Yang Rumen's Journey to the Source, Episode 6: A Field Visit to the Origins of Agricultural Produce

Text / Yang Ju-men

The market has always wanted to find farmers in the north, so when I received a letter from Ms. Su of "Valley of Bees," I was quite happy. Having lived in Keelung for 7~8 years, I had heard the place name "You Rui" because when I was previously applying to turn the "old campus of Hou Tong Elementary School" into the "Hou Tong Ecological Education Park," I saw on the Ministry of Education website that the Ma Dong and Ma Xi branch classes in the You Rui area had also been abandoned. So we set a day to go up the mountain and take a look!

As soon as I heard the meeting point Jian Cheng had arranged, I was a bit puzzled. Isn't You Rui in "Qidu"? How could we be meeting at "Xizhi" Railway Station? Man! At first I thought it was a mistake, but it turned out I was the one lacking common sense and hadn't looked at a map. You Rui is actually at the border between Xizhi and Qidu, closer to Xizhi Railway Station, and the place where Brother Su goes in and out of the city to shop and live is Xizhi. It was our own misunderstanding.

Below is Ms. Su's letter:

Hi, team of the Agriculture Learning Market

Hello
We are small beekeepers on the mountain in Keelung. Our family keeps bees ourselves, and every year we insist on harvesting honey only in spring, only once a year.
What we keep are Taiwan wild bees, and the honey yield is relatively small, because we very much insist that only honey collected by bees going out in spring is harvested.
Our honey is the red nan-flower honey unique to the north.
I would like to ask, if we want to join the Agriculture Learning Market, I wonder whether there are any rules?