Ultimate Pear Farmer in Dongshi, Taichung

Meet Mr Sun, the pear farmer behind this summer’s ultimate thirst quencher - Fengshui pears (豐水梨). In this video, he explains how this particular pear with a different coloration of the outer skin, is not acceptable to be sold to customers.

Mr Sun has a certain strict and stoic quality about him, that might be attributed to his previous career as an Army regular and his four decades of experience in pear farming. He firmly believes in harvesting fruits at the perfect ripeness, even if it means his harvest is later than others (and he ends up with a lower price), and only after passing rigorous pesticide residue tests.

The Fengshui pears is a temperate species of pears, originally from Japan. Every year, Mr Sun imports thousands of pear buds from Japan to be manually grafted onto hardy local “mother” pear trees. This process known as marcotting, allows the pear buds to “merge” with the “mother” tree and is able to absorb nutrients via the root system of the Mother trees. It's a labour intensive process that needs to be repeated every year because the branches die off after bearing fruit!!

Marcots. Photo credit: News and Market	Marcots. Photo credit: News and Market

All of Mr Sun's hard work truly pays off. I must say, his pears are the best so far I’ve tasted this summer. They possess a delicate floral fragrance that dances on the tongue while each juicy bite releases a burst of sweet juice. 

But here's the best part: Mr. Sun personally selects each fruit for us! With great care, he hand-picks every single one before carefully packing them into boxes.