“Making the best of Yilan County’s geographical edge is the recipe for breeding the most flavorful cherry ducks,” said 51-year-old Huang Ming-chieh (黃明杰), a well-known duck farmer in the county’s Sansing Township (三星), whose poultry has become the source of top-notch gourmet delicacies.
The beautifully roasted ducks served by the Yilan-based Silks Place, the sole international five-star hotel in the county, was voted in September by gastronomes and netizens in an online poll “the most mouth-watering crispy ducks ever served in the country.”
The hotel’s accolade owed much to Huang and the cherry ducks he breeds — also known as Cherry Valley ducks — which can weigh up to 4.8kg in winter and produce the highest-quality meat.
Photo: Chiang Chih-hsiung, Taipei Times
After graduating from the department of animal husbandry and veterinary medicine at the Yilan School of Agriculture and Forestry — the predecessor of National Yilan University — Huang worked as a veterinarian for swine breeders before venturing into the duck farming industry by starting up the Ho Hsing Livestock Farm in his hometown about 16 years ago.
The sharp differences in temperature between day and night in Sansing Township, coupled with the wind frequently blowing from the mountains, are ideal appetite stimulants for Huang’s ducks, which require about 75 days to mature, leading to their thick chests and large bodies.
Huang’s ducklings that mature in winter can weigh 4.8kg, compared with ducks raised by other farmers, whose average weight stands at only 4.2kg.
Although Sansing Township’s advantageous environment and pollution-free water resources have played a crucial role in Huang’s success, the provision of around-the-clock care and a supply of high-quality animal feed and enzymes to improve digestion are equally important.
“Breeding ducks should be done as attentively as raising one’s own children,” Huang said, adding that he has to stay at his duck farm almost every night to guard and pay close attention to every move of his beloved poultry.
“You can never let your guard down even for one second,” Huang added.
In an effort to give his ducks more space, Huang breeds only about 35,000 ducks on his eight hectares of pasture, which could otherwise accommodate a maximum of 80,000 poultry.
He also went to the trouble of converting the farm into a “duck playground,” where the floor is paved with stone to avoid dust swirling in the air and a pond contains only shallow spring water to prevent duck excrement from accumulating and tainting the water.
Huang emerged as a successful duck farmer despite a sluggish domestic economy that has forced many duck farmers based in the county’s Lanyang Plain to go out of business.
Attributing his unexpected rise to his expertise in veterinary medicine and his diligence in studying the habits of cherry ducks, Huang said: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. To have an invincible foundation, one must work to build distinctive features for one’s products first.”
Born into a farming family, Huang said he took a leap of faith with his career and returned to the township after having worked away from his hometown for years.
“The moon just seems bigger here [in Sansing Township,]” he added.
Huang said in the initial stage of his business start-up, he bred only a handful of ducks to lower his financial risk and waited until his farming career got off the ground to expand its scale.
An environmentally conscious man, Huang has attached great importance to keeping his duck farm odor-free and sustainable.
“My ultimate goal is to see Sansing Township become the first word that crosses people’s minds whenever they talk about cherry ducks,” Huang said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods