The Council of Agriculture (COA) launched a package of programs yesterday based on its successful 2006 “Stray Bird Project,” which is aimed at getting young people to return to farms in their hometowns.
Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Wu-hsiung (陳武雄) said the council has 3,260 openings for people to gain farming expertise or simply to experience farm life at council-contracted farms and agricultural improvement stations.
The agricultural sector has long suffered from a drain of young workers and an aging population. A council survey conducted in 2007 said that the average farmer was 62 years old.
The council initiated the Stray Bird Project in 2006 to keep young people in the countryside or bring them back from cities to eventually take over family farms.
At a press conference, Chen introduced several “stray birds” who had returned to their hometowns and produced high-quality bamboo shoots, green tea, organic vegetables and sugarcane liquor.
The council said nearly 5,000 people joined the program since 2006, with 476 of them becoming full-time farmers.
One was 37-year-old Liu You-lin (劉又菱), who was an insurance broker before she decided to grow vegetables with her husband after taking part in the council’s program. They now own a farm in Taoyuan County that sells a wide range of certified organic vegetables.
The council launched more programs this year, including a short-term vocational training camp; the Stray Bird experience camp; an agricultural camp for university students and summer camps at farming villages for children.
Registration for the new programs began yesterday. Information is available on the Chinese-language Web site at straybirds.coa.gov.tw.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching