Environmentally Friendly Trapa-farmers' Reflexive Practice in Guantian: the Symbiosis of Trapa Farming and its Inhabited Pheasant-tailed Jacana

• Main Authors: Huang, Jui-Ching, 黃瑞靜
• Other Authors: Su, Heng-An
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/h4797k

碩士 === 國立高雄餐旅大學 === 飲食文化暨餐飲創新研究所 === 107 === For 30 years, Tainan Guantian has maintained a unique cultivation, which is "crop rotation of rice and trapa". Trapa is an important crop. Pheasant-tailed Jacana loves nesting on the leaves. Trapa-farmer, trapa and Pheasant-tailed Jacana become inseparable triangular relationship. Due to a farmer’s live broadcast of rice cultivation, an incident of Pheasant-tailed Jacana eating rice grains contaminated with pesticides has caused widespread concern since 2009. In 2010, Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation cooperated with Forestry Bureau to help guide the farmers in the Guantian area to turn to friendly farming, and together they take actions to protect Pheasant-tailed Jacana in farmland wetlands, thus causing the farmer to think about how to live in harmony with ecology while maintaining their crop interests. How should farmers choose in the moral dilemma between economic income and ecological conservation? Faced with this conundrum, this paper intends to explore whether the establishment and practice of ecological awareness in agriculture can provide an alternative for Taiwan's agricultural development. Farmland in Taiwan is easy to be contaminated, making it difficult for agricultural products to pass organic certification. In Guantian, a group of farmers have insisted on environmentally-friendly farming for eight years. They and Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation cooperated with Forestry Bureau to promote the "green conservation " project while refusing to be involved in the usual organic certification process. What motivates them to do so? In order to answer the question, the study first reviewed the history of organic agriculture in Taiwan, explored the challenges it faces, and used the Guantian area both as a field survey and the observation target; local young farmers in Guantian were recruited to conduct in-depth interviews, which were sorted out to indicate the compromising choices that these farmers were forced to make when they were stuck in the dilemma of economic income and morality. In the field of Guantian, different landscape changes have been observed. From the interview process, the study indicated that after the Pheasant-tailed Jacana event, the farmers started to switch to environmentally-friendly farming; furthermore, in order to suit the breeding period of Phesant-tailed Jacana, these famers have adopted Trapa cropping first followed by rice cropping rather than the former model, which is rice cropping followed by the cropping of trapa. Another benefit of the new cropping model is that it allows the farmers to reduce the cost of fertilizers, because the outer hard shell of trapa can be reused and repurposed as fertilizers. This is not only a prime example of organic farmers' reflexivity practice in the risk society but also a miniature showcase of Taiwan's agriculture development.