xu smiled as he pointed to the new plants and said this.

Now the Xu family's loquat orchard has a rich ecosystem, and while working they often run into tree frogs, and of course snakes too, adding a lot of risk to his farming life.
Xu also put the tree frog on his own brand logo, representing their commitment to being friendly to the earth.