Getting by on willpower
With the arrival of summer, the ripening rice in Taitung’s Chishang Township forms a sea of yellow. Wei Jui-ting gets up at 5 a.m. on a day off from his day job and fires up his harvester to reap the golden grain. It takes him three days to harvest the rice from his nine hectares of land, and send it for drying and milling.
During this busy period on the farm, Wei, who still works at the Forestry Bureau, sleeps only four to five hours a night. “I get by on willpower.” With sweat pouring off his brow, the 38-year-old Wei says, short of breath: “This is why I didn’t want to work the land.”
Growing up in a farming family, Wei had no real childhood. When it came time to write a school essay on “where I would like to go for fun,” Wei couldn’t think of anything to write. He says: “When I was with my classmates, I didn’t dare admit that that guy wearing ragged old clothes was my father.” After finishing his compulsory military service, Wei was determined not to go back home and farm. He graduated from the Department of Forestry at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology and got a master’s from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at National Ilan University. Then he put his nose to the grindstone for three straight months in the NPUST library to prepare for the recruitment exam for the Forestry Bureau, which he passed, thereby becoming a civil servant.
In 2009, when the Veterans Affairs Council for the first time called for bids for farmers to manage organic rice farms in Chishang, Wei’s father, Wei Qinan, won operating rights for 16 years with a bid of NT$1.01 million. Topping up his savings with a loan, he spent an additional NT$5 million to prepare ten hectares of weed-choked abandoned land for cultivation before he could begin planting rice.
After going to all the trouble of harvesting his first rice crop, Wei Qinan found he couldn’t sell it, running up against brick walls in all directions. Organic rice produced in Chishang finally was sold to neighboring Guanshan—at about half price! Then, when it came time to harvest his second crop, at first Wei Qinan couldn’t find anyone to do the harvesting, and the rice would have rotted in the fields had he not at last managed to hire a harvesting team from Taitung’s Chenggong Township, on the other side of the Coastal Mountain Range.
After that close call, the elder Wei spent NT$3 million to buy a harvester. Where did he get the money? “From the farmers’ association!” says Wei Jui-ting, meaning that he borrowed it from the association’s credit department. To cope with the shortage of farm labor, Wei’s father went on to buy a rice seedling transplanter, a tractor, and a fertilizer sprayer, as well as a grain transport truck and a flatbed truck for transporting his harvester. Without even realizing it, he had gotten himself NT$30 million into debt.
“Everything he earned went to buy farm machinery! Whenever I went home, I had to listen to my parents arguing about money.” Wei Jui-ting says wryly: “My father knows how to grow rice, but not how to sell it.” Unable to look on any longer, Wei requested a transfer from the Forestry Bureau in Luodong, Yilan County, to Taitung’s Guanshan, and on his days off took rice to sell at organic markets in Taipei, thus beginning five long years of “market life.”
One technique used in organic agriculture is to set up hawk-shaped kites to scare away small birds that eat rice grains.