Harvesting Onions, Connecting with the Land, and a Joyful Encounter with a Rainbow

Ringed by green mountain forest, a one-jia onion field lies enclosed, facing the Shimen Mountain pass, where the famous Luoshan wind of the Hengchun Peninsula blows through. Rainbow Farm is the ancient battlefield of the Mudan Incident, and also a Taiwan Sugar Corporation farm abandoned more than nine years ago. Rainbow Farm owner Hong Hui-hsiang still remembers that back then this place was still a forest covered with white leadtree (Leucaena leucocephala), with field mice running and jumping among it; yet this wasteland, left fallow for a full seven years, has now been cleared into neat rectangular rice and onion fields.

The pig pen beside the farm is built from recycled fishing nets and pallets given by friends, and inside are raised 13 black-haired pigs; every morning and evening someone has to light a wood fire to cook their food, feeding them twice a day. Compared with large-scale pig farms, the pigs here live only 15 months, each with about 2 ping of activity space, and they are let out onto the farm to move around from time to time, making Rainbow Farm seem to transform into a small-scale Rainbow Ranch, which is quite interesting.

This is Rainbow Farm in Checheng Township, Pingtung, and it is said that after rain clears, a rainbow arcs across in front of the farm. At first, farm owner Hong Hui-hsiang was a director teaching at a senior high school; more than twenty years ago, concerned about environmental issues, he formed a three-person group, and afterward founded the Pingtung Environmental Protection Alliance

He still remembers that at the environmental impact assessment meeting for the Alangyi Old TrailOld Gaoping River Railway BridgeKenting Houwan land crab homemonitoring the Hengchun Maanshan Nuclear Power PlantWugoushui Spring WetlandDonggang Gonghe New Village

Upstream of the Sizhong River in Checheng Township, Rainbow Farm is continuing the spirit of an ancient battle, using the action of organic agriculture to put the value of land and ecology into practice, and training intern farmers in the concept of organic cycling. At present, besides the intern farmer training program and the work-exchange farm experience, Rainbow Farm is also actively seeking 50 green-consumption joint purchasing groups across Taiwan, so that through the strength of long-term purchasing of organic and pesticide-free agricultural and livestock products from "Green Farmer's Home," this stretch of land that was so hard to make clean can be sustained, like the ever-blowing Luoshan wind, whistling without end, ceaselessly renewing life...