Yang Wenquan / Friendly smallholder farmers form their own cooperative contract-farming circle │ Rice harvesters, large trucks, even a grain drying plant!
For a long time, many people have been skeptical about how friendly-farming smallholders, who lack economies of scale, could ever build an industry system. This view is in fact merely a continuation of last century's thinking, which held that agricultural development could only rely on large agribusinesses operating over vast areas in order to demonstrate economic benefits and gain market competitiveness.
However, the openness and spread of the internet environment has given friendly smallholders engaged in small-scale farming the opportunity to effectively gather and create the power of scale, shaping and driving a professional production system that provides them with contract-farming services (mechanized services) through open collaboration, and thereby offers consumers customized services. Today, in the friendly smallholder cluster of Yuanshan Township, Yilan County, we have already seen the prototype of such a professional contract-farming system for friendly-farmed rice.
A flexible and open contract-farming system that encourages customized services
Of course, the professional contract-farming system currently serving friendly smallholders throughout the Yuanshan area is a larger-scale open system. In this system, there are already many operators willing to openly and flexibly serve everyone across different contract-farming tasks, including traditional local operators as well as operators transformed from smallholder partners. And each friendly smallholder can, within this open collaborative system, find the operator at each stage of work that best fits their own operations, flexibly assembling a contract-farming workflow of their own, realizing the farming method they want, and holding on to their autonomy in farming.
Because within this open system, anyone can equally take part in providing contract-farming services for everyone; at the same time, the more customized one's service is, the more support one can get from smallholders within the system; and moreover, the organization of each workflow is self-organized by smallholders or smallholder groups according to their own needs. Based on these characteristics, I call this rice contract-farming system serving friendly smallholders in the Yuanshan area an open collaborative system of professional contract farming.
Who says Taiwan's agricultural future must necessarily be the scaled farming of large agribusinesses? The case of the smallholder cluster in the Yuanshan area of Yilan may also give us, when thinking about the future of Taiwan's agriculture and facing increasingly customized market demand, another kind of imagination for local development.