Yuanxiang Natural Eco Farm

Yuanxiang Natural Eco Farm sits on the subsiding, salt-affected wetlands of Kouhu, Yunlin. Kuo Ming-Yuan did not come from a farming family. Watching his hometown flood with every typhoon, and after years of community and environmental volunteer work, he came home to farm, working through young-farmer programmes and the Yunlin Farmers' Academy to a place in the first cohort of Taiwan's Top 100 Young Farmers.

The crops are sweet potatoes, rice, soybeans and mung beans, rotated between paddy and dry fields with added organic matter so the soil rebuilds its own fertility and biodiversity. Pheromone traps control the sweet potato weevil, every weed is pulled by hand, and the legumes fix nitrogen as green manure, reducing the need for outside fertiliser.

"Treat the land well, and it gives back the purest food." Zero pesticides and hand weeding from day one. Production, ecology and daily life have to stay in balance, so that clean land is passed on to the next generation.