Light at the end of the tunnel
A few years ago, Huang tried selling his produce through organic food stores. But the stores kept making ever more rigorous demands about the appearance of the vegetables, and anyway sales volume would never have been very much at such stores. Huang was left with little choice but to sell his hard-won organic produce as if it were ordinary veggies. “I would lower the price trying to get someone to buy them, but people still thought they were too ugly. I felt like crying,” sighs Huang.
But last year fortune finally knocked on his door. Pxmart sought out Huang and signed a contract with him, guaranteeing that they would purchase a certain amount of organic food on a regular schedule.
“Pxmart gives us better conditions, and holds special marketing activities for us during peak harvest season. Sometimes the vegetables don’t have an ideal appearance, but Pxmart still takes everything as agreed,” says Huang gratefully. He notes that a typhoon struck and inundated the fields during the most recent growing season for carrots, so that some of them ended up split in two like a pair of human legs, and others looked like pig’s feet. Although this didn’t affect the flavor, it made them more difficult to process; but Pxmart still bought the whole lot.
Looking at the crop of carrots being harvested right now, they are full and beautiful, making Huang beam. Ah-Meng, who has direct responsibility for managing the carrots, guarantees they are delicious—“cross my heart!”
At the current stage, Champion Farms is sending Pxmart about 9000 metric tons of carrots, more than 6000 tons of sweet potatoes, and about 6000 tons of potatoes per week. At the same time the farm is producing an average of 3000 bags of vegetables per day, and is advancing toward their target of 8000 bags per day.
“We don’t sleep all night long, we are all out catching insects!” Now that they have a regular and stable outlet for their products, and moreover aren’t getting exploited by middlemen, the 70–80 employees of Champion Farms are no longer anxious about the future. Like the organic vegetables they grow, they look invigorated.
In order to ensure that supply remains dependable as Pxmart expands sales of organic foods, Champion Farms is looking for an additional 50-hectare piece of land in southern Taiwan where they will begin operating another organic farm.
“Organic farming is the way things are headed for the future. Even if you don’t start now, you will have to start eventually. As a farmer, once you know this is true, then you might as well get started as early as possible,” says Huang, fully prepared to show what he can do.