Due to the changing of political and economical structure domestically and the liberalization and internationalization internationally in these years, both the interaction frequency and scope enlarged and all countries tend to affect by the fluctuation of global boom. In particular, the agriculture in our country belongs to small scale management, which has high production cost and low competition ability, and tends to influence by the competition of free trade, and thus facing multiple challenges; such as the influence from inner and outer situation like the decline of agriculture competition ability, traditional industrial development and farmer’s local identification and the participation of WTO; Taiwan agriculture is facing the key point of transformation and re-orientation.
The development of leisure agriculture benefits the transformation of agriculture, job transformation of farmer, rural village construction and facilitate local prosperity and agriculture recourse’s sustainable development; however, if any industry wants to have sustainable development, it must have the orientation and framework for sustainable development, and the sustainable development for leisure agriculture is established on the base of “Production, Life and Ecology.” Sinshe Township is located in the east side of Taichung County with complex and varied landforms; it is exceptionally rich in natural resources, including river terraces, hills, plateaus, continuous green mountains and Baileng Ditch siphon; it has warm and comfortable weather all year round and suitable to plant various crops; and it has plentiful vegetable and fruits, beautiful mountain and forest scenery, colorful birds, precious and rare Paradise fish, lavender, mushroom, rape flower, firefly, sakura and plum blossom woods, all these are very appropriate for the development of leisure agriculture.
Sinshe Township is a traditional agricultural township with farmers of decreasing incomes day after day, and the traditional agricultural production also declined. With the implementation of two days off in the weekend, recreational traveling has become a tendency and agriculture management has transformed to leisure agriculture gradually and developed to six types, including recreational garden vanilla coffee, experience type recreational farm, sightseeing flower and fruit farm, educational ecology farm, lodge & historical scenic spot and others; referring to modern country’s experiences in the development of leisure agriculture, such as America and Japan, providing rural village’s resources to tourism and recreation, increasing farmer’s income and benefit, and increasing recreational resource’s supply to satisfy tourist’s needs; therefore, successful foreign examples are referred as the reference for the development of leisure agriculture and feasible future development orientation in Sinshe Township.
According to the research from administration, industry, category, environment and system aspects, the suggestion is addressed to promote leisure agriculture in the future, such as to establish farmer service center, agricultural products presentation and selling center, hold mushroom and loquat season and discriminate farm features — successful lavender, promotion of ecology and culture tourism (natural river terrace, Baileng Ditch, agriculture ecology education area and Xiao Xitou water park), management of nature and health village & rural village’s resources, maintenance of agricultural environment, improvement of traffic environment (traffic index, road, parking area and transit car), establishment of assessment system, lodge association and 3rd department business management.
