Pangcah Organic Farm is one of the suppliers of the Tribal E-Shop run by the Association of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples’ Development (ATIPD). Established in 2011, the Tribal E-Shop is the first online platform for indigenous agricultural products helping indigenous farmers in Taiwan to engage in organic agriculture in combination with Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS).
ATIPD has been active since 2002 and joined IFOAM – Organics International as a member in 2019. The organisation empowers the indigenous people of Taiwan through tribal education and promotion of indigenous agriculture.
We spoke with Tipus Panay, founder of Pangcah Organic Farm and an indigenous farmer from Taiwan’s Ami tribe, the largest indigenous group in eastern Taiwan, about her journey into organic farming.
An Organic Kinship for the Amis
Tipus Panay, an organic farmer of 20 years, founded the Pangcah Organic Farm in 2007. The word “Pangcah” stems from the Ami language which stands for “people” and “kinsmen.”
“I wanted to create a space where we, indigenous women, can support ourselves — through a skill we know deeply: farming,” explained Panay.
Tipus Panay, founder of Pangcah Organic Farm, showcasing her products at a trade fair. ©Pangcah Organic Farm.
Panay was motivated to practise organic farming by a mission and a sense of responsibility: to improve the livelihood of the local indigenous farmers. Currently, her farm has seven employees, three of whom are over 70 years old. Whenever she was asked about her unconventional choice, she would always give a straightforward answer:
“If I don’t take them, who will? To me, age is never the limit, if they are willing to do the work and learn the skills. When they’ve acquired the necessary skills, they’ll become self-sufficient even if my farm disappears one day.”
Panay and a cross-section of her farmland. ©Pangcah Organic Farm.
Get to know the Amis
The Amis are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Taiwan, with a population of about 213,000 (as of January 2020). They mainly live in the eastern counties of Hualien and Taitung, and on the Hengchung Peninsula in Pingtung County.
The Amis traditionally engage in farming and fishery. In addition to their staple food, rice, they gather wild edible plants and catch animals and fish for food in their daily lives.
Sustaining Tribal Heritage
As the first organic farm in the Matai’an wetland of Hualien County, Pangcah Organic Farm not only grows leafy vegetables but also strives to preserve the precious seeds of the truly local inhabitants – the indigenous species of glutinous rice. Compared with rice paddy, indigenous glutinous rice is among the upland rice species that grow in a dry-land environment and are resistant to drought and unstable weather conditions.
In the past five years, Panay collected the remaining seeds from tribal elders and went through repeated rounds of trial and error until she managed to revitalise four species of indigenous glutinous rice – Katepaay, Cilipeday, Falinono, and Cederan.
These species used to play a key role in the memories of Ami community. In the past, every household had their own rice species that they would use to make their own wine or rice cakes at the harvest festival.
“The entire house would be filled with the aroma of glutinous rice that gives the scent of taro – the smell of my childhood,” recalled Panay.
Creative presentation of a traditional Ami dish. ©Pangcah Organic Farm.
Holding on to Hope after Hazards
With this initial success, Panay intended to extend the revitalisation efforts by training local women to grow these crops in her farm. This plan fell short because of the extreme rainfall brought by Typhoon Ragasa on 23 September 2025, leaving her 5 hectares of vegetable fields completely damaged by the overflowing of a landslide-dammed lake on Matai’an Creek. However, the dry-land rice fields survived the hazard, demonstrating their resilience amid adverse weather conditions.
As Panay and her employees started clearing up the mud that buried their fields, they found a bag of dry-land rice seeds, which she perceived as hope in despair:
“It’s heartbreaking to see the indigenous rice fields we worked hard to grow in the last five years destroyed overnight. Despite the heartbreak, we are NOT giving up. When the rain stops, when the mud is cleared up, we’ll return to the fields, to rebuild our farm and restore our efforts of revitalising indigenous upland rice,”
wrote Panay on the Facebook page of her farm.
Panay has started a crowdfunding campaign to support the two-to-three-year plan to rebuild her farm. More details can be found on the campaign website (Mandarin only).
Additional Reading
More about indigenous organic farmers in Taiwan:
More about organic in Taiwan: From Learning to Leading – A Youth Assistant’s Path in Organic Transition
