Written by Pan Meiling ，Photographed by Liu Zizheng
"…Eat bamboo shoots, shelter with bamboo tiles, carry bamboo rafts, cook with bamboo firewood, wear bamboo skins, write on bamboo paper, and wear bamboo shoes. It can be said that one cannot live without this gentleman even for a day." - Su Dongpo Travel Notes on Lingnan
Bamboo gives people an image of being "out of touch with the mundane world" and is always described by literati as a fairy. In fact, bamboo is the most worldly material, taking care of the ancients' food, clothing, shelter, transportation, Education, entertainment and many other necessities of life. With today's cutting-edge scientific research and development, bamboo can be transformed from solid to liquid and gaseous, benefiting people's livelihood. Even if it turns into ashes, it still nourishes the land. The use of bamboo forests has long surpassed that of 800 years ago. The imagination of Su Dongpo, a great writer of the Song Dynasty…
Breaking the curse of low material and high freight costs
If we use bamboo joints to describe the bamboo industry, then the upstream, midstream and downstream are really connected.
A bamboo is 12 meters long, with the head, middle and tail sections. Each section has its best function. The three sections also connect different bamboo industries, such as the bamboo sword industry (head section), bamboo stick industry (middle section) and agricultural support materials (end section). If one industry in the middle goes bankrupt, it will also affect other industries. "Because the harvesting cost is not met, bamboo farmers will not want to produce."
Taiwan has abundant bamboo forest resources, but the cost of collecting bamboo branches remains high. Architect Gan Mingyuan, who often had a headache choosing the right raw bamboo, also mentioned his own experience: "A bamboo I saw on the mountain was estimated to be worth about NT$25. It would cost about NT$100 to ask workers to move it out of the forest, even if it was only to 2500 yuan. The cost of cutting bamboo on the roadside is 250 yuan in an instant, and 500 yuan after the withering process. By the time the drying is complete, the cost has reached 800 yuan. "It sounds a bit incredible, but it is an example of bamboo cutting in the central and northern parts of the country. Because Phyllostachys rapa and Phyllostachys morifolia mostly grow in medium to high altitudes and on steep mountains, the cost of felling and transportation accounts for 70% to 80% of the selling price.
An operator told me that a 10.5-ton truck can usually carry about 560 bamboos, but if they undergo primary splitting, they can carry 1,200 bamboos. "Sometimes I think about it, more than half of the load on the car is air (bamboo has a hollow stem) and water (bamboo has a water content of up to 50%)!"
Lin Yuren, a researcher at the Forestry Research Institute who has long been advising the bamboo industry, said that they are currently looking for a suitable location to set up a regional grading and preparation site: "Bamboo will be graded (maturity, fiber hardness testing) at the grading site, and the specifications will be determined on site. The bamboo is cut and purchased by the buyers, and the bamboo farmers can reduce the pressure of transportation, and their profits will increase instead of decrease. The grading system is also a practice of "full bamboo utilization".
Enter the beautiful world of bamboo
Beauty is an inexhaustible resource. It turns out that the beauty of bamboo can also be eaten.
On a warm spring day when cherry blossoms were in full bloom, the group came to the Da'an Bamboo Forest in Nantou, which is more than 1,000 meters above sea level. In the bamboo forest, Zhang Huimei sprayed bamboo fragrance while giving guests a bamboo massage SPA. The mud-walled old house is the family legacy of Zhang Huimei and her husband Chen Zhengren. Working in the beauty industry, she regards the bamboo forest on this mountain as a beauty therapy venue and also designs the Mengzong bamboo into a massage therapy tool.
Huang Ying-bin, a senior researcher at the Industrial Technology Research Institute who has been guiding Taiwan's bamboo industry since the 1992 Bamboo Revitalization Plan, said: "Today, if we want to revitalize the bamboo industry, we can no longer follow the old path. We should have new thinking and new practices. "
The tea industry in Nantou is booming, and many of the bamboo forests on the mountains have been cleared to develop into tea plantations. However, Chen Zhengren has another plan for this bamboo forest left by his ancestors: to use the bamboo forest as an economic means of physical and mental healing. In addition to harvesting bamboo leaves that are only available at medium and high altitudes, we also use the siphon principle to collect bamboo juice, from the earliest roasting to today's collection of bamboo juice as raw materials for biotech products. Among them, bamboo leaf tea won the bronze medal in the Youth Agriculture Innovation Award last year.
Taiwan's bamboo industry has been abandoned for nearly three decades. Many bamboo forests have become "bamboo pests" due to lack of management. In addition to causing the bamboo forests to deteriorate and collapse, they have even invaded natural broad-leaved forests. "With mosquitoes and insects swarming in the bamboo forest, even the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest can't stay there!" Knowing the importance of environmental protection, thinning the bamboo forest has become Chen Zhengren's most important task during his holidays.
When we were in the "well-maintained" bamboo forest, we could faintly smell the fragrance of the plants (bamboo leaf polyphenols). "If the bamboo forest is too dense, the sunlight cannot enter, and the ecology will definitely not be active. These bamboos If you don’t thin out trees that are over five years old, they will become thinner and thinner.” “Did you see a forest owl just now? Blue-bellied pheasants and tree frogs also come to visit from time to time.”
I recalled the bamboo forest I saw in Longqi, Tainan not long ago. If the osmanthus fragrans and Phyllostachys chinensis are graceful young ladies, then the osmanthus fragrans that can survive in bad places is a tough and hard-working village girl. The branches are thick, the bamboo flesh is thick, and the material recovery rate is high. It was once the main economic forest material in the south. However, because the bamboo forests have been abandoned for a long time, harvesting has become difficult. Luo Kaian, an associate professor of the Department of Forestry at Pingtung University of Science and Technology who helped develop the machine to cut bamboo, said that if the bamboo forests can be well thinned and managed, not only will the forests be beautiful, but also the bamboo can be of better quality and better quality. High yield bamboo.
Who said the appearance of a bamboo forest isn’t important?
Using bamboo to reduce carbon emissions helps cool down the planet
In the era of energy conservation and carbon reduction, consumption is often seen as a depletion of the earth's resources (especially petroleum products that do not degrade for thousands of years), but this is not the case with the use of bamboo.
This natural material with rich connotations and no rules is flexible and tough. After being carbonized by Vulcan, it emits far infrared rays and negative ions, and the carbon particles are drawn out to transform into various functional wearables. , reduce plastic, even if it reaches the last mile, it can be transformed into biomass energy as fertilizer and fuel, generating heat and electricity for humans; making full use of things to the extreme is a virtuous circular economy.
The more you consume, the more environmentally friendly you are!
~The source of the information is part of the excerpt from the article of "Classic Magazine", used with permission~
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