On the barren land of Lunshan Tribe, a gift from heaven grows
Located in the mountains of Zhuoxi Township in southern Hualien, Lunshan (Duqpusan in Bunun language) has spectacular scenery, yet it is a tribe left with only the elderly and children.
Wen Guangliang (original name Qaisul Subalian), a 48-year-old pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, China, is the driving force behind the tribe's organic industry. In his youth he too left home to make a living, working as a plumber and electrician; later he devoutly turned to the path of theology, and 10 years ago was assigned back to his hometown. But because job opportunities here are few, the tribe's young people have moved away, leaving only the elderly, and what he ends up doing most often on his days off is actually "officiating funerals."
Shortly after returning to the tribe, Pastor Wen was walking on the road one midnight when he found a group of children still wandering around, so he called them over: "Why aren't you home yet?" What he didn't expect was that the children, eyes wide open, said: "We haven't had dinner yet." Heartbroken, he learned that the children's parents were either far away in the city or hired to cut grass in the forest district, coming down the mountain only once a month. 
Pastor Wen Guangliang promotes organic farming in Lunshan Tribe
Children wandering at midnight, tea-oil trees in the weeds
As a clergyman, Wen Guangliang thought: if their bellies aren't full, how can their spirits be nourished? So he spent tremendous effort persuading the church to let him step out of the chapel and devote himself to community work. Yet after 2 or 3 years of promoting after-school tutoring and nutritious dinners for the schoolchildren, when the children graduated from junior high school they told him one by one, "We have no money to continue studying," which plunged Pastor Wen into deep thought again.
Walking on the road behind the mountain, he looked at the tribe's fields. Because they grew highly replaceable crops such as peanuts and corn, prices were always manipulated by middlemen, leaving tribal members with unstable incomes; they left one after another, and the fields lay fallow and desolate, patch after patch.
Yet God had not forgotten them. Right on this barren land, amid weeds taller than a person, stood quietly row after row of tea-oil trees planted in earlier years. Around the time of Taiwan's retrocession, because domestic edible oil sources were insufficient, the government promoted the planting of tea-oil trees in various places; 40 hectares of tea-oil trees were once an important source of income for Lunshan, but later declined after being replaced by imported soybeans and salad oil.
Unexpectedly, in recent years, because tea oil contains especially high monounsaturated fatty acids, it has become a sought-after health food. Pastor Wen finally figured it out: "Developing a tribal industry that coexists with nature, so that villagers have a stable income, is the fundamental solution."
To the tribe, the tea-oil trees on the mountain are a gift from God
The 50-year-old aunties and the never-ending weeds
Yet, as everywhere, promoting organic agriculture is anything but easy. At the beginning, most tribal members just waited to see the joke. "To put it bluntly, it's a fool's errand," said Pastor Wen.
What drew the most complaints was "cutting the weeds." Because large tracts of farmland no longer use herbicides, all weeding must be done by hand. The production and marketing group would often finish tidying the pineapple field this week, only for last week's cut chrysanthemum field to be full again with waist-high wild grass. "And on top of that, 19 hectares of organic tea-oil orchard..." Pastor Wen frowned and said: "We'll get scolded to no end again."
He pointed to a beehive on the trunk of a peach tree nearby, appearing because the environment had returned to organic; the aunties of the production and marketing group, whose average age is over 50, often get stung and yelp and grumble endlessly; even the corn Pastor Wen planted himself was all eaten up by monkeys. But Pastor Wen, keeping his foolish zeal, said: "Only this way can it be sustainable."
At the same time, with the help of biochemist Wu Meimao, the tribe weathered the hard early days, and organic sweet liucheng (sweet orange) was finally gradually accepted at above-market prices. In addition, the wild organic tea-oil seeds, carefully weeded and managed, also rose with the demand for tea oil, with the price growing from 12 yuan per jin 7 years ago to 36 yuan per jin.
Not only that, wild tea-oil trees, in order to absorb water, send their roots especially deep, so they not only use little water but also protect the hillside soil, preserving the entire ecosystem.
The organic industry began to sprout in the tribe, and Pastor Wen could more easily persuade the tribal members one by one. Crops on the mountain behind -- plums, plums, May honey peaches, dong quai, red sage and others -- were converted to organic farming one after another, and the soil once again gave off fragrance. Reeve's muntjacs and masked palm civets returned to the tea-oil tree orchard of class leader Tian Youfu of the fruit tree production and marketing group, Sister Mao's free-range chickens and ducks stroll under the citrus trees, and quail lay eggs with peace of mind in the chrysanthemum fields.
Pastor Wen's dream is very simple: he hopes that through organic contract farming, the tribe can be directly supported and risks shared; at the same time, "creating job opportunities so that the people of the tribe can return to their home in the mountains with peace of mind."
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