Huang I-feng (黃一峰), 33, is the manager of the flower department at Tai Yi Plant Nurseries in Puli, central Taiwan.
My father and grandfather were both farmers. Ever since I can remember, they worked hard in the fields, growing rice, mangoes, oranges, and all the other crops found in southern Taiwan. The funny thing was that all that hard work brought them no reward. I never saw anything they grew make any money. Being the eldest son in a Tainan farming family, I was expected to go home and take care of the seven-hectare family farm after I finished military service, but I just couldn't make myself work in a business that made no money, so I found a job in a trading company instead.
Later, part of the family land became a strawberry PYO [pick your own] farm and that did make some money. The family wanted to expand it, and asked me to go home to help. I agreed, but being a marketing major, my agricultural knowledge was zero. I went to see Mr. Chang [president of Tai Yi], who was supplying strawberry seedlings to my family. My plan was to stay for several months, gain some basic knowledge, and apply it to the family farm. During that period, I was also able to get a bird's eye view of the industry from a marketing point of view, and I found that there was plenty of room for development. That interested me, so I decided to stay and find out more about it. My brother now looks after the family farm, although I help a bit too.
Tai Yi started up seven years ago. For the first five years, it was a vegetable nursery. Winters are the slow season for vegetable nurseries, but they still need income, so in winter it had a small-scale flower-selling operation. In any country, when people's income reaches a certain level, they begin to think about improving their environment. Taiwan has reached this point, and it's obvious from the way people's attitude to flowers has changed. When I was a child, potted plants meant something grown by grandma in a broken wash basin.
Taiwan went through a time when flowers, especially very expensive ones like orchids, were a means of showing off wealth. A couple of years ago, we had a lot of customers come in asking how long a NT$15 [50 cents] potted plant could live. We used to tell them it was a worthwhile buy even if the plant only lived for three months, considering that NT$15 probably wasn't enough to buy one can of soft drink. Nowadays, more and more people are coming to regard flowers as consumer goods. I've calculated that it costs NT$5,000 [US$180] a year at most to make your balcony flower all year around. It doesn't take up much time, either: perhaps fifteen minutes a day.
There's more to agriculture than working hard in the fields. We have to keep up with trends. In 1995, we started to expand our flower department, focusing on potted and bedding plants. The market has been growing as we anticipated. When we started, the island bought 25 million bedding plants a year. Now that figure's grown to 35 million, and I can supply 10 million of them. Our customers include whole communities, typical families, and public construction projects.
We supply 250 species of flowers a year, and regularly introduce new ones from abroad. We have to do that because the minute a product becomes popular you find similar ones springing up all over the market. This is a free economy and you can't ask others not to grow popular species, so we have to cultivate new ones.
We also export some bedding plants to Singapore and the Ryukyus. Only a very small number of Taiwan's flowers are exported, though, because many of our growers still have a "good enough" attitude toward quality control, whereas foreign markets expect perfection.
One major change I've noticed over the last two years is the automation of office and garden management. We've changed from being a labor-intensive farm to an automated operation. Office automation, using computers, was especially difficult. For many of the older staff, using a hoe was much easier than holding a pen. They'd never touched a keyboard, and we had to ask them to make big adjustments.
Production automation was easier. We've invested a large part of our income in things like automated irrigation, pesticide spraying, and tracking systems. Technically, it needs only one person to take care of the whole flower production line. Most of these automation facilities were originally developed by government agricultural agencies, and they also funded part of the cost. The key to success is finding a market large enough to make automation worthwhile. There's no point in having an automatic seeding machine that sows 300,000 seeds a day if I can't sell the resulting product.
Despite steadily increasing demand locally, flowers are still an underdeveloped market in Taiwan. Whenever I'm surrounded by concrete high-rises in the city I feel happy, because I see an untapped market.
In fact, flower production isn't particularly difficult. The main problem is balancing supply and demand. The govern ment is now suggesting that we control supply by organizing ten to twenty small-scale farms into cooperatives. This sounds all right, because larger-scale production units reduce costs, but there are still problems. Say I'm the head of this flower cooperative and five of my members grow roses. Which member should I go to when a customer gives me an order for 500 rose bushes? We could take turns, of course, but what about quality? Your roses may be better than his, but if you both belong to the same cooperative, the chief has to sell everyone's products equally. But if he does that, he's risking the group's reputation.
Also, in a cooperative, the chief has no control over the production capacity of individual members. He might consider last year's market demand and ask each of his members to grow, say, 10,000 pots of roses this year. But when the members think of the good market last year, they grow another 10,000 pots for themselves, and we end up with a supply that's twice the real demand. Growers will then have to retail their surplus at very low prices, and that will be bound to reflect on the market price.
Flowers are not as profitable as people imagine. Actually, the profit margin is very thin, because of the competition. The wholesale price for a bedding plant, for example, is NT$8 [28 cents], but if we compare average income and consumer prices in Taiwan with those in other countries, a more realistic price would be NT$10 [35 cents]. Given an unstable market price, as I've just described, large-scale producers like Tai Yi would risk very large losses. I believe the situation is much the same in the vegetable market.
Agriculture has long been classified as a secondary industry. One of the main reasons is that the sector concentrated too much on production and too little on marketing. Farmers believed that agriculture should be "down-to-earth," and that small -scale agriculture shouldn't squander its resources on marketing. Government agricultural agencies do make marketing suggestions, but it's hardly proper for them to engage in the actual marketing process.
In other countries, Japan for example, the media play an important role in the cultivation of the flower market, because flowers are seen as helping beautify the environment. Here, things are different. We've set up a promotional department to cultivate the market for ourselves. And a few months ago, we also set up an agricultural classroom, where we teach children how to plant seeds. They take the seeds home in a pot, and they can watch the flowers or vegetables grow and learn to appreciate the beauties of nature. The classroom and nursery attract 3,000 to 4,000 visitors a day on weekends and holidays--sometimes even more than 5,000. We don't expect them to bring in any major business, at least not directly, but we've already learned from our repeat visitors that these outings do have some non-marketing contribution to make to society, such as strengthening family ties when children discuss their plants with their parents, for example.
It may surprise you to know that most of our staff don't have any formal agricultural training. The manager of our vegetable department, for example, is an accounting major. Except for Mr. Chang, everything we know about flowers and vegetables we learned after we'd joined the company. You can say we recruit businesspeople to sell agricultural products--not because we want to, but because we have to. A university agricultural department is usually a student's second choice, med school being the first. These reluctant students have two options: transfer to other departments and hence another line of work, or study hard and become professors of agriculture. Either way, they've certainly got no intention of working in a nursery.
Another potential source of agricultural manpower is agricultural vocational schools, but a lot of those graduates don't want to become farmers either. I can hardly blame them; after all, I refused to take over my own family's business. They can't see a future in agriculture: no proper promotion system, no opportunities to learn, and so on.
If we couldn't show young people a future, we could hardly ask them to come and work for us. Nowadays, however, more agricultural vocational school graduates are willing to join us because we can show them a future. But many of them think they can become the boss after working here for a couple of years--I think that's a trend in society generally--and I have to warn them that it's not as easy as they think. I've worked it out, and if I wanted to start my own business and make as much as I'm earning here, I'd need at least NT$20 million [US$714,300] in capital and it would be a really high-risk venture.
When I first joined this company, agriculture held little appeal for me. Now, after three and a half years, I have every reason to stay: a healthy environment, pleasant atmosphere, a good boss, and even a wife--I'm getting married next month. She works here too. I guess you could say I'm a little obsessive about agriculture now.
--interview by Jim Hwang