Five years after Typhoon Morakot, organic farmers in Shanlin still wait for the government to allocate farmland as a Father's Day gift

For many people, August 8 Father's Day is a day to thank fathers for their hard work in supporting the family, but for Ko Pi-feng, a farmer living in the Tzu Chi Great Love Park in Shanlin, Kaohsiung, August 8 is a day of mixed emotions: becoming a Typhoon Morakot disaster victim, his father falling into depression and illness due to improper post-disaster reconstruction, and his own arduous journey of switching careers to farming.

Ko Pi-feng, born in the 58th year of the Republic of China calendar (1969), originally ran a machinery trading company in mainland China, providing machinery repair services to Taiwanese businessmen there, and over thirteen years accumulated major clients such as Hon Hai and Catcher. But in 2009, Typhoon Morakot caused the August 8 flood disaster, which severely damaged his old home at Huoshan Bridge in Shanlin Township, Kaohsiung County.

Ko Pi-feng said that his old home originally had three parcels of private farmland; one was washed away by the flood, and the other two were forcibly expropriated at state-owned land prices because the government designated the Huoshan Bridge area as a "specific zone." Because the government did not respect residents' opinions and actively communicate during the land expropriation process, his father, facing the successive blows of natural disaster losses and forced government expropriation, fell into depression and illness; in 2011 his cranial nerves were damaged and he became a vegetative patient, bedridden ever since.

As the eldest son in the family, in order to shoulder the burden of caring for his father, Ko Pi-feng ended the business he had run in mainland China for thirteen years and returned to Taiwan. To be able to care for his father nearby, Ko Pi-feng's whole family also moved into a permanent house in the Tzu Chi Great Love Park in Shanlin.

The Yonglin Farm was only a job; he could not run a family farm