The 12-hectare farm is located beneath Mt. Liyu. It was originally part of a sugarcane plantation owned by Taiwan Sugar Corporation. In the 2000s TSC ceased planting sugarcane and began to lease out the land. Lin, her husband and friends fell hard for this land and its fertile soil the first time they saw it. “With such an outstanding environment,” Lin remembers thinking, “crops grown here are sure to be excellent.”

Full of confidence, they leased nearly 30 hectares, investing tens of millions of NT dollars on equipment and irrigation lines. But things didn’t go as smoothly as they had anticipated. “It turns out that when farming you’ve got to make adjustments in accordance with the season, the land and the climate,” says Lin. “You need to be constantly learning.” The first year’s harvest was poor, and they ended up losing more than NT$9 million. The Lins’ partners found the losses too hard to stomach and pulled out.

Back then, their ground crops hadn’t been harvested when the lease with TSC expired. Lin couldn’t bear to see all her efforts come to naught, so she accepted the risks involved in continuing to farm and extended her lease.

Mother and daughters have staked out a place of their own in the realm of organic agriculture.

Healing the land

Before operating Wubaihu, Lin was a housewife who also handled back-office operations for her husband’s highland vegetable business. She kept the accounts and answered the phones but wasn’t familiar with how to plant.

Laughing, Lin says that her days before becoming a farmer were pretty laid back. After sending her children out the door to school, she’d practice painting, weaving and other hobbies. When friends invited Lin to take a course on organic agriculture, she immediately consented. It was her first experience with organics. 

At first, after they leased the land, the labor was supplied by her partners, using conventional methods. Over the course of two years, Lin saw for herself how the workers were getting poisoned repeatedly by spraying chemical pesticides. The practice was hard for her to condone. With concepts from environmental sustainability courses filling her mind, Lin convinced her husband to support her in adopting organic methods.

Lin started by nurturing the soil: She planted corn one season and a cover crop the next, constantly rotating. That slowly brought the soil back to fertility. “There are no shortcuts when you farm organically. You’ve got to gradually nurse the soil back to health,” Lin says. After working at it for more than four years, they finally attained formal organic certification in 2006.

Lin takes an entrepreneurial approach to organic farming. Thanks to her efforts, Wubaihu Farm has moved into the black, with a steadily improving balance sheet. (courtesy of Lin Peiru)

A farming guru emerges

When they first shifted to organic farming, Lin planted more than 60 varieties of fruits and vegetables. But after working hard for a stretch, she discovered to her disappointment, “Even when harvests were good, the proceeds from the farm barely covered the labor costs. There was hardly any profit at all.”

Lin carefully examined the farm’s operations, eliminating some of the crops and leaving only the varieties that would be high earners over the long term. Now Wubaihu only grows about 20 varieties, including pumpkins, lemons, chayote shoots and broccoli. These are crops that grow back on their own after harvesting. There’s no need to prepare the soil again and sow seeds. The practice saves a lot of labor.

In order to bring more stability to the farm’s operations, Lin signed contracts with various businesses, including biotech companies. She thus gained control ahead of time over the varieties to plant and their prices. She also put core aspects of farm management, such as field work schedules, crop growing periods, yields and so forth, onto spreadsheets, handling them in an entrepreneurial manner.

What’s more, Lin and her husband continued to upgrade their farming machinery and irrigation system, raising the farm’s productivity. Ten some years after being tens of millions of NT dollars in the red, the farm was on a sustainable financial footing, and Lin won the Shennong Award, which recognizes achievements in agriculture. She has become a “farming guru.”

In 2015 Lin Peiru (seventh from right) won a Shennong Award, becoming the first female “farming guru” to be so honored. (courtesy of Lin Peiru)

Neighbors join in to establish Donghua

Unlike most farms, which typically comprise adjacent fields, the land making up the Wubaihu Farm is scattered across a larger area of farmland. Known as the Donghua Organic Farming Zone, this 80-hectare expanse includes land worked by a dozen some farmers.

The zone’s origins go back to 2009, when TSC announced a plan to take back some of its leased land to plant trees. In response, Lin called together neighboring farmers and traveled across the Central Mountain Range several times to make their case to officials in the Agriculture and Food Agency’s Nantou office. After four years’ hard work, not only did TSC decide not to take back the land, but the AFA went so far as to designate the area as “prioritized for organic agriculture,” thus pushing forward the establishment of the Donghua Organic Farming Zone. When asked about these achievements, Lin modestly says, “Every additional person who gets involved in organic agriculture creates one more piece of healthy land.”

One only becomes intimate with the land by humbly bending down and getting one's hands dirty. The Wubaihu Farm applies a feminine tenderness to healing the land.

Motherly love for co-workers

The hard work and low wages of farming have created an agricultural labor shortage, so Lin has pulled her two college-educated daughters in to help. “I wasn’t dead set on them taking over the family business, but I wanted them at least to give it a go,” she explains. “Then if they really didn’t like it, they could leave.” In a flash five years passed. Now her two daughters are working together: one handles scheduling and the other manages orders. They even are known to operate the tractor and excavator. Whenever Lin talks about her daughters, her maternal pride shines through.

And it’s not just her daughters. Lin treats all of her companions on the farm like family, applying feminine warmth and consideration to running the farm. She lets the single mothers she has hired bring their children with them, so the mothers can provide childcare as they work. From a mother’s perspective, she sympathizes with the difficulties these women face in raising their children by themselves.

There is also a special group of young workers on the farm that Lin calls “students”: Inmates from the Zihciang Minimum-Security Prison are rehabilitating themselves by learning skills on the farm.

The physical labor of farm work consumes a lot of energy, and if young workers are limited to buying only one boxed lunch, they may end up still hungry. Consequently, Lin cooks up big pots of rice or soup to make up the difference and demonstrate some motherly care for these “students.” Under Lin’s direction, these young people, who typically at first show a pretty lackadaisical attitude, end up working hard, and sometimes even come back to the farm after their release to tell Lin of their own plans to go home and farm.

Going organic has involved masses of hard work, but Lin says that she’s never regretted it: “Farming organically protects the land, protects the farmer, and protects the consumer. That’s what I believe.” She quotes Soka Gakkai International’s founder Daisaku Ikeda: “A person who works hard makes waves and creates history.” From the Wubaihu Farm to the Donghua Organic Farming Zone, Lin has made an impact with her organic farming. We can be confident that her example will bring only more people down that path. 

Lin and her husband have continually upgraded their farming equipment, raising efficiency in the process. (courtesy of Lin Peiru)

As an incubator of farming talent, Wubaihu Farm is often graced by the presence of kids, big and little. (courtesy of Lin Peiru)

Lin will continue to apply a special feminine warmth to the field of organic farming.