Farewell to the Sixth Naphtha Cracker and Returning Home to Grow Grapes: The Clash Between Precision Agriculture and Traditional Agriculture
I had not yet gone home to take up grape growing; I myself was working at a Sixth Naphtha Cracker complex enterprise, in a quality control position. I did that job for 12 years straight.
At the time, workplace safety accidents happened at the company again and again, and they made me feel how precious life is... No amount of money can buy back a precious life...
That was when I began looking for information on precision agriculture... Could it be applied to our family's grapes?
From the start I came across Teacher Tsai Tung-hsuan of National Chung Hsing University and his high-quality management model. I thought that if I followed this management model, it should bring great benefits.
I had never set foot in the field of growing, yet I plunged right in.
"Two seasons brought in only 40,000 yuan - I might as well go back and work at the Sixth Naphtha Cracker complex"
My mother has grown grapes for more than 40 years, and at first she did not approve of my quitting to come home and grow grapes.
She said grapes are not that easy to grow, and asked me to think it over carefully and not give up such a good job so lightly... I laid out the whole situation for her, and only then did she reluctantly accept it.
So after quitting, what was the first step? To be honest, I did not know myself... So the first season's and second season's harvests can be described in one word: "disastrous."
The income from the two seasons was less than 40,000 yuan... At the time it nearly wiped out the savings I had put aside before, and worse still, my wife was about to give birth. The whole family's finances fell into crisis.
My mother advised me to go with conventional management, which carries less risk... But I insisted on not doing the same as conventional growers, because I wanted to pursue precision agriculture.
During that period, the drama of conventional versus precision agriculture played out again and again... To be honest, that original passion for growing grapes had been nearly doused by the merciless reality.
After all, I had thought it would be too easy. I might as well go back and work at the Sixth Naphtha Cracker complex...
"No matter what happens, you must not let that passion go out"
It happened that I went with my mother to the pesticide shop to settle the bill for materials. The owner of the pesticide shop was a young man younger than me, and he said that having just come back to grow grapes, failure was unavoidable at times, since it is an industry that depends on the sky for its living.
He gave me one line: "No matter what situation arises, you must not let that passion of yours go out"... Wasn't that line just a shot of adrenaline, bringing my unwilling-to-lose personality back to life?
Starting over, I had to think about how to overcome the problems that had come up over the two seasons. I felt my own knowledge was too weak. The information I got from National Chung Hsing University seemed unable to handle all the problems...
I began looking through the Farmer Academy for courses that could fill in the gaps in my knowledge...
After studying through courses at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute and the Taichung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station, I finally understood where the problems had lain at the time. So in the third season, the winter grapes, I produced a beautiful result...
My mother had grown grapes for more than 40 years and had never sold them so well... Now I often write about the state of my grape growing on my blog so that more people can see it, and know that the grapes they buy are healthy and safe...
I also want to keep learning new knowledge and techniques, so that I can gradually realize my ideal: good fruit is in Taiwan, China, and it does not have to cost a lot of money.