Adventures in Farming – Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Finally, thanks to my gracious host in Penang, I was able to visit some farms in an area of Malaysia called the Cameron Highlands.  The Cameron Highlands are a unique area in peninsular Malaysia because temperatures there are 10 degrees Celsius cooler than everywhere else, with an average high temperature of 20 degrees and an average low of 13 degrees.  The Cameron Highlands’ temperate climate is mostly due to its high elevation, about 1,500 meters above sea level.

I knew beforehand that Malaysia would be hot, but I didn’t anticipate how deeply climate can affect language and culture.  In conversations with locals, I found that I would receive silence and/or puzzled looks when I mentioned summer vacation, or anything else related to the four seasons.  It turns out that most people here do not know which months we mean when we say summer, fall, winter, or spring.  There are no traditional seasons here, only wet and dry.  Students and teachers do not have summer vacation, and the school year does not start in late summer like it does everywhere else that I’ve lived or visited.  Instead, the academic calendar follows the regular calendar, and students get a month of vacation in June and another in December.

I found the lack of the concept of traditional seasons among ethnic Chinese Malaysians particularly interesting because the importance of seasons in Chinese culture, which grew out of an agrarian lifestyle,  is strongly reflected in Chinese language and traditions.  Indeed, the lunar calendar that Chinese people use to this day is called the “farmer’s calendar” in Chinese, and the most important Chinese festivals, such as the mid-Autumn festival when Chinese people celebrate the harvest and eat mooncakes, mark important events in relation to the traditional seasons.  Yet, in Malaysia there exists a Chinese society that speaks, reads, and writes Chinese, and even celebrates the same traditional festivals as people in China, but doesn’t know which months comprise summer!

Sorry to get off-topic, I just thought that was interesting.  Trite and boring for all of you who have travelled in the tropics before, I’m sure.  Back to farming…

The first day we were there, an odd local farmer took us on an ass-splitting ride in the bed of a battered old Land Rover through hills thickly planted with all sorts of crops.  The great majority of farms here use chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Even our crazy farmer guide, who makes a living from using these chemicals, lamented that all of the creeks and streams are seriously polluted by agricultural run-off.

Take a look at those tomatoes in the picture above.  Pretty, aren’t they?  They’re not as appetizing after you see what they are fed:

The fertilizers aren’t the worst, though.  Here are close-ups of some other vegetables:

Nice-looking veggies, good for your health, right? WRONG.  See the liquid droplets on the tong-hao (茼蒿) leaves on the left?  Freshly sprayed insect-killing poison.  Take a close look at the bell pepper and nearby leaves.  That white residue is much more insidious than soap scum.  It is dried pesticide.

The weirdo farmer told us that the pesticides used on the tong hao are so noxious that after the tong hao is harvested, the soil must be left unplanted for 3 months, and then planted with something other than tong hao before tong hao can be planted there again.  If these guidelines are not followed, the soil becomes so toxic that it can never be used again.  And we are putting these poisons in our bodies every day.  No wonder our sperm counts are decreasing.  Soon, our problem won’t be overpopulation, it will be sky-rocketing infertility and birth defects.  Perhaps overexposure to farming chemicals also caused our farmer friend’s freakiness.  After he brought us back down to where our car was parked, he sat down with us for some tea, then left without a word.  We never saw him again.

But there is hope.  The next day, we had lunch at an excellent hot pot restaurant which serves as a storefront for one of the few organic farms operating in the Cameron Highlands, Cameron Organic Produce.  We opted for the veggie hot pot, which came with a huge assortment of crisp, delicious vegetables, as well as a bunch of different mushrooms and tofu.  Somehow we charmed the manager into giving us a tour of the farm.

What a huge contrast with what we saw yesterday.  Instead of sacks of chemical powders that are mixed into solvents and pumped into the roots of crops, we saw piles of compost created from vegetable stalks, coconut husks, and other organic “trash” from nearby restaurants and vendors.  Given about 3 months, micro-organisms turn plant matter into fragrant, nutrient-rich soil.

On the left is composted soil that is nearly ready to be applied to the fields.  On the right is a pile of relatively fresh vegetable matter, mostly broccoli stalks.

Rather than dousing their veggies with toxins, this organic farm uses clever strategies such as planting garlic next to rows of broccoli.  Insects that eat broccoli are repelled by the garlic.

Garlic on the left, broccoli on the right

A few other principles also guide the organic farm’s approach to insect control:

1) There is a natural balance among plants, insects that eat plants, and animals (including insects) that prey upon plant-eating insects.  When food crops are part of a healthy natural ecosystem, it is normal and acceptable for up to 30% of crops to be eaten by insects.  This is a part of nature and a part of the cost of doing business.

2) The quality of the soil is key.  When plants grow in soil that  is nutritious, porous, and teeming with organisms that maintain the soil’s nutrient content and structure, they become much stronger than their chemically grown counterparts.  This means that they are naturally more resistant to insect attacks and they are much more nutritious and tasty.

3) Over time, pesticide use weakens the genomes of vegetables by allowing fragile plants to survive and reproduce.  By growing and selectively breeding organic vegetables, farmers are creating vegetable strains that are genetically more resistant to insect damage and other dangers such as harmful fungi and bacteria.

Finally, here’s a picture of some organic produce.

Note that there are a bunch of holes on the outer broccoli leaves (left) and also a spattering of small holes across the spinach leaves (right).  After what you’ve seen today, which would you rather eat – completely intact vegetables that taste like nothing and alter your sperm count (I’m sure pesticides aren’t good for women, either) OR nutritious, clean, tasty vegetables with a few holes in them?

We proceeded to pick and eat spinach and a few other leafy greens directly from the ground.  Guess what?  No diarrhea.  Intestinal parasites are still a possibility.