Chen Wen-yu: How a Seed Became an Ambassador for Taiwan's Agriculture

Image: Chen Wen-yu and colleagues displaying watermelons. Source: Wikimedia Commons, author Uiuc1028, CC BY-SA 3.0; image not modified by this article.¹

30-second overview: Starting from the Fengshan Tropical Horticulture Research Station, Chen Wen-yu bred the "Fengshan No. 1" seedless watermelon and founded Nongyou Seedlings. His distinction lies not just in the number of varieties he developed, but in his definition of breeding success: whether farmers can exchange better seeds for a more stable life.

In 1925, Chen Wen-yu was born into a farming family in Yongkang, Tainan. In 1962, he bred the "Fengshan No. 1" seedless watermelon. In 1968, he co-founded Nongyou Seedlings with friends. These three years divide a single life into three scales: the difficulties seen in the fields, the technical solutions found in the laboratory, and the path of a company that eventually crossed national borders. ^{2 3}

But what Chen Wen-yu truly left behind is more than just the title "Watermelon King." A more important question to ask is: Why would a breeder prioritize "letting farmers make money first" over corporate profit? Seeds are usually too small to appear in news photographs, yet Chen Wen-yu treated them as a public commitment—varieties must enter the fields and ultimately be transformed into harvests that farmers can see.

Starting from the Sighs of the Fields

Image: Wikimedia Commons file describes this image as Chen Wen-yu cultivating oriental melons; author Uiuc1028, CC BY-SA 3.0. Image not modified by this article.⁴

As a young man, Chen Wen-yu helped out in the fields, witnessing his parents' helplessness in the face of natural disasters and unstable harvests. After graduating from the Research Department of Hsinchu Agricultural and Vocational School, he joined the Fengshan Tropical Horticulture Research Station, initially working on vegetable breeding before eventually shifting his focus to watermelons. According to Taiwan Guanghua, he once conducted surveys from south to north regarding soil quality, moisture, climate, and crop suitability—observing in the fields by day and returning to the laboratory at night to compile reports. ²

This experience was crucial because Chen Wen-yu did not begin imagining varieties based on "what the market lacks," but rather asked what the farmers' land could actually sustain. To him, breeding was not about adding a new color to fruit on paper; it had to simultaneously contend with pests, climate, transportation, and whether farmers could afford the seeds.

📝 Curator's Note: Chen Wen-yu's starting point was not making Taiwan's agriculture look more beautiful, but rather reducing the risk for farmers of "planting something without knowing if there will be a harvest."

Fengshan No. 1: Technology is Not the Destination

Image: Wikimedia Commons file explicitly labeled "Seedless watermelon"; original description states it was purchased in Atlanta, USA, in 2005 and the product originated from Nicaragua; author SCEhardt, public domain. This is an illustrative photo of a seedless watermelon, not Fengshan No. 1, nor a historical photo of Chen Wen-yu taken in Taiwan.⁵

In the 1950s, some watermelon seeds used by Taiwanese farmers faced issues with disease resistance and reproduction. Consequently, Chen Wen-yu devoted himself to seedless watermelon research. This also explains why "seedless" is not a single laboratory achievement, but rather an industrial process composed of parent selection, chromosome doubling, hybridization, field pollination, and the segregation of harvests. Data from North Carolina State University's Cucurbit Breeding indicates that growers typically must arrange diploid and triploid plants in the field and distinguish between seeded and seedless fruit during harvest and sales. ⁶ After approximately three years of effort, he bred "Fengshan No. 1" in 1962. Reports from Taiwan's Guanghua magazine describe how he utilized chromosome doubling and mating to ensure the offspring formed sterile, seedless watermelons. English reports summarize this achievement as the "world's first seedless watermelon." ^{2 7}

There is a discrepancy in verification here that cannot be glossed over: different sources offer different descriptions regarding the geographic and global ranking of the "first" watermelon. This article adopts the most conservative phrasing, which can be directly verified against Chinese-language reports, calling it Taiwan's first seedless watermelon, "Fengshan No. 1." As for being the "world's first," this is only retained within the context of quoting English reports to avoid misrepresenting media shorthand as an undisputed scientific historical conclusion. ^{2 7}

The story of seedless watermelons, therefore, should not be written merely as "an invention." From a breeding perspective, modern seedless varieties are usually not a magic trick of having "no seeds," but rather the result of triploid hybridization: a tetraploid mother (2n=4x=44) mates with a diploid father (2n=2x=22) to produce a triploid (2n=3x=33). The three sets of chromosomes are difficult to distribute evenly during meiosis, causing male and female gametes to lose normal function; thus, the fruit typically does not form mature seeds. Because triploids themselves cannot provide effective pollen, production fields still require the placement of diploid plants to stimulate fruiting. ⁶ The true turning point occurred in Erlun, Yunlin. Based on farmland surveys, Chen Wen-yu determined that the barren sandy fields under the Xiluo Bridge were suitable for planting this cold-sensitive watermelon. He drove north from Fengshan to work alongside Wang Liang-hsiung, a Farmers' Association official, to teach farmers how to cultivate it. Since farmers worked in the fields during the day, they could only study at night. Chen Wen-yu recalled: "Because the farmers had to be in the fields during the day and could only study at night, I often had to stay overnight in the Farmers' Association duty room, but there were so many mosquitoes that it was impossible to sleep." ²

The barren sandy fields eventually yielded watermelons, which were assisted in being exported to Hong Kong by agricultural institutions of the time. It was only after farmers discovered that the returns were better than rice that he was given the title "Watermelon King." If this title is placed only at the end of a success story, it looks like a trophy. Placed back in those barren sandy fields where nothing grew, it is actually more like an ID badge: Chen Wen-yu had to be physically present to help farmers turn technology into a harvest. ²

One Company, First Learning to Put Seeds into the Fields

Image: Watermelon from a small-scale organic farm in Tainan, Taiwan, photographed in November 2009; author Fred Hsu, CC BY-SA 3.0. This is a depiction of the Taiwanese agricultural landscape, not a historical photo of Chen Wen-yu himself.⁸

In 1968, 43-year-old Chen Wen-yu left the research institute to co-found Nongyou Seedlings with friends. Official records position him as a pioneer in the development of hybrid vegetable varieties in Taiwan, noting that he published horticulture and seed publications, established the Nongyou Social Welfare Foundation, and set up farmer hospitals in Myanmar to provide free medical services. ⁹

Nongyou's subsequent official awards page lists the company's core value as "One Seed, One Responsibility," and records Chen Wen-yu receiving the Order of the Brilliant Star, Third Class, the Asia-Pacific Seed Association National Seed Contribution Award, and a Commendation Order from the Presidential Office. While these awards prove institutional recognition, they cannot independently verify every industry statistic; figures must still be cross-referenced with their respective original sources. ¹⁰

The Interview Record of Chen Wen-yu and Lin Jun-yi, published by the Institute of Historical Archives, provides another important clue: the official book introduction places Chen Wen-yu within the context of Taiwan's agricultural seed breeding moving toward internationalization, specifically mentioning the "Diana" yellow-fleshed watermelon and its AAS award, as well as Nongyou's global R&D sites, farmer hospitals, and social welfare foundation. This is not a substitute for the verbatim interviews in the book, but it proves that Chen Wen-yu's story was not constructed solely from later legendary articles. ¹¹

📝 Curator's Note: Taiwan's agricultural soft power is sometimes not a flag, but a packet of seeds capable of germinating in a different climate.

A Corporate Philosophy of "Letting Farmers Earn Money First"

Image: Ripe watermelon, author Steve Evans, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; this image is used to represent the watermelon crop itself, not a historical photograph of Chen Wen-yu or a Taiwanese farm.¹²

Smiling Taiwan recorded interviews from Chen Wen-yu's later years. He distinguished seeds from general consumables, stating that "the responsibility of a single seed" is to "develop good varieties that bring good returns to farmers." In the same report, when discussing the breeding of the yellow-skinned, red-fleshed "Diana" watermelon, he spoke of repeatedly encountering green-skinned individuals; he ultimately described that unyielding persistence by saying, "I just wanted to be different from everyone else!"¹³

Upstream/Downstream placed this management philosophy on a larger geographical scale: Nongyou once promoted seedlings and cultivation techniques in northern Thailand, China, and India, and even established farmer hospitals in Myanmar. The report simultaneously preserved the less glamorous aspects of agricultural globalization, such as counterfeiting issues in the Chinese market and the risks of cross-border operations. These difficulties should not be omitted, because "helping farmers" is not just a beautiful corporate slogan, but involves bearing costs within unfamiliar systems, transportation networks, and markets.¹⁴

In an English report by the Taipei Times regarding Chen Wen-yu's passing, it quoted him saying: "My goal is to create the world’s most delicious watermelon." The same report also recorded another sentence closer to his work ethic: "It takes good seedlings to produce good varieties. We provide farmers with good seeds to help them reap better harvests."⁷

Looking at these two sentences together, one finds that his goals were not contradictory: the most delicious watermelon is the breeder's vision, but the fact that farmers can achieve better harvests is the very reason that vision is allowed to exist.

Seeds Go Out, Bringing Limitations Along

Chen Wen-yu's story is often condensed into "Taiwanese seedlings going global." Nongyou's official data and agricultural industry cases show that the company has long invested in research farms in different locations, germplasm management, variety development, and international markets. Agricultural cross-domain integration cases also point out that the cost of the breeding industry is not just land and labor, but also includes parent management, isolated reproduction, storage, and intellectual property management. ^{10 15}

These details make "success" more concrete. Seeds do not simply transplant Taiwan's experience intact overseas. They must reface local soil, climate, pests and diseases, consumer habits, and farmers' cash flow. Cross-border seedlings are therefore both a technical work and a translation work: translating the possibilities of a variety into risks another place is willing to bear.

The Ministry of Agriculture's commendation report after Chen Wen-yu's passing mentioned his contributions to fruit and vegetable breeding, farmer technical guidance, rural economy, and overseas public welfare, and recorded that his life story was included in the national history. This official narrative gave him a national-scale positioning. But returning to the fields, the hardest problem remains small: Can this batch of seeds grow well in this land? ⁹

Why This Story Is Still Worth Writing Again

Chen Wen-yu's deeds have been reported multiple times; this article does not treat "King of Watermelons" as a new discovery, nor does it pile up all circulating figures again. After re-reading these articles, a more meaningful angle is to put technology, enterprise, and public welfare on the same line: he first understood the problem on the farmland, then brought the research results to the farmers, and finally let the company become a transnational organization.

This line can also explain an easily overlooked phenomenon: the results of agricultural breeding often appear on the dining table under others' names. Consumers remember the sweetness of the watermelon, the flesh color, and whether it has seeds, but do not know how its parents were preserved, how varieties were isolated, and how trials were eliminated. Nongyou's industry case mentions that seed production must face land isolation, labor input, parent management, and intellectual property protection. Behind the "magical variety" is actually a system that is prone to error and must be maintained long-term. ¹⁵

This also connects Chen Wen-yu to today's agricultural issues. As climate becomes more unstable, farmers need not just a single "star variety," but germplasm and knowledge that can be adjusted according to different regions, seasons, and markets. The思路 (approach) Chen Wen-yu left behind may not be "finding another watermelon king," but acknowledging that every piece of land has its own problems, and breeders must be willing to spend time to look.

In his later years, he still treated variety selection as on-site work: cutting open, tasting, recording, and then deciding whether to proceed to the next stage. This action looks slow and is somewhat different from the fast, scaled language often used when discussing agricultural technology today. But it is precisely this slowness that makes a variety not just a commodity name, but a promise that farmers can trust.

Deconstructing "Success"

There are several types of success in Chen Wen-yu's story that are often put together but should actually be separated. The first is breeding success: the ability to breed stable varieties under experimental conditions. The second is field success: farmers can grow them in their own soil, climate, and work rhythm. The third is market success: the fruit can be transported and sold, with returns sufficient to make farmers willing to plant again. The fourth is social success: whether technology and returns leave behind longer-term agricultural capacity.

Taiwan Panorama wrote about Nongyou's variety selection, stating that staff must check sugar content, taste, weight, rind hardness, flesh color, and seed status. If any one item fails, it may be eliminated. This selection is not turning nature into a controllable machine, but acknowledging that every variety still needs to undergo on-site negotiation time and again. ²

Official industry cases further point out that every material in the germplasm bank needs to be distinguished, preserved, and tracked. Management errors have consequences not just for the company's loss, but may also cause farmers to receive varieties inconsistent with claims. Breeders are therefore not just creating new things, but maintaining a record chain that prevents errors from flowing into the fields. ¹⁵

This is the most suitable place for Chen Wen-yu's story to be placed today. When we say agriculture needs technology, we cannot only think of faster equipment or higher yields; we must also think of who preserved the germplasm, who recorded the parents, and who was willing to try again on a land not看好 (looked down upon). The value of technology lies not only in whether it can be displayed, but more in whether it can be trusted.

From Fengshan to the World is Not a Straight Line

Chen Wen-yu's internationalization did not start with a beautiful map. Early on, Nongyou first undertook commissioned production for foreign entities, then gradually established its own research farms, varieties, and brands. Industry cases mention that the company set up research farms in Fengshan, Tainan, Pingtung, and Chiayi, utilizing soil and climate from different locations for breeding. This dispersion is not decoration for expansion, but a way to let varieties be tested by different environments. ¹⁵

Taiwan Panorama wrote that Nongyou's variety selection field once featured watermelons from Brazil, South Africa, Central Asia, and other places. This image explains the essence of breeding work better than "sold to multiple countries": seeds from all over the world are first brought in for observation, then undergo mating, trial planting, and elimination, before finally possibly returning to the farmland of another country. Internationalization is not just sending products out, but also bringing back external differences. ²

Nongyou's awards page records that the company has continuously been recognized as an Outstanding Export Manufacturer by the Ministry of Economic Affairs since 1976, and lists the 2008 Presidential Agricultural Innovation Award. These corporate honors and Chen Wen-yu's personal medals cannot be conflated, but placed together, one can still see that breeding, export, organization, and brand have gradually become the same industrial system. ¹⁰

Public welfare is not an extra layer of warmth added to the story. Ministry of Agriculture official data records that Nongyou Social Welfare Foundation's assistance scope expanded overseas, and a Farmers' Hospital was established in Myanmar. Smiling Taiwan presents Chen Wen-yu's reaction when reading patients' letters through interview details. To him, if seeds only allowed enterprises to gain markets, the story was only half complete. The other half is whether those who originally could not access medical care, nutrition, or stable income truly gained an extra path. ^{9 13}

What Is Left for Today is Not a Magical Seed

Chen Wen-yu passed away on December 7, 2012, at the age of 88. Nongyou Seedlings continues to operate based on his philosophy, while Taiwan's agriculture also faces new pressures: climate change, germplasm preservation, variety intellectual property, aging rural populations, and how farmers can obtain stable returns in high-cost environments. ^{7 10 15}

Therefore, the most memorable aspect of Chen Wen-yu may not be how many watermelons he bred, but that he moved the evaluation standard of breeding one step closer to the fields. Sweetness, color, and appearance are certainly important. But if a variety cannot give farmers more choices on their own land, the technology is not yet complete.

He once wrote: "Nongyou (Farmer Friends), these two words are more (to me) preferable than wealth and nobility." ¹⁴ The power of this sentence lies not in portraying the entrepreneur as a saint, but in leaving a verifiable promise: seeds must ultimately return between people and land, to places where someone is willing to plant, someone can harvest, and someone can live because of it.

This promise also has its boundaries. Nongyou's corporate data presents the company's own history and values; the official commendation order represents the government's affirmation of Chen Wen-yu. Neither can replace independent farmer income statistics, nor prove that every overseas promotion was equally successful. Therefore, when reading Chen Wen-yu, one neither needs to deify him as a person who changed all agriculture, nor deny the actual traces left by breeding, field guidance, and public welfare facilities just because biographical language carries respect. ^{9 10 15}

What also needs to be preserved is the gap between sources. The 2007 Taiwan Panorama is a Chinese feature report with on-site interviews and photography. The Ministry of Agriculture's commendation order is the government's formal account of the deceased. The Taipei Times organized company and public welfare information in English in its obituary. They each answer different questions; one cannot take the rhetoric of one article directly as the statistics of another. This is also the reason this article does not adopt absolute statements like "Global No. 1" that cannot be verified verbatim from the original text as a single conclusion. ^{2 7 9}

A more reliable understanding is: he made a working method last for a long time. First look at the land, then do breeding. First let varieties pass farmers' trial planting, then talk about the market. First let seeds be verified in different environments, then send them abroad. This method is not romantic, and often very slow, but it makes "Taiwan agriculture going global" not just a slogan, but a path composed of batches of seeds, research records, field teaching, and farmers' reply letters.

Next time we cut open a slice of seedless watermelon, perhaps we do not need to think of it as a monument to a certain genius. A reading closer to Chen Wen-yu is to imagine that behind that flesh lies a series of eliminated tables, pieces of unsuitable land, and a person who is still willing to bring technology back to the fields. Seeds are small. The responsibility they require has never been small. Precisely because of this, Chen Wen-yu's story belongs not only to agricultural history, but also to those who are willing to do one more verification before handing a technology to others. This patience is precisely the work that is most difficult to see but cannot be omitted before seeds truly cross borders. It reminds us that truly reliable innovation often endures long waiting in details, and thus deserves to be re-verified by generation after generation of farmers, and repeatedly reminded by every piece of land that needs to re-adapt, reminding us, and reminding later comers.

Seedlings Are Not Merely an Appendage to Agricultural Products

Image: Watermelons growing in a field, author Mihaib21, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; this image is used to represent crop growth stages and is not a historical photograph of Chen Wen-yu's actual workplace.¹⁶

Chen Wen-yu's case helps us re-examine the term "agricultural industry chain," which is often used in a vague manner. What farmers see in the field are seedlings, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Seedling companies, however, must handle parent plants, pollination, isolation, purity, germination rates, packaging, and preservation much earlier in the process. If even one of these stages is inaccurate, the variety received by the farmer may not be what was expected. Cases of cross-domain agricultural integration have pointed out that farmers eventually need to improve the storage capacity and information workflows of germplasm banks, precisely because seed management cannot rely solely on memory and paper records. ¹⁵

This "invisible infrastructure" is an aspect of Chen Wen-yu's story that is less frequently discussed. Taiwan often focuses its agricultural achievements on yield, exports, or award-winning varieties; however, what truly enables a company to conduct long-term breeding is the ability to preserve failed parent plants, record every hybridization, distinguish between different generations, and still be able to locate those materials many years later. For breeding, data is not an administrative burden, but rather the starting point for the next success.

From Fengshan No. 1 to Today's Triploid Technology

When Chen Wen-yu promoted seedless watermelons in the 1960s, he faced the field conditions and market demands of Taiwanese farmers at the time. Today's breeding research further breaks down triploid production into steps such as chromosome doubling, parent cultivation, pollen configuration, and trait selection. NC State University data reminds us that triploid seedless watermelons are not completely without need for pollination, but require diploid plants to provide pollen to stimulate fruit formation. This detail prevents consumers from misunderstanding "seedless" as not requiring a reproduction process. ⁶

Therefore, Chen Wen-yu's historical position lies not only in that he once bred a certain famous variety, but also in that he brought a highly specialized breeding problem into a production site that farmers could use. From the experimental station to the Erlun barren sandy fields, and then to Nongyou's overseas research bases, this path transforms abstract genetic and cultivation knowledge into a technology that can be taught, replicated, and tested by the market.

How Images Preserve an Agricultural History

The two photos of Chen Wen-yu selected for this article are both from specific file pages on Wikimedia Commons, and the file pages explicitly state the author and CC BY-SA 3.0 license. The other two are freely licensed photos of Taiwanese farms and general watermelons. They cannot replace interviews or field records, nor can the photo shooting location be directly inferred as every piece of land Chen Wen-yu worked on. What photos can do is return the "colleagues," "fields," and "watermelons" in the text to observable material scenes.

This distinction is important: a photo without a traceable author and license, even if it looks very suitable for the article, should not be directly placed into an open knowledge base. This article retains the file page and license information for each image, and uses hot links to cite the original files, allowing subsequent readers to return to the source pages for self-verification.

Further Reading

One can first read the Ministry of Agriculture's official commendation order report, the Academia Historica publication bibliography, NC State University's seedless watermelon breeding instructions, and Taiwan Panorama's on-site narrative of Erlun's barren sandy fields and Fengshan No. 1, and then cross-reference how English reports describe the "Watermelon King."

Images and Licenses

The six images used in this article have been downloaded and included in the project directory (public/article-images/), citing original files via non-hot links; the first, second, third, and fifth file pages indicate Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), the fourth indicates Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), and the sixth is in the public domain. This article did not crop, composite, or recolor the images. In accordance with license requirements, author names, original file pages, license links, and "not modified" descriptions are retained; if modifying or compositing this article's images into other works, one should share them under the same or compatible license according to the original license terms.

References