In November, I was fortunate enough to co-organize and attend a week-long trip to Taiwan with eight Asian American farmers and food systems leaders from California and New York. The inaugural program, Taiwan Diaspora Delegation: Food and Farm Tour aims to connect farmers and food workers across generations and geography, inviting Asians in diaspora to Taiwan — a center of regenerative agriculture and value-added food production — for cultural exchange, skill and experience sharing, explorations at the intersections of food politics and history, and ancestral, earth-based healing through immersive urban and rural farm visits and workshops.

The following photo essay highlights some of the impactful moments on our learning journey across the east coast of Taiwan. We are currently in the development phase for the second iteration of this project. You can follow along for updates or get in touch with the co-organizers on Instagram @taiwanfoodandfarmtour.

Day 1 – A Farmer to Farmer Exchange in Taipei

We began the trip in Taipei by attending the Good Food Festival held at the Taipei City Hakka Cultural Park and an organic farmers’ market. Our delegate, Kanoa Dinwoodie of Feral Heart Farm (Sunol, CA) joined Amis farmer and cultural leader Ke Chun Jie in a public conversation about growing heirloom millet varieties. The event was moderated by our Taipei-based co-organizer, Pei-Ru Ko, founder of the Bay Area non-profit Food Culture Collective and author of Fermented with Love: A Dialogue with Food, a Healing Journey from Me to Us.

Ke Jie (Big sister Ke) shared how her community in Guangfu was devastated by Typhoon Ragasa when a barrier lake dam overflowed. The natural disaster buried hundreds of hectares of farmland and resulted in 14 deaths and 17 missing people. Leading up to the trip, our delegation held a mahjong night fundraiser to help offset the losses faced on her farm. 

Ke Jie spoke to the importance of preserving agrobiodiversity that can remember both flood and drought. In response to the damaging mudslides from the typhoon, she reminds us that the sand, silt, clay, and nutrients from the mountain lakes flowing into the oceans play a crucial role in the ecology of the island.

Day 2 – Bees, Tea, and Semiconductor Engineering in Pinglin

We left the city and headed into the mountain town of Pinglin. Our first stop was the hives of honey producer Zheng Hong-song. Zheng Laoshi (teacher Zheng) raises native Taiwanese honeybees (Apis cerana). The majority of apiarists in Taiwan raise western honeybees due to their higher yields, but the native bees are better suited to Taiwan’s tropical climate and are crucial pollinators for native plants.

In order to extract the maximum yield while preserving the health benefits of native honey, Zheng Laoshi utilized his background in semiconductor and aviation cooling system engineering to design his homemade extraction equipment.

Later that day, we harvested and processed tea seeds (for oil), leaves, and flowers (for tea) at 綠光農園 Green Light Farm, learning firsthand the labor and care involved in small-scale tea production. We were instructed to wear protective sleeves and hats, which prompted many photo ops.

Day 3 – Yilan: All Things Rice and Beans

We descended from the mountains into the famously rainy flats of Yilan County, rice paddy country. In the morning, we toured the farm, soy sauce and soymilk factory, and rice cleaning and storage facility of Wu Da Ge (big brother Wu). Wu Da Ge is one of the larger organic farms in town. He provides cleaning, storage, and packing services for many of his neighbors. He also places bulk orders of soil amendments and packaging and then resells the discounted materials at cost to other farmers.

Wu Da Ge’s family is the OG when it comes to farming a special heirloom variety of black soybean. These landrace soybeans are the only variety that thrives in the wet Yilan climate, which receives an average of 118 inches of rain a year. Even after the fields were submerged by a typhoon, the beans survived where other varieties would have failed. Thanks to sustained advocacy by Wu and other farmers, the Taiwanese government recently recognized Yilan County as eligible for soy subsidies—an important policy win for climate-adapted crops.

In the afternoon,  we sampled local products using regeneratively grown Yilan rice and black soybean. Thomas of Dao Jiang Shanghang (島匠商行) is preserving his grandmother’s traditional Yilan method of soy sauce production without any additives. He includes local ingredients like kumquat and tea in his flavored products.

Others are finding ways to create new value-added products for their rice, like pancake mix and artisanal rice wine.

Day 4 – Shengou Village: Rural Revitalization 

The next day, we joined members of the Shengou Village community, including rice farmer and interpreter Joelle Chevier, rice farmer and author Lai Qing Song, and Zeng Laoshi, a farmer and teacher in the local farm school. Lai Qing Song has inspired many to move from Taipei to Yilan by creating apprenticeship opportunities and providing access to equipment for beginning rice farmers. Many rural villages in Taiwan have lost younger generations to higher paying jobs in the big cities. Lai Qing Song is reversing that trend. His approach is to not only train farmers but to help people find purpose in a community that is supportive of their dreams. Members of the community have found their place in Shengou Village, opening stores and restaurants, running queer farmer cooperatives, hosting radio programs, brewing rice wine, and conducting citizen science projects. 

Zeng Laoshi taught us to harvest my new favorite vegetable, water bamboo, a rice relative with a tender swollen stem that is the result of being infected with naturally occurring smut fungus. Water bamboo is only available for a short time of the year. We were lucky enough to time our visit with the harvest season of this delicious vegetable that tastes like roasted chestnuts and corn.

We ended our time in Yilan at the home base for the community, where Qing Song shared a video explaining the origins of their movement. (Scott – center, blue jacket).

Days 5 & 6 – Guangfu: Indigenous Agriculture and Resilience

From Yilan, we headed south to Guangfu in Hualien County. The flooding from Typhoon Ragasa knocked out the bridge into town, leading us to a detour over a one-lane mountain pass. When we finally got back to the main road,  we were met with a moonscape of sediment covering fields, and water trucks spraying the roads to keep down the grey dust that covered every surface.

We headed to Pangcah Organic Farm (“Pangcah” means “people” in Amis). They told us the mud was extremely alkaline and lacked beneficial biology, making it unfit for growing most crops. In an attempt to bring both biology and community back to the farm, Pangcah hosted a remediation project, digging a grid of round garden beds to plant an indigenous variety of chenopod called djulis (aka hongli 紅藜, or Taiwanese quinoa). When complete, the circles will create a maze for community members to be able to visit and play in.

The farm has also been reviving a variety of indigenous red glutinous rice that has the ability to be dry farmed, instead of the typical paddy cultivation. After years of searching for germplasm, they found a small amount of seeds being kept by an Amis elder. Over the years, they duplicated the seed stock. This year, they finally grew enough to offer it for sale through their CSA. Unfortunately, the flooding destroyed their planting and their seed storage, leaving them only one bunch of dried rice seed to start the process of duplication over again.

We then went to see the millet farmer we met the first day in Taipei, Ke Jie. She and her mom invited us into their home that was still without power or water. We shared a tasty and hearty lunch, roast duck and veggie rice plates, from a restaurant that had only just reopened weeks after the typhoon, to fill our bellies before heading into the black soybean fields to weed. She showed us some of the varieties of millet she grows, much of it for food as well as to make millet wine, which is used in many Amis traditions. These days, most millet wine is made with corn or sorghum.

Armed with a homemade tool, a piece of slender bamboo with a red-handled serrated blade, we got to work weeding amaranth from her soybeans. Ke Jie grows about 40 acres of grains and beans. She says the soybeans are the cash crop that makes the millet farming possible. 

When we finished weeding, Ke Jie took us to see where the levee broke. From across the river, we could see semi trucks hauling mud away and returning with construction materials to rebuild the damaged infrastructure like a steady stream of worker ants. 

We parked next to a boulder many times the size of our van. These giants that are responsible for knocking out the bridge into town now cover the riverbed and the surrounding fields. Ke Jie let us know that the area where we parked used to be her rice field.

It was a somber drive back to town, realizing we were driving on what used to be some of the best farmland in Guangfu, now compacted alkaline mud and half-buried scooters. But when we arrived at our next stop, we were welcomed into a gorgeous structure on another of Ke Jie’s fields. This traditional Amis architectural structure was built by Ke Jie to be a center for preserving and teaching indigenous traditions. The large, open-sided, thatch-roofed structure was surrounded by kitchen gardens, tended native grasses, and perennial fruits.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exchanging gratitudes and reflecting on everything we had learned and seen in our time in Taiwan. Before we left Ke Jie gifted us each one of the red handled serrated knives we had used to weed the soybean field to bring back to our respective farms. 

The next morning, we returned to Taipei full of inspiration, knowledge, and deep appreciation for our teachers. While we may be in the minority of food producers, one of the greatest outcomes of this exchange is the comfort knowing that there are others like us around the world and across the Pacific. This type of solidarity provides the fuel needed in an often thankless industry to push for a future that bolsters diversity, centers indigenous people, and grows delicious food that nourishes our bodies and spirit.