The soybean world's treadmill makes Hualien farmers beam with joy

Organic soybeans from Hualien retail for as much as 300 yuan per kilogram at the end of the supply chain. Farmers want to expand their acreage, but they cannot afford a sorting machine costing more than 600,000 yuan, and hand-picking beans until their eyes nearly pop out. Today the Hualien District Agricultural Research and Extension Station unveiled the first soybean primary sorting machine in the country designed specifically for small farmers. It can sort 60 kilograms of soybeans per hour with an accuracy of up to 95%, replacing the work of 20 people, and it costs only 60,000 yuan, making the farmers who hand-sort soybeans grin from ear to ear.

This sorting machine could be called "a treadmill for the soybean world." Using the principle of rolling on an incline, it sets up three funnel-shaped outlets on planes of different slopes. After soybeans are fed into the hopper, the fuller, plumper beans have lower friction, roll faster, and drop into the first outlet, while oddly shaped and less plump soybeans have higher friction, do not roll easily along the conveyor belt slope when vibrating, and reach the finish line last.

Hualien Pangcah Farm has 16 hectares of soybeans. Farmer Su Xiulian joked that in the past, when it came to sorting beans, no one would keep her company, "because we sorted until it was too late." Most people in the countryside are elderly, and bean-sorting efficiency is relatively low. The daily wages for 10 people are 10,000 yuan, and they still cannot sort 30 kilograms; with this machine, an afternoon is enough to finish it all. "Only 60,000 yuan, super worth it."

In recent years, the Council of Agriculture has promoted planting miscellaneous grains on activated fallow land, and because Taiwan-produced soybeans carry no genetically modified concerns, they are deeply loved by consumers. Huang Peng, director of the Hualien DARES, said that the soybean area in all of Hualien grew from 20 hectares in 2012 to 150 hectares now, two-thirds of it organic, with retail prices at the end of the chain reaching as much as 300 yuan per kilogram. Calculating at a yield of 120 kilograms per fen of land, the income from two fen of land can buy one machine.

A researcher born in the 1980s spent a year building a small farm machine himself

In fact, Taiwan already has Japanese-made soybean sorting machines that can sort 500 to 1,000 kilograms per hour, with higher efficiency, but they cost more than 600,000 and are better suited to large-scale cultivation. Organic farmers in eastern Taiwan plant small areas, mostly between 0.1 and 5 hectares. A machine would sort the entire year's output in one hour, and because the terrain is long and narrow, the shipping cost for centralized processing is high. Buying a large machine does not make economic sense, so farmers had no choice but to use makeshift methods.

Zhang Guanghua, the assistant researcher at the Hualien DARES who developed this machine, was born in the 1980s and graduated from National Taiwan University's Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics Engineering. He only arrived at the DARES the year before last. He was already very interested in researching agricultural machinery. Seeing farmers hand-sorting beans, he felt it was simply too hard work. By observing how different machines operate, he spent 6 months to 1 year improving a new type of farm machine, with an operating efficiency 8 times higher than manual labor.

He stressed that it is not that existing machines are bad, but that a cheap, small machine better suits Hualien's growing characteristics. This machine uses an ordinary industrial conveyor belt, and ordinary people can also DIY it themselves, but the key point is that the slope must be accurate, just enough to match the speed at which good and bad beans fall.

Hualien farmer Su Xiulian (left) says that in the past, hand-sorting soybeans was very time-consuming and hard on the eyes.

On the right are good beans sorted out by the soybean sorting machine, and on the left are bad beans, with accuracy reaching over 95 percent. (Photo/Lin Huizhen)

Good soybeans are plump and full, and roll down right away.

Assistant researcher Zhang Guanghua (left) of the Crop Environment Section at the Hualien DARES developed a small sorting machine, and farmer Su Xiulian (right) says it is a big help.

With machines helping, expanding acreage is just around the corner

This sorting machine can initially divide soybeans into Grade A, Grade B and rejects. At present, the quality sorted out as Grade A is almost 100 percent problem-free, and about 5% of the rejects are actually good beans. Even if they need to be hand-sorted again, it is relatively much easier, and the DARES expects it can attract more farmers to expand their acreage.

Zhang Guanghua said the sorting machine can also sort black beans, while for soybeans it has only been tested on varieties more commonly grown by local residents, such as Hualien No. 1 and Hualien No. 2. Some soybean varieties in western Taiwan are larger and need further testing. Yesterday the technology was already transferred to Tongnong Company, a machinery factory in Taichung. In the future, an air-separation function will be added to also screen out pods and impurities from manually harvested soybeans.

In the past, after harvest, everyone at Pangcah Farm had to stop what they were doing to sort beans, and because shipments could not keep up, they did not dare plant a second crop of beans. Su Xiulian said this machine is simple to operate, and even children can use it. "In the past, orders were waiting for us; now that we leave it to the machine, we can finally hurry out to the fields to work."