Organic red dates in the community supported by both seniors and youth

There is an Chinese old saying. “Three dates a day, keep the 100-year-old young”. Dried dates are most commonly used to make nutritious stew. Containing 10 times more vitamin C than lemons and 100 times more than apples, fresh crunchy dates are less available on the market.

After 1940, date trees were mainly grown in Gungkuan, Miaoli, where sand gravel, breeze from Taiwan Strait during the day, the evening wind from Snow Mountain Range in the spring and the water from Houlong River create a perfect environment for date plantation .

The 40-day harvest season as well as typhoon season starts Major Heat (the 12th solar term) and ends late August. Conventional agriculture is commonly practiced to control the harvest and to effectively manage fertilizer, pests and diseases. Since 2014, young farmers from other cities practiced organic farming here. Their actions have drawn consumers’ attentions with their quality, selling prices and marketing campaigns and have had some impacts on the local community.

While struggling to increase organic produce, organic farmers practice grass cultivation to improve soil fertility and keep moisture. They choose weeds, such as runner peanut, or legume plants to add nitrogen to soil and to cover the ground with green carpet. Biological control can reduce damages caused by pests. Free-range chickens not only provide manure but also remove weed seeds. Bordeaux mixture is used against date tree rust. Miaoli District Agricultural Research and Extension Station in Kunguan provides timely professional consultation services to farmers, observing and recording intertillage, weeding, fertilization, and other production management procedures every year. Such data is valuable for pest management.

After overcoming various difficulties of organic farming, farmers found an innovative method to dry dates. In Kunguan, dates were traditionally sun dried in the court yard. Organic farmers apply our ancestors’ wisdom to set up a glass house on the roof floor, which prevents seasonal rain, flies and dust and is full of sweet aroma from dates in the sunlight.

To meet the requirement of intensive labor, organic date farmers recruit international volunteers from WWOOF and urban areas. Interesting street market and fruit picking activities attract people to interact with farmers and locals and bring changes to the local community when people wear bamboo hats and collect dates one by one with blue bags on their waists in sunny days.

Young organic farmers energize this “old” town, Kunguan, and practice feasible organic farming by forming a cooperative, a community shop of organic products and a street market. The progress of these actions has inspired this isolated town and show different possibilities to the young people, who encourage and support each other and share information to embrace failures and more opportunities of organic farming.