Plum prices have plummeted after being undercut by the broader market; please support fair trade for plums.

Update 2015/03/27:Today we received word that there are two ways hand-picked plums are bought in the mountains: middlemen pay "13 yuan per 1 kg," while plums turned in to the farmers' association fetch "30 yuan per 1 kg." However, plums turned in to the farmers' association must come from plum orchards that have already undergone "soil testing" before the farmers' association will buy them, and most plum growers in the mountains do not meet the purchasing criteria, so the purchase price below has also been corrected to 13 yuan.

[What happens inside and outside the production area]

Although we were mentally prepared that this year's plum prices would inevitably be affected by the farmers' association's policy of halting purchases of pole-harvested plums, when we actually heard the middlemen's purchase price, we still felt…… hmm, probably just as sour and bitter as an unripe plum.

Yes, plum growers in the mountains have already begun harvesting plums, and middlemen have come up to buy them, with the price of "hand-picked plums" at "12 yuan per kilogram."

Is 12 yuan a lot? Let us roughly estimate how much it costs a plum grower to tend a plum orchard for a year. Here we will use a grower who does not spray pesticides or apply chemical fertilizers as the baseline.

Without spraying pesticides to control weeds, the grower must cut the grass by hand. One laborer costs 1,600 per day. A one-jia plot of plums requires roughly three laborers, each working two days, and mountain farmland is very different from flatland farmland; many plum orchards are in uneven terrain covered with rocks and soil, which makes the work more difficult. On average, the grass must be cut three to four times a year. A rough calculation: 1,600×3 (people) x 2 (two days each time) x 4 (cutting four times a year) = 38,400.

How many hand-picked plums are needed to offset this expense of 38,400? It takes 3,200 kilograms, or 3.2 metric tons.

Labor costs for a plum orchard do not stop there. They also include pruning, and if you want to sell hand-picked plums, there is also the wage for picking. Before making any actual profit, the grower is already deep in debt.

A few days ago, a friend commented that our hand-picked plums are priced relatively high. Someone said you can buy them for 25 yuan per jin, so why does Jia Zai Nan Sha Lu charge 45 yuan per jin? We have wanted to discuss this for a long time, but we never figured out how to explain it in words so that everyone could understand more easily. We thank this friend for the private message, which gave us a chance to sort out our thoughts:

We compared transaction prices at the Taipei fruit and vegetable wholesale market over the past three years, and converted they come to roughly 25 yuan per jin, but this is the wholesale market price. That is, it is the price at which traditional middlemen, after buying from the tribe, trade at the fruit and vegetable wholesale market, not the price the farmer actually receives. Under the past production and marketing model, after the fruit and vegetable market wholesale stage, the price more than doubles by the time it reaches the general market. In recent years we have also noticed supermarket retail prices; a one-jin pack of green plums is marked at 79.

We can understand consumers' concern about why buying directly from farmers seems to differ from wholesale market prices, but how much of that past 25-yuan-per-jin price was left for the farmer has always been something that leaves us feeling helpless. Sometimes the production-area price is less than 10 yuan, but by the time it reaches the Taipei fruit and vegetable market the price immediately doubles. For one or two jia of plums, farmers sometimes receive only ten or twenty thousand yuan, and that is not a reasonable income for a farmer.

Why does Jia Zai Nan Sha Lu price its green plums at 45 yuan? We once visited the Xinyi Township Farmers' Association. The Xinyi Township Farmers' Association has promoted the plum processing industry for many years. We asked them about the price range at which they buy green plums from growers, and it also falls around 40 yuan. (Addition, past news materials: hand-picked green plums are purchased at 40 yuan per kilogram, while organic green plums fetch as much as 150 yuan.http://www.88news.org/?p=17094)

The farmers' association staff told us that hand-picked, pesticide-free plums really do command such a price, and farmers should also receive a better income. This is what we considered when setting our price, because what we offer everyone is delivered directly from the production area, with no middlemen and no pesticide spraying, and the management costs are also relatively high: the grass is cut three to four times every year, every plum grows happily on the tree, and then the farmers hand-pick them to maintain the plums' appearance without damage.

We have written a lot. Outside the production area, what have we been busy with lately? Recently we have spent a lot of time organizing orders and confirming order details with everyone. We hope to let Maidar and the tribal members who have joined us in this effort focus only on making good products, while we handle all the tedious paperwork and administration down in the lowlands.

But at the same time, amid the busyness, we sigh, because these things really are not something every farmer can do. Buying directly from farmers is actually very hard. What is hard is not growing good produce, but how to get good produce from the production area to the consumer.