Taiwan Today

Xu Zhi-xiong has turned seemingly useless aquatic plants into a promising sector of the aquaculture industry.

Xu Zhi-xiong's grand-father grew rice and his father cultivated eels in . Having sweated the better parts of their lives in the fields and ponds, they did not have the slightest idea what the younger Xu was doing when they first saw the young man growing waterweeds. "As they saw it, weeds were weeds--undesirable, unattractive and troublesome plants whether in the field, garden or ponds," Xu says. "They kept telling me that I should grow something I could sell instead of wasting my life on such useless stuff."

The young man did not listen to them and continued to work on the "useless stuff." After 18 years, his Sheng Yang Farm is 's largest aquatic plant farm, producing 100,000 plants a year. In addition to supplying the domestic market, Sheng Yang also exports to a dozen countries including , and . Earlier this year, 39-year-old Xu Zhi-xiong was honored with 's highest agricultural award, the Shen Nong Award, for his achievements in waterweed cultivation. The award is named after the legendary emperor Shen Nong, who is traditionally credited with founding Chinese agriculture. No other aquatic plant farmer has won the award since it was first bestowed in 1983.

Xu's entering the trade, however, was totally unplanned. He explains that the family's fields were not very productive due to poor soil quality, so his father built ponds on some of the land for eel cultivation in the mid-1960s. The export market for eels was very good throughout the 1970s and Xu's father made a fortune out of it. "Merchants literally came with bags of cash for the eels," Xu recalls. "Oftentimes, my brother and I had to help count the money." Yilan's eel industry, however, declined quickly after the mid-1980s. One reason was the competition from Southeast Asian countries and mainland . The other reason was that compared with central and southern , Yilan's cooler climate was not as good for eel farming.

Courting Disaster

While his father was struggling with eel ponds, Xu entered a vocational high school in Hualien, majoring in electronic engineering. After graduation, he worked for a factory in for a while, before completing his compulsory military service and then returning to Yilan to help his father. "Eel was done, but we were still trying frogs, crabs, sweetfish and whatever else you can think of," Xu says. "Each of them turned out to be a disaster because culturing specific species requires specific knowledge that we didn't have." The family was in serious debt since they had to borrow money to pay for fish fry and operate the ponds. So in addition to helping his father, Xu had to take on other jobs including working as an ironsmith and kindergarten bus driver.

The family ponds saw no improvement as time went by, but Xu became acquainted with waterweeds through chatting with students from National Suao Marine and in Yilan who were interning at the fish farm. The students told Xu that waterweeds were cultured in places like the and and seemed to be profitable. "I thought waterweeds just grew by themselves and you could pick them everywhere," Xu says. "Anyway, I decided to give it a try since there was nothing to lose as our ponds weren't producing anything."

Zhang Ji-hong, who hosts a culture and history workshop in Xu's community, witnessed the whole process as Xu developed his waterweed business. Zhang thinks that an important reason for Xu's being able to start the business was that there was hardly any extra investment involved. "The ponds were already there and so were the waterweeds," Zhang says. "There weren't even worries about expenses for feed or electricity bills for water pumps as the area's groundwater rises naturally in springs."

The problem was that even though waterweeds were everywhere, Xu had to learn what specific kinds to grow. Reference materials in Mandarin Chinese were hard to find and Xu's foreign language ability was very limited, but he managed to learn some of the basics about waterweeds from pictures in foreign publications, which he also used to identify a few species in the neighborhood and then plant in the ponds.

The breeding was not much of a problem and the plants grew fast. Xu soon had enough products to sell and began to market them. Every day, after his morning shift as a kindergarten bus driver, Xu loaded his car with samples of waterweeds and visited aquariums in northern . He soon realized his efforts were in vain, however, as he returned to Yilan for the afternoon bus-driving shift every day with the same load of waterweeds. Xu explains that although the hobby of keeping a home aquarium was becoming popular in , they were mostly for ornamental fish, with aquatic plants playing a supporting role that any aquarium could do without. "Few aquariums were selling them and few were interested in stocking them," he says. "Simply put, there wasn't a market."

Having little luck with retail aquariums, Xu had to find other avenues. He and a few friends pulled together some capital and opened their own aquarium shop in Yilan. In addition to selling the usual products--fish, feed and such, the shop served as a venue for Xu to introduce aquatic plants to customers as well as suppliers he was doing business with. He spent a lot of time learning "waterweed arrangement" from magazines and taught it to others. His enthusiasm proved to be infectious as he was able to persuade several businesspeople to promote waterweeds in other aquarium shops. "The quality was good and the price was competitive compared to imported waterweeds," says Zeng Yong-tian, who owns a trading company specializing in aquarium products. "What really impressed me was that he'd always go that extra mile to solve whatever tiny problems and provide consultations and services to customers or distributors."

Getting Hooked

Xu, for example, often drove half a day to help some of his distributors to arrange aquariums for customers. With his own efforts and the help of people like Zeng, Xu managed to build business connections with many individual retailers and even some aquarium chain stores. There was also a growing number of people who appreciated the idea of allowing waterweeds to take the leading role in their home aquariums and gave it a try. "Keeping ornamental waterweeds is just like keeping ornamental plants, fish or anything," Xu says. "Once you start, there is a good chance you'll become hooked."

Business grew fast. At its peak, Xu supplied two thirds of the domestic market. Although Sheng Yang has seen a bit of a decline in the past decade or so as there are more competitors, it still controls a third of the domestic market which, according to Xu, has grown from nearly nothing when he first started to between NT$100 million and $200 million (US$3 million and $6 million) a year. There are now about 40 aquatic plant farms in and a fifth of them are based in Yilan.

When the goal of establishing marketing channels was achieved, Xu closed the aquarium shop to concentrate on production and more importantly, to increase the variety of his supply. "We're just like the fashion industry," he says. "Customers grow tired of fashion designs and they do the same of waterweeds." However, while new fashions can arise from a designer's imagination, waterweeds require more work. The solution, therefore, is to find as many species as possible to grow. Currently, Sheng Yang has a "gene pool" of more than 400 aquatic plant species and supplies the market with at least 100.

Some of them are foreign species. By localizing them, Xu has considerably lowered the retail price of these plants. An imported giant ambulia, a species with fine leaves and a bushy, pine-like appearance, for example, cost NT$800 (US$24) when there were only imports, while Xu's retail for NT$20 (US$0.60) each.

Xu has also been searching for domestic species and has collected some 120 rare specimens so far. In his travels around the island, however, he found that nearly a third of 's 350 aquatic plant species are endangered--some due to natural disasters, but mostly because of habitat loss resulting from overdevelopment. So in addition to providing his customers with more choices, Xu takes collecting local species as a responsibility to preserve them.

Steady business also allowed Xu more time to research other "values" of waterweeds. In the summer of 1991, a French chef living in was stuck in his apartment during a typhoon. Starving, the chef grabbed some of the plants from his aquarium to eat as food and found them quite tasty. Later, he contacted Xu and paid his farm a visit. The chef and the aquafarmer overcame the language barriers and came up with a few dishes and even desserts that were extremely popular among the farm workers, Xu's friends and relatives on their taste trials. The experience gave Xu the idea of developing waterweeds for use as food ingredients and seasonings.

Xu soon found precedents for the idea. For instance, he learned from new immigrants from that the ornamental waterweed velvetleaf, also known as yellow bur-head, is called cu neo or keo neo in and is a common "vegetable" there. The ancient book Compendium of Materia Medica compiled in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) by Li Shi-zhen was also a valuable source on edible waterweeds.

With enough dishes and more on the way, Xu was considering the idea of a waterweed restaurant, when opportunity knocked in 1992. At the time, the government was promoting agri-tourism as well as community empowerment that aimed to combine government and neighborhood resources to boost tourism and community development. With help from the Council of Agriculture, Council for Cultural Affairs and Yilan County Government, Xu turned part of his waterweed farm into a tourist farm, which included a restaurant serving dishes made from the plants.

Xu does not keep a record of visitor numbers, but says that it is common for the farm to receive a dozen or so tour buses of visitors a day including groups of students, company trips and individuals who learned about the place from media reports. In addition to the restaurant, tourists are guided through a waterweed museum and an outdoor ecological park where, if they desire, visitors can also fish in the ponds where Xu's father cultures tilapia for the restaurant, or try the tomatoes grown in the vegetable patch cultivated by Xu's uncle.

Meanwhile, tourists rarely miss the farm's DIY activities. A popular project is the "green moss ball"--a moss-wrapped mud ball. Drilling a hole turns it into a flowerpot, while putting a few together makes a moss-ball "doll." But most visitors are even more interested in making the "ecosystem bottle." Under the guidance of farm staff, tourists put some water, sand, aquatic plants and a tiny shrimp into a glass bottle and seal it to form a closed biosphere. The system--originally developed by NASA scientists for research--has its own water cycle, carbon and nitrogen cycles, food chain and other elements of a balanced and complete ecosystem. With proper sunlight, the biosphere can theoretically exist by itself for years until one of the "elements" suffers a natural death.

The Perfect Pet

Xu jokes that one of the reasons for the popularity of the kits is that they make a perfect pet for children, and more importantly, for their parents. "Kids are always asking to keep some sort of pet, but it soon becomes the parents' responsibility to take care of them," he says. "These little pets save the parents a lot of trouble since they don't need anything except sunlight." Some of the parents, to the best of Xu's knowledge, have been "caring" for their children's pets for four years. "And as far as keeping a pet is concerned, the best thing about these bottles is that it's hard to get emotionally attached to such a tiny shrimp when it eventually dies," he adds.

Aside from their economic value, Xu has also found some waterweeds to be environmental protectors. He is now working with the county's environmental protection bureau to promote "eco-ponds" for farm or factory wastewater management. Xu explains that an eco-pond is formed by a series of ponds. Different waterweeds in different ponds have specific functions like filtering heavy metals, eliminating odors or neutralizing acidity to clean wastewater.

And there are other ideas being realized. Xu, for example, is working on a DIY project that allows visitors to make paper out of paper reeds--an ornamental aquatic plant that ancient Egyptians used to make papyrus. In Xu Zhi-xiong's mind, there are unlimited possibilities waiting to be discovered in seemingly useless waterweeds.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw