By Tiana ‘Jia-Cih’ Yang: Jinlan, Chiayi County, Taiwan
We’re on the front-line working in agriculture in Taiwan.
It’s a never-ending struggle when you cultivate food and fruit in a tropical region with a hot and humid climate. Diseases are a constant challenge. One of the worst is fusarium wilt—a global fungus that damages and destroys crops on every continent.
The mission of our farm is to defeat it by promoting and producing disease-resistant seedlings.
We started it in 2012, seeking to take advantage of Taiwan’s special strengths in agriculture. These may not be obvious to outsiders. Our land is famous for making semiconductors, not growing food.
Taiwan’s arable land is limited to only about 800,000 hectares. Farms tend to be smaller in size and they’re expensive, both in property values and labor costs. To be sustainable economically, farms in Taiwan must produce large amounts of food that sells at a good price and never lets up.
Diseases are a major threat. Successful farms must be more than lucky. They must have strategies of resistance and ways of battling back. Otherwise, fusarium wilt invade and conquer our farms.
Thankfully, Taiwan benefits from special strengths in agriculture. Our island may be small, but it contains multitudes of environments, from tropical jungles to soaring mountains. The farms that occupy these regions aren’t big, but they are enterprising and adaptable—and they are an ideal proving ground for experimenting with new varieties of plants and conducting disease-resistance trials.
Farmers like me are also physically close to a powerful industry of advanced technologies. This means we enjoy access to 21st-century tools such as sensors, automation, and artificial intelligence.
This is the goal of our farm: We seek to apply smart and sound science to the biggest challenges of agriculture.
Fusarium wilt is one of them. This soil-borne fungus attacks plants through the roots. As it spreads, it blocks the vessels that provide crops with water and nourishment.
First the plants turn yellow. Then they wilt. Finally, they die.
When fusarium wilt infects a plant, farmers can’t fix the problem. The infection is forever.
The losses can be massive. Farmers around the world surrender billions of dollars each year to fusarium wilt. Bananas may be the single most vulnerable crop. Both Chiquita and the Dole Food Company have called fusarium wilt “an existential threat” to the global production of this delicious and popular fruit.
The only cure for fusarium wilt is prevention. In other words, we must find ways to stop the disease from infecting crops in the first place.
That’s where our seedling farm steps in.
There are many traditional ways for farmers to fight fusarium wilt, such as rotating crops and selecting fertilizers that lower soil acidity. Today’s farmers are increasingly able to take advantage of new tissue-culture technologies.
On my farm, we work in labs and greenhouses that allow us to propagate banana, strawberry, and papaya seedlings in sterile conditions. We collaborate with university researchers to breed plants that carry a natural resistance to fusarium. We’re best known for a banana resistance line with a name that only a scientist could love: GCTCV-228.
This type of banana is not immune to fusarium wilt, but it confronts one of the deadliest strains of the fungus with vigor—and it gives banana growers a chance to overcome a massive threat to their livelihoods. We’ve also developed more than 30 varieties of strawberry and we’re boosting resistance in papayas and melons.
Crops are often uniquely suited to the places and climates where they are grown. Yet the seedlings from our farm have found homes not only in Taiwan but in Vietnam and Brunei in Asia and Eswatini in Africa.
I don’t know where they’ll go in the future, but I’m encouraged by the conclusion earlier this year of a trade agreement between Taiwan and the United States. While the deal is mostly about manufacturing, it also involves food imports and exports. And it will bind our countries more closely at a time when many trade ties are loosening.
As we exchange goods and services, we also exchange knowledge—and I’m hopeful that when farmers and scientists work together across borders, we can overcome diseases and improve agriculture everywhere.
Jia-Cih (Tiana) Yang produces seedlings for bananas, strawberries, papaya, loofah, grape and melon under greenhouse in Jinian, Taiwan.Tiana is a member of the Global Farmer Network www.globalfarmernetwork.org
