Applying microbial technology to the new Intelligent Agriculture in Tainan City

Earnings of farmers mostly come from the product benefits that were largely affected by the weather conditions. Given background of global warming, agricultural sectors are facing various challenges from farming, harvesting to marketing. Establishing a six-grade agriculture industry determines its sustainability.

In 2018, a storm struck southern Taiwan in August with serious floods in Houbi district for 5 days. The harvest of rice reduced half. From late 2020 to early 2021, low precipitations led to serious droughts in southern Taiwan. Meanwhile, all the rice farming was forced to stop, leading to no harvest for the first season. Cutting edge technique can be applied to reduce the harvest loss. In contrast, lowering farm product benefit due to the overproduction has been seriously trapping the primary agricultural industry.

In 2019, a newly released legislation allowed farmers to invest agricultural product processing, which is able to extend the shelf life and increase benefits. Even so, relevant technology and marketing skills are required. In addition to selling raw materials and processed products, farming tourism as grade 3 industry of agriculture has become popular. Farming tourism not only sells agricultural products such as vegetables, tea, coffee and so on, but also provides extra services that largely strengthen the value of goods. However, it usually takes a long time to be profitable, and the scale of the field must be sufficient and provide diversified channels for marketing. Besides, due to opening to visitors that may likely carry with pathogens, farm management inevitably would become difficult. So far, there are only very few successful cases.

Given most local farms mostly equipping with primary and secondary industries, our USR project aims to promote the six-grade agriculture industry. First step was to connect business and farmer together for the best benefits. A farmer- business league also started at that time. The second step was to create one package service for the six-grade agriculture industry. Our team combined primary, secondary industry and tertiary sectors together into a synthetic six-grade agriculture industry. Accordingly, all farmers used a nontoxic approach of the microorganism farming at their lands, all crops produced herein passed double blind examination for pesticides and herbicides, which output scientific parameters, including heavy metal amount, taste value for a report for customers. Biotechnology has also been applied to the product processing that largely elevate the value of agricultural products. An e-Commerce platform was constructed for promoting the marketing. Efforts are still enforced to realize the six-grade industry system.