Three years ago, four former cement-industry workers left their jobs to take up organic farming. From the left, they are the Tenha Organic Farm's Chou Chun-chi, Huang Yau-pin (standing in the center), Lee Wei-yu, and Tom Chen. (Hsueh Chi-kuang)

Since it was founded two years ago, Tenha Organic Farm, located between Tainan Airport and Provincial Highway No. 1, has become Tainan County's flagship organic farm.

Tenha is run by four friends born in the 1960s who majored in plant pathology and horticulture at university. Like traditional farmers, they work from dawn to dusk. The difference is that they have put biotechnology and IT skills to good use to turn barren land into fertile farmland.

In the warm sun of an early winter morning, farm director Li Wei-yu walks into the office and announces glumly that 100 chickens kept in a greenhouse were killed by feral dogs the night before. "We'd been raising them for four months and they were big enough to sell, but now we've lost NT$40,000 in a single night. How are we going to weed the vegetable gardens today?"

Having chickens instead of people do job of weeding is one of the organic weed prevention and management methods employed by Tenha Organic Farm. Chickens are weed- and pest-control experts. After the greenhouse crops are harvested, the chickens are put in the vegetable gardens so they can eat up unwanted leafstalks, seeds, and insects-with remarkable results. The chickens also perform a very useful function for the farm by raking and turning the soil with their feet. Chickens raised in this way get plenty of exercise and have higher-quality meat, which consumers prefer.

Farm manager Chou Chun-chi has no alternative but to order another 100 chickens, of a local breed able to endure high temperatures, from the Livestock Research Institute in Tainan. To prevent another attack, he asks a group of farm hands to put up a chicken fence and set up traps outside its perimeter.

Chou and his partners built 61 greenhouses, which take up approximately two hectares of Tenha Organic Farm. The rest of the farm's 16 hectares comprises netting cages, outdoor cultivation areas, an ecological pond, a compost site, a packing area, and an office. The farm grows dozens of leafy vegetables, root vegetables, and tubers, including cabbage, flowering cabbage, water spinach, rape, carrots, pumpkins, eggplants, cucumber, and luffa gourds. It supplies Li-Ruhn, Uni-President and the Homemakers' Union and Foundation with organic produce and posted sales of NT$8 million in its first year of operation.

In the packing area, lot numbers and other data are written in different colors on a whiteboard. Sales and distribution manager Chen Tai-an explains that the farm has computerized the entire food growing process. Every man-hour that goes into planting, field work, bedding, pest control, and vegetable picking is recorded on the whiteboard, then entered into the computer system. No specialized software is used: every step of the production schedule is calculated and tracked with MS Excel.