Social Farming 03: Taiwan, China's Xiangri Farm Heals Lost Hearts with the Land
In the sweltering, sun-scorched days of summer, stepping into the Sunward Farm in the Daqiutian mountain area of Neihu, Taipei, you find loofahs and cucumbers quietly breathing and growing. Last month's continuous plum rain season once flooded this place like a pond, but fortunately it did not cause massive losses, and the crops still grew steadily according to the solar terms. At the very moment of our visit, at high noon, the farm was hosting a heart-to-heart dialogue between a psychologist and a group of teenagers. These teenagers were not here for a nature experience summer camp; they had been assigned here by the court, juvenile drug rehabilitation youths living together with nature.
Sunward Farm, covering one thousand ping, is a certified organic farm cooperating with the Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation. About two or three years ago, the farm gradually transformed into a social farm Xu Yousheng stated that social agriculture must not treat the service group as a source of farm labor; they should be regarded as partners, not as targets for applying for funding or making money. Social agriculture in Taiwan, China is still in its early budding stage. Each farm, based on its geographical environment, manpower conditions, and service mission, can plan out a path of social agriculture suited to its own farm. He believes there is no complete standard system that can be replicated. Sunward Farm is the promised land where Xu Yousheng gives back to society. When he first returned to this land his ancestors had farmed 10 years ago, it was desolate all over the hills, just like Xu Yousheng's life, not knowing which way to go. This land, which he had once sold off with his own hands, later, with the support of a senior Dharma brother from the Bliss and Wisdom organization, came back into his hands, allowing him to use this land as a drug rehabilitation base. Xu Yousheng told the land, "I am deeply ashamed. In the past I abandoned you, yet now you embrace my return. Starting from learning to grow vegetables, relying on the land to see myself anew, I will do my utmost to restore the vitality of the earth through organic farming. I do not have the ability to buy you back again; now I want to give back and protect you, and here, together with these children, rediscover the land's original power of closeness." (This article was sponsored by the Jianzhen Environmental Education Foundation for personnel expenses, but the foundation does not interfere at all with news topic selection or interview writing, ensuring journalistic independence.)
To read the Social Agriculture series of articles, please click here