Wearing a straw hat and dressed in farmer’s attire, Lin Yu-tsen (林宥岑) said she made the right decision when she left an accounting job to look after her family’s water bamboo.

“Not only do I make more money now, I’m also helping to bring life to this area, which has been quiet for a long time,” she said.

Five years ago, farming was the main source of income for the small town of Puli in central Taiwan’s Nantou County, as well as some 4,000 other villages around the country. At the time, families worked as a unit around the clock in the fields, took care of animals and, of course, each other.

Today, the younger generation is flooding into cities for higher-earning and less labor-intensive jobs, bringing about a drastic change in the population structure on farms. Agriculture has become a graying profession, with the average age of Taiwanese farmers standing at 61 and growing.

“It’s a bit sad when you think about it because the only visitors here used be to sons and daughters living in cities. They come back regularly to see their children whom they trust their parents with,” the 38-year-old Lin said.

Despite that, Lin, like many her age, had no intention of trading in her air-conditioned office for one under the sun until a crisis came along: her employer was on the brink of bankruptcy and started slashing jobs.

“The misfortune was actually a blessing in disguise,” she said. It prompted her to start up an agritourism business on her family’s hundred-year-old water bamboo plantation.

With creativity and enthusiasm, she renovated a sanhoyuan (三合院), a traditional three section housing compound, into lodging and organized a series of activities targeting urban families with small children.

For example, visitors, wearing waterproof jumpsuits, can roam through the water fields and harvest fresh bamboo. After that, they can either chop the high-fiber vegetable into dumpling fillings or preserved delicacies to take home.

“My intention is not to sell the produce,” she said, “I am promoting a new kind of tourism where experience is the core value.”

From time to time, foreign backpackers also call her up, wanting to have an authentic taste of Taiwan’s rural living before it dies out.

The business yields monthly revenue of about NT$200,000 and comes with the benefit of flexible working hours and fulfilling family obligations. She said that her siblings as well as local farmers are eager to follow her footsteps in the agritourism business.

Burgeoning industry

Since the late 1980s, farmers have been encouraged to transition away from traditional farming and focus on recreation-oriented enterprises as a way to lessen the impact of urbanization and counter the adverse effects of agricultural imports on the domestic economy.

A decade later, the development of agritourism was fueled by the urgent need to reconstruct areas devastated by the 921 earthquake that hit central Taiwan, a region originally founded on farming. The 7.3 magnitude earthquake left more than 2,400 dead, 11,000 injured and over 10,500 houses damaged.

Today, Nantou, Taichung and Changhua together are home to most leisure farms in Taiwan.

In a recent effort to promote agritourism, the Council of Agriculture launched a Web site in Chinese and English that offers users detailed itineraries ranging from fruit-picking trips to firefly watching tours.

Agritourism:
a growing industry

Traditional farms are transitioning into leisure-oriented enterprises as a way to lessen the impact of urbanization and counter the adverse effects of agricultural imports on the economy. It also gives farmers a chance to make some extra cash