The Rice God Shares Breeding and Farming Techniques in Hualien

At the Biyunzhuang community activity center near Tzu Chi University in Hualien, a talk was specially scheduled for Wednesday evening. The invited speaker was from the Khao Kwan Foundation of Thailand (in Thai, Khao means "grain" and Kwan means "god"); the main speaker was Daycha, and the interpreter was Chen Meng-kai, who had previously visited Khao Kwan and is part of the Hopu Agricultural Learning Market.

Since Daycha had already given several talks in Taiwan, this topic was arranged through communication with Teacher Chiu, the head of Hualien Permaculture, because many attendees were friends who farm, so the focus of the sharing was practical sharing on rice seed selection and field management.

Daycha's talk was titled Appropriate techonologies of sufficiency economy for small rice farmers. What is sufficiency? Can Daycha's methods bring an opportunity? Can we find a dialogue between the experience of Thailand's Rice God and Taiwan's organic agriculture?

Postscript: After this talk, I carefully thought about a few things: If the development of organic agriculture ultimately satisfies the health of people above the middle class, while people without money have to eat unsafe food, is such development right? If the development of organic agriculture ultimately satisfies only food safety, while not caring about the meaning for the environment and ecology, is that right (in some organic farmland areas in eastern Taiwan, loaches still cannot be seen, which shows that some organic materials still cause damage to the ecology)?

Also, I like the Rice God's way of doing things full of experimental spirit. If you like a certain farming method, keep doing it. If you like organic food grown in a certain way, support it. If you feel you like this one and that one too, then cross them again to create your own farming method. All the way to the n-th generation, you will have the way you like, and the food produced by that way. Don't make things complicated, just try it and observe. If it's wrong, switch to another method. Very simple! I recall a saying: "People often think that the method to solve a difficult thing must be very complicated and hard to learn. Even if the solution is really simple, people would rather believe in a method that looks complicated and cannot solve the problem."

Further reading
All articles in "Friendly Small Farmers. International Connections. Relay Records"