Hsinchu CSA Test Farm: Linking Production, Marketing and the Community
Lead image/Chiang Hui-hsien
You may have heard of CAS (Certified Agricultural Standards, Taiwan's certification mark for premium agricultural products), but do you know what CSA is?
CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is, simply put, "food producers + food consumers + an annual mutual commitment = community-supported agriculture and endless possibilities." In this relationship, people take responsibility for supporting the farm, and the farm takes responsibility for feeding the people, and together they share the potential risks and the harvest. It is precisely this give-and-take that creates agriculture that is ever-renewing and endlessly cyclical. This concept was first proposed in the 1960s and has spread to countries including Germany, Switzerland, the United States and Japan. Its main concerns are food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land.
After observing CSA cases abroad, Mr. Chen Chien-tai, a researcher at ITRI, felt strongly that Taiwan should also understand and put this concept into practice, so he decided to set up a "test farm" near ITRI in Hsinchu. Starting with a two-fen plot of farmland, he set out to test the feasibility of CSA in Taiwan. If it succeeds, the model can then be promoted to larger areas and regions.
First, let us introduce this test farm located in Sanchongpu, Hsinchu!
The test farm is located in Zhudong Township, Hsinchu County, near the 93 km mark of National Freeway No. 3. It covers about 0.2 hectares and is roughly 2.8 km from ITRI.
As industry and commerce have flourished, many young students have grown increasingly unfamiliar with agriculture. To help more people understand farming and get closer to the land, the Youth Platform Foundation and the Taiwan Agriculture Front joined forces with Mr. Chuang Cheng-teng, the professional farmer at the test farm, to hold a three-day event from July 19 to July 21 called "Cloud Farmer - Complete Rice-Growing Guide: Harvest Edition." In these few short days, participants can experience the unique thrill of harvesting rice by hand, threshing and drying, and can even take home bags of rice they planted themselves, guaranteed healthy. These actions, which many may have seen only on television while growing up, can all be experienced firsthand in the field.
Take the July 20 activity as an example: members harvested together the "Xinxiang Rice" Taoyuan No. 3 rice planted in spring. For this event, the farm owner, A-Teng (Chuang Cheng-teng), specially borrowed a manual threshing machine so the young friends could try it out. Members were seen sweating profusely under the blazing sun as they kept stepping on the pedal, yet no weariness showed on their faces - only looks of curiosity and satisfied smiles.
"Actually, for a field this size, if I used a machine, what they spend a whole day doing the machine would finish in ten minutes," A-Teng said. "But precisely because young people today have never done it, I'm willing to borrow a manual threshing machine, just so this experience can be passed down and agriculture won't be forgotten. If no one teaches it, one day it really might be forgotten. The 'passing down' meaning of this event is greater than the practical meaning of the harvest itself." Though A-Teng said this with a smile, his earnest concern could still be felt.
A-Teng has been mentioned repeatedly, but who exactly is this "A-Teng"? A-Teng is the professional farmer at the test farm, and the rice he grows has an excellent reputation. This year he was just selected as a winner of the "10 Classic Good Rices of the Republic's Centennial."
A-Teng has a very cheerful personality and is also very talkative, interacting well with the young friends who join in the farming work and with his work partners. But A-Teng was not a farmer all his life. He was once the owner of a textile factory, starting from a small factory and growing it into a large one, and during that time he also did some sales work. "But the pressure of being in sales, of being a boss, is too great. I still prefer the farmland - that's my interest," A-Teng said with a smile. Later he resolutely returned to the farmland, getting up at four every morning, farming until ten or eleven, then resting until two and continuing to farm until evening. "This life is physically exhausting, but I love it, so mentally I'm not tired at all. I used to be the opposite: because I didn't love it as much, even if I wasn't physically tired, I was mentally exhausted."
Having returned to the farmland, A-Teng seems to have found his own patch of sky again, living each day fully, with a face full of smiles and the simple, honest manner unique to farmers. "I'm truly grateful to A-Teng. Without him, today's event could not have run so smoothly," said Liu Kuan-cheng, representative of the Qingda Touqian River Club, one of the co-organizers and also a member of the Cloud Farmer activity. The Youth Platform Foundation mentioned earlier has a "contract farming" relationship with A-Teng: the foundation purchases A-Teng's entire crop of rice, then packages and designs this rice and sells it under a social enterprise concept. This partnership is a win-win situation: A-Teng's rice is guaranteed to be sold entirely to the Youth Platform Foundation, while the foundation can use the high-quality rice A-Teng grows to make other related products to sell to consumers.
The concept of CSA is not yet widely recognized by the public in Taiwan. If this project succeeds, it is expected to be promoted to more places. This method of farming, which is good for both the Earth and people, should become more widely understood. At the test farm in Hsinchu, with the careful tending of A-Teng and other core volunteer mothers, and the joint participation of person-in-charge Chen Chien-tai and many local residents, the situation has gone from its initial startup phase to becoming more and more on track. Results are just around the corner. Let us keep following this test farm!