How Has a Taiwan Food and Farming Magazine With No Contributor Fees Lasted 22 Years?
A Note from Foodthink
I. Three Fortuitous Occasions
From 1993 to 2003, I moved from urban Taiwan to the countryside and lived there for ten years. During that decade, I worked with local villagers to form an association and undertake activities such as stream protection, landscape regeneration, Hakka cultural and historical surveys, community education, and weekend cultural markets.
This rural experience planted in me the idea of moving from “community” work to the broader field of agriculture, rural communities and farmers – after all, local industry and the economy are indispensable to rural development. It also laid the groundwork for founding Green Sprout.
Another important reason I was moved to found Green Sprout was my acquaintance with farmers working in agricultural supplies in Taichung. After the 921 Earthquake in 1999, I threw myself into disaster recovery in the Taichung area and met many local farming colleagues and agricultural supply-industry workers.
I found these fruit growers remarkably skilled, able to precisely control fruit sweetness and tree growth cycles. As early as 1975, some farmers had successfully grafted Japanese pear scion onto local rootstock, creating a new grafted-pear industry that generated annual revenues of up to NT$4 billion for the region (equivalent to approximately RMB 1 billion at the then-prevailing exchange rate).
But brilliant results came at a tremendous cost: long-term reliance on pesticides and chemical fertilisers led to soil degradation and environmental damage, posing a grave threat to farmers’ health – during pesticide spraying, toxic mist would fill the air, and many farmers succumbed to liver cancer around the age of fifty.
These experiences prompted some farmers to reflect on the harms of conventional agriculture. A handful of them joined forces to open an agricultural supplies shop called Three-in-One Agricultural Supplies. They barely sell any pesticides, and rather than pushing chemical fertilisers, they go directly to orchards and, like doctors, personally “diagnose” the health of fruit trees, offering farmers scientific growing advice. They also championed “year-on-year reduction” of pesticide use, gradually helping the environment recover.
Seeing them act with such excellence and such a sense of responsibility, I felt deeply that these many stories deserved to be recorded, that more people needed to hear their voices and share their experiences with one another.
As a reader and writer, the contribution I could make was to use the written word and publishing to give voice to farmers, and to seek out a new path for agricultural and rural development.
It was through the convergence of all these fortuitous occasions that Green Sprout was born.
II. Three Wishes
In both Taiwan and mainland China, farming as a vocation has long seemed to lack the respect it deserves – indeed, farmers themselves often undervalue their own work.
If someone asks, “What do you do?”, many farmers find it difficult to say that they are “fruit growers” or “vegetable growers”. This pains me deeply. Farmers’ labour and harvests are, quite plainly, the most fundamental pillar of society, yet they are overlooked and belittled.
The second wish behind founding Green Sprout was to present the true picture of rural life.
Before 2003, Taiwan’s general public paid very little attention to the countryside. Rural resources were constantly siphoned off by cities, and the population was draining away, leaving a sense of decline. Urban people’s impressions of rural life came mostly from romanticised promotional images – vast stretches of paddy fields, tranquil little villages – looking like a lovely pastoral painting.
I come from a sociology background, and I knew this kind of rural life was not real. I wanted to document everyday village life and the problems people faced, to show the countryside without any filter, so that we could all work together to make things better.
At the time, the term “organic agriculture” was barely used in Taiwan; all I could say was “green agriculture” to express my vision. Publishing Green Sprout was merely a means – what I truly cared about was fostering healthy development across agriculture, rural communities and farmers, and building a symbiotic relationship between town and country.
Through this publication, I hoped to offer a platform for those concerned with these issues, while also serving a role in public awareness and education. To realise these goals, Green Sprout established four main columns:
• “Sowing New Ideas” – sharing cutting-edge concepts and explorations in the world of food and farming
• “Sprouts Everywhere” – recording new agricultural endeavours springing up across the land
• “A Global Gaze” – introducing agricultural experiences and models from abroad
Over more than two decades, Green Sprout has published a great many articles across these five columns. I can say with pride that I was among the first writers in Taiwan to introduce new food and farming practices such as Slow Food, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers’ markets and ecotourism.
III. Contributions and Expenses
But I soon found that this goal was difficult to achieve. Many farmers had plenty of ideas and deep farming experience, but they were not accustomed to putting pen to paper – or rather, their affinity with the written word was slim. They felt that writing a hundred characters was harder than carrying two sacks of rice.
As a result, our main contributors became younger food and farming practitioners. Most had graduated from university or postgraduate programmes, had hands-on frontline experience, cared about these issues, and could tell the stories of themselves and others.
Organising Taiwan’s farmers to speak with one voice has always been extremely difficult, and most existing agricultural organisations were established or assisted by the government. There are also some civil-society groups focused on food and farming, such as the Taiwan Housewives’ Alliance Living Consumer Cooperative (hereafter, the Housewives’ Alliance), and Shangxiayou News & Market (hereafter, Shangxiayou).
Initially, the Housewives’ Alliance had around twenty to thirty thousand members. The outbreaks of food safety scandals in 2007–2008 – clenbuterol contamination, melamine-laced milk powder and others – caused membership to surge to between eighty and a hundred thousand overnight. Many new members were not necessarily concerned about agriculture per se; what they wanted was clean food. So the Housewives’ Alliance has been training new members ever since, raising their awareness of food and farming issues and of the cooperative spirit.
Shangxiayou is also doing excellent work. Its editors are all professional journalists, many of them graduates in sociology and anthropology. They not only provide news and in-depth investigations on public issues such as agriculture, food and the environment, but also serve as a supply platform for smallholder produce, providing consumers with healthy, locally sourced food.
Green Sprout’s contributors are primarily food and farming practitioners. For them, the act of writing is not merely sharing; it is also a process of organising and clarifying one’s own – or others’ – life practice. Some authors had never written a piece before; seeing their work published in Green Sprout, even without any fee, brought them great joy.
Someone once asked me, “A-Wei, how have you managed to keep going for twenty years?”
In truth, I do not feel I am “persisting” at all. If it had truly felt like drudgery, I would have given up long ago. We have unexpectedly made it this far thanks to the countless people who have supported and helped us along the way. This support has come from the authors who contribute to the magazine, and from readers who quietly sponsor our work – together, they provide the two most essential material resources for publishing a periodical: articles and funding.
When I invite contributions, most people agree, so I have become Taiwan’s biggest “creditor” – there are manuscript debts I am owed everywhere.
I am fairly relaxed about article requirements. I often tell our authors, “If you dare to write 50,000 words, I dare to publish 50,000 words.” Of course, it is not about word count – what I want is writing that is genuine and vivid, telling stories that are complete and full-bodied.
Even when unexpected situations arise – say, four or five out of ten commissioned pieces fall through at the last minute – I can quickly find a friend to fill the gap. So I am grateful to the contributing authors who have ensured that Green Sprout has never run short of articles.
On the other hand, there is the matter of funding.
I want Green Sprout to remain a pure, farmer-serving publication, not a commercial magazine. Each issue is printed in a run of 1,000 copies, of which seven to eight hundred are distributed free of charge.
Since the magazine itself is not sold, its operations have always relied on sponsorship. Our principle is this: if you like Green Sprout and have money to spare, please sponsor us generously; if you do not, it is yours for free. In addition, we generally do not accept donations from farmers, students, or those whose views do not align with ours. The magazine’s operating expenses consist mainly of printing costs, postage and a small amount of sundries.
I also set myself a psychological threshold of NT$100,000 (approximately RMB 22,000) – if losses in any given year exceeded that figure, I would stop publishing the following year. Over the past seven or eight years, despite the deteriorating overall economic situation, losses have never breached that limit, so we simply carried on.
We are now in the age of digital reading, and the magazine faces the question of whether to transition from print to an online publication.
Green Sprout has always stayed with print. On one hand, I prefer physical publications – they feel real and tangible. On the other, they are more convenient for farmers to read. We deliberately use large font sizes so that farmers can easily read the content without reaching for reading glasses.
In recent years, with the help of several new volunteer friends, we have also begun to publish our content on Vocus, an online platform.
Since January 2022, our volunteers hold an online discussion on the first Monday of each month to decide the topic, then gather all articles from the previous 100 issues that relate to it and post them on Vocus for readers to enjoy free of charge.
IV. “All Kinds of New Things Are Sprouting”
These reflections became action, giving rise to Tusheng Liangpin by the Ainong Association in Guangxi and “Tusheng Eatery” in Yunnan.
The Tusheng Liangpin restaurant in Liuzhou started with a focus on local agricultural produce and gradually grew into a rural initiative with real social impact. Its direct connection to Green Sprout may not seem obvious, but I feel that it owes some of its inspiration to this publication.
There are quite a few young people in Taiwan willing to head to the countryside and work in ecological agriculture. Some of them are second-generation farmers – their families already own farmland, so when they return home, they can tidy up the land and transition it to ecological agriculture. The others are young people who need to rent land in the countryside.
Renting land is never easy. If you spend a full three years improving the environment and getting the land into good order, only for it to be reclaimed when your lease expires, everything you have built is gone in an instant.
Against this backdrop, some people began exploring new models for agricultural development, bringing together young people eager to practise ecological agriculture and available land. One example is Lai Qingsong, who has been promoting environmentally friendly farming in Yilan and inspiring many young people to take up farming.
At first, Lai Qingsong adopted the Japanese “Grain Club” model to develop Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in Yilan – grain members pre-pay for their grain share and share the risk of natural disasters with producers.
In practice, however, running a Grain Club turned out to be extraordinarily demanding; one can only imagine the pressure of facing hundreds of grain members single-handedly. So Lai Qingsong decided to shift his focus, devoting more energy to attracting young people into agriculture.
Because of his long-standing relationships with local farmers, Lai Qingsong earned their trust, and they were willing to entrust their land to his management. That land, in turn, provided young farmers with opportunities to learn and gain hands-on experience. He also collaborated with “Two Hundred Jia”, founded by Yang Wenquan, who holds a PhD from National Taiwan University’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning. Yang Wenquan was responsible for teaching young people agricultural techniques and finding ways to help them overcome their land-access challenges.
Later, the entirely unpaid support model also exposed certain problems. So a few years ago they established Slow Island Living Ltd, which charges a modest fee for its services to ensure the system can operate sustainably.
Over the past twenty-odd years, Lai Qingsong has guided three to four hundred young people into agriculture in Yilan. In Shengou Village alone, more than a hundred have taken part. As older farmers gradually stepped back, young farmers took over their land and skills, and a community of new farmers slowly took shape, breathing fresh vitality into the entire village.
In the food and farming sectors across Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland, there are many more explorations like this.
No matter what the future holds, I have always believed that social progress is driven by many small forces like Green Sprout and by people who work with diligence and integrity. Though small, they are like wild grass – tenacious in spirit, growing alongside new things and quietly bringing about greater change.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images were taken by Foodthink
Compiled by: Xiaomao
Edited by: Ze’en