Pineapples: Technology and Agriculture in Taiwan

The characters in this story include: Chen Ying-yen, the president of the Pineapple Hills farm and factory in Chiayi in southern Taiwan and the head of the Tann-niau Cooperative; Shaw Wu and York Lin, co-founders of AgriWeather, a company developing tools to use weather data for agriculture; and researcher Huang Shih-huang from the Council on Agriculture, a cabinet-level ministry.

Recently I invited everyone to meet and chat about applying new technologies to improve agriculture in Taiwan, specifically looking at the example of the pineapple industry. Chen had already heard of AgriWeather, while the AgriWeather team admitted that they only found out about President Chen of Pineapple Hills after my invitation, when they did some research into the pineapple industry and realized Chen is a towering figure within the industry. He leads the industry in many areas, having 230-plus hectares of pineapple farmland, the most varieties cultivated, as well as yield and quality.

Local problems require homegrown solutions

At the meeting, the AgriWeather team pointed out, Taiwan’s farmers still mostly rely on verbal descriptions and personal memory to conduct their work. On a macro scale, the variations between each farmer, as well as the results from imprecise decisions, all contribute to inefficiencies and waste. AgriWeather hopes to quantify basic farming practices into data sets to better understand and improve them.

Chen of Pineapple Hills said, given the same area of cultivation, the United States can produce 33% more soybeans compared to China. He credits this to more precise monitoring in the US, which allows farmers to have full control over the exact location and amount to irrigate and fertilize. Chen said he has been trying to incorporate this level of technological tools in his pineapple farms. However, Chen said that although he has tried a variety of sensors from foreign vendors to collect data on his farms, but the data collected is not enough to fully monitor the farm to the level he’d like. Furthermore, the sensors were rather unreliable and broke down easily.

Touring the Pineapple Hill farms (photo by Kuan-ting Chen)

AgriWeather pointed out that sensors by European or American companies are often designed to be more suited to temperate climate zones, which does not work in a sub-tropical cliamte like Taiwan. The hardware, AgriWeather said, isn’t built to withstand Taiwan’s humidity and pests, and often end up becoming luxurious mansions for ants and other insects.

AgriWeather designs and builds their own field sensors, which collects data on the weather conditions in the field. The data allows the farmer to immediately respond to changing weather conditions, but also accumulates into a data set that can then be used to predict weather patterns and make suggestions to the farmer for long term management. AgriWeather has already collaborated with another pineapple farm in Kaohsiung, Green1, to improve their crop yield and quality.   

Taiwan has been called a fruit export empire, because of the quality and variety of its products. It is also well known for fruit products, the best example being pineapple cakes. But Taiwan is also prone to natural disasters, and its annual season of typhoons often bring destruction to Taiwan’s agricultural sector, resulting in wild price fluctuations. Managing farms using more precise data and tools that analyze that data will allow our agriculture practives and policies to be more nuanced and more efficient. There is much room for improvement.