Lanyang Plain 200-Hectare Farm: A Breeding Ground for Dreams and New Farmers

In the United States, if you want to play major league baseball, you mostly have to go through the minor leagues first. Taiwan has a minor league too, but what these players hold in their hands is not a baseball, but rice seedlings, hoes and weed trimmers!

The grassroots organization 'Lia Baijia' in Yilan promotes friendly farming on the Lanyang Plain. Built on volunteers, it not only helps newly arrived farmers find and rent land, but also provides technical resources and "spiritual companionship." In its first year it has already trained 8 new farmers. Founder Yang Wen-chuan says their goal is to have the entire Lanyang Plain engaged in friendly farming: "Add 5 farmers a year, each farming 2 jia, and in 20 years there will be 2 hundred jia!"

A spring between rookie farmers and landowners, lowering the threshold for renting land

In recent years, more and more people want to leave the city and live a half-farming, half-something-else life in the countryside, but "renting land" is the first challenge for these newcomers who do not know the area. "I was very puzzled at the time. Yilan is full of fallow land everywhere, so why would no one rent it to us?" Peng Xian-hui, who lives in Taichung, resolutely quit her job with her husband early this year to go to Yilan to become farmers, so that their child could have a better environment to grow up in. But the two of them, with no farming background at all, hit a wall right at the land-rental stage.

To find land, the couple asked around at every major farmers' association in Yilan, sought matching through the Farmland Bank, and even carried their one-year-old daughter straight into the fields to ask farmers to lease to them. But old farmers who have depended on the land their whole lives are as cautious about leasing land as they would be about marrying off a daughter. For outsiders with no connections, gaining farmers' trust is a nearly impossible task. It was not until early April this year, when the first rice crop had already been transplanted, that through an introduction from a friend they got to know 'Lia Baijia,' which promotes friendly farming in Yilan, and solved the land-rental problem.

Yang Wen-chuan, who has long focused on rural planning in Taiwan, founded 'Lia Baijia' in Yilan at the end of last year. At first he only wanted to rent land himself and be a farmer, but more and more friends who wanted to take up friendly farming "showed up at his door on their own." Considering that he could not farm too much himself, he decided to release land, and by accident became a minor-league incubator for novice farmers. This year they are cultivating more than 2 jia of land in total, and all 8 farming friends are rookies.

"For the countryside, farmland leasing is not entirely a free market; there are many local networks of human relations in between." Compared with the rigid regulations of public agencies, Yang Wen-chuan defines 'Lia Baijia' as a "spring" between landowners and new farmers. He says the farmers of 'Lia Baijia' share a characteristic: none of them are under much economic pressure, so they are also very flexible. He can rent land from a landowner a year in advance and slowly release it to new farmers who are willing, and if it cannot be rented out, at worst he farms it himself. "Actually, I got everyone to come and keep me company farming."

But 'Lia Baijia' did not come out of thin air either. The land in its first year was brokered by Lai Ching-sung, a farmer who has put down roots in Yilan for ten years. As one of the first batch of young people returning home, Lai Ching-sung feels deeply that "finding land, finding a house, finding a barn" is the biggest challenge for incoming farmers.

Lai Ching-sung laughs: "In the past I even secretly handed over the farmland I rented to other new farmers who wanted to try friendly farming. When the landowner asked, I could only play dumb and say that was my intern." Over ten years of farming, he has introduced more than a dozen families to the countryside. After 'Lia Baijia' was founded, he took on the role of technical guidance and brokerage, dividing the work so as to achieve the greatest benefit.