Chang Chih-yun (張誌紜) worked as a physical therapist at a hospital for 17 years and was satisfied with her career, but she resigned to keep a promise to her grandmother and cultivate Formosan quinoa, a grain she grew up hating.
Chang, a Paiwan, now grows Formosan quinoa — a traditional Aboriginal crop — on her family’s land in Pingtung County’s Sandimen Township (三地門).
The 37-year-old said she grew up watching her grandmother plant the crop, which she used to make wine for the local community.
Photo: courtesy of the Southern Branch of the Agriculture and Food Agency
Chang said that as a child she was not a fan of the grain and even came to intensely dislike it because she had to keep an eye on the family’s harvest as it dried in the sun.
However, her grandmother, who is now nearly 100, always said that quinoa was a useful traditional crop for Aborigines and that one day it would become popular across the nation.
Chang remembers her grandmother telling her that locally grown quinoa was the best type to trigger the chemical reactions necessary to make millet wine, a traditional Aboriginal drink.
Photo: courtesy of the Southern Branch of the Agriculture and Food Agency
“Grandma insisted that the plant had good qualities and was a crop that people would always have a use for,” Chang said, repeating the argument her grandmother made to try to persuade her to carry on the family tradition.
The argument failed to resonate with Chang, who refused to believe the grain could ever offer anything of value.
However, perhaps to humor her grandmother, Chang said she promised her that if people were willing to buy it, she would be willing to grow it, to the point of quitting her job.
Chang was 23 at the time and never imagined that scientific research would eventually reveal the many benefits of the grain and boost demand for it, she said.
In 2007, a research team headed by National Pingtung University of Science and Technology food science professor Tsai Pi-jen (蔡碧仁) studied Formosan quinoa, a variation endemic to Taiwan that is much smaller than other quinoa grains found around the world and comes in red, yellow and orange colors.
What the team found is that Formosan quinoa has an astonishing level of nutritional value compared with other commonly consumed grains, including rice and millet — a discovery that suddenly drew attention to the crop and kindled consumer interest.
Formosan quinoa is 14.4 percent protein, not too far from beef’s 19.6 percent, and it has 50 times as much calcium as rice, and 2.3 times the magnesium and 12 times the potassium found in oats, the research team said.
Formosan quinoa also has six times the dietary fiber found in sweet potatoes and three times that found in oats, the team said.
In addition, it contains all nine essential amino acids that humans cannot synthesize, including lysine, which helps keep calcium in the body, synthesizes collagen and produces antibodies, hormones and enzymes, the team said.
Taipei Medical University’s School of Nutrition and Health Sciences in February pushed the value of Formosan quinoa up even more by publishing a study showing that the grain can help suppress early pathological changes that indicate colon cancer.
The results of animal tests showed that such changes in sick mice were successfully stopped after they had been fed Formosan quinoa for 10 weeks, said Shih Chun-kuang (施純光), an associate professor who was part of the research team that conducted the trial.
“Before a tumor forms, there are pathological changes,” Shih said. “There are many active constituents in Formosan quinoa, such as dietary fiber and some phenolic compounds, which are likely what helped stop the changes.”
Eyeing the market potential of Formosan quinoa, Taitung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station associate researcher Chen Chen-yi (陳振義) about eight years ago began to encourage Taitung County’s Aboriginal farmers to grow the crop.
The grain at the time was nothing more than a sub-crop planted on the sides of millet fields to help brew millet wine and for use in Aboriginal rituals.
However, Chen did manage to convince some farmers.
“Eight years ago, there were less than 8 hectares in Taitung County devoted to quinoa farming, but now there are 150 hectares,” Chen said in an interview with local media last month.
Despite the increase, Chen said he hoped that more Aboriginal communities would start to cultivate the crop.
In Pingtung County, as of this month, about 70 hectares of farmland are used to grow Formosan quinoa, Southern Branch of the Agriculture and Food Agency Director Yao Chih-wang (姚志旺) said.
With prices for the grain surging, he pledged to expand the area to 100 hectares by the end of the year.
The price of Formosan quinoa with the hull has jumped to between NT$180 and NT$220 per kilogram this year from NT$40 per kilogram in 2008, Council of Agriculture (COA) data showed.
The price for the grain without the hull has climbed to NT$500 to NT$550 per kilogram at wholesale level, and more than NT$600 per kilogram at the retail level, the data showed.
The high prices in part reflect the highly labor intensive process needed to harvest Formosan quinoa, which requires five people to work for eight hours to harvest 0.1 hectare of the crop, the Taitung District Agricultural Research and Extension Station said.
The grain’s high nutritional value and growing market demand persuaded Chang it was time to keep the promise to her grandmother and return to farm her family’s land, at first part-time only and then full-time starting from this year.
She has also convinced more than two dozen family members and relatives to cultivate the grain, called djulis in the Paiwan language.
Her family and relatives now have more than 10 hectares of Formosan quinoa fields in Pingtung’s Sandimen, Majia (瑪家) and Changji (長治) townships, Chang said, adding that her relatives in Taitung County have also begun growing the grain.
She might have taken some convincing, but Chang has now gone all in on the increasingly lucrative crop.
“My family has been growing djulis for more than 70 years. Now I feel a sense of duty not to let our djulis fields disappear,” she said.
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