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COA’s promotes regional integrated agricultural development program brings new opportunities to traditional agriculture
Therefore, to provide farmers with spontaneous assistance in agricultural transformation has been the focus of COA in recent years. For example, the efforts and endeavors of the Dounan Farmer’s Association has successfully helped farmers in Dounan, Huwei, Tuku and Dabei townships in Yuenlin County, and even farmer’s associations and agricultural production and marketing groups in Chiayi, Changhua and Tainan counties to form scaled farming areas, either in blocks or in bar shapes, growing carrots, potatoes, and burdocks. In fact, the idea has modeled from farmers growing kiwifruit in New Zealand. To combine collaborative farming, centralization of intensive farming and custom farming to establishing of the large agricultural product distribution center will be the practice and achievement of COA in the Establishing Modernized Agricultural Product Distribution Systems under the government’s Challenge 2008 economic reform.
According to COA, in addition to integrating regional production areas, COA has helped Dunan Farmer’s Association to establish the custom farming system and form the customer farming team as a solution for the aging agricultural labor force and rising labor cost problems in Taiwan. COA also introduced medium and small farming machine from domestic and abroad and enforced standard farming procedures to effectively increase the yield and production efficiency and reduced production costs. These have been proven effective to improve market competitiveness and promote the benefits of farmers. Practical statistics indicated that such kind of practice has successfully reduced the farming cost by $40,000/hectare and thus increased the incomes of contract farmers by $60,000/hectare.
COA added, both the mass production and divers production policies must be supported by aggressive and integrated regional development plans, close cooperation between the government and farmers, and government policies in order to make agricultural products from Taiwan competitive in the global market.
