Urban metabolism analyzes the supply and consumption of nutrition, material, energy, and other resources within cities. Food, water, and energy are critical resources for the human society and have complicated cooperative/competitive influences on each other. The management of interactive resources is essential for supply chain analysis. This research analyzes the food-water-energy system of urban metabolism for sustainable resources management. A system dynamics model is established to investigate the urban metabolism of food, water, and energy resources. This study conducts a case study of Shihmen Reservoir system, hydropower generation, paddy rice irrigation of Taoyuan and Shihmen Irrigation Associations, and water consumption in Taoyuan, New Taipei, and Hsinchu cities. The interactive influence of the food-water-energy nexus is quantified in this study; the uncertainty analysis of food, water, and energy nexus is presented.

Taiwan’s Agricultural Development Act (ADA) of 2000 relaxed farmland ownership criteria and allowed non-farmers to own farms. Although this opened up the market and induced a growth in farmland trading, relaxing these criteria without proper monitoring resulted in rapid development of farmhouses that fragmented farmlands, adversely affecting agricultural production and the quality of peri-urban environments, and increased management difficulties. Relaxing farmland ownership criteria also provided opportunities for speculation, which pushed up farmland prices, causing farmland price to deviate from its production value. We used a price:value ratio as an index of price-value distortion to explore farmland price-value distortion spatially using a geographical information system (GIS). Yilan County was used as a case study since its agricultural lands suffer high development pressure due to ready accessibility from the Taipei metropolitan area. Ordinary least square and quantile regression were used to identify factors driving distortion in Yilan County. Finally, we discuss the distortion and key factors for specific sites in Yilan to assess the urban sprawl and propose a preliminary course of action for peri-urban growth management. Our findings suggest that residential activities stimulate farmland price-value distortion but do not enhance farmland value. Designation of a land parcel as agricultural within an urban area allows for speculation and increases distortion. The land parcel’s association with infrastructure such as road and irrigation systems, and the price of agricultural products, are significantly correlated with distortion. Most of these identified factors increased farmland price because of the potential for non-agricultural land-use. We propose that to resolve farmland price-value distortion in Yilan, multi-functional values, in addition to agriculture, must be envisioned.

This research aims to analyze the food–energy interactive nexus of sustainable urban plant factory systems. Plant factory systems grow agricultural products within artificially controlled growing environment and multi-layer vertical growing systems. The system controls the supply of light, temperature, humidity, nutrition, water, and carbon dioxide for growing plants. Plant factories are able to produce consistent and high-quality agricultural products within less production space for urban areas. The production systems use less labor, pesticide, water, and nutrition. However, food production of plant factories has many challenges including higher energy demand, energy costs, and installation costs of artificially controlled technologies. In the research, stochastic optimization model and linear complementarity models are formulated to conduct optimal and equilibrium food–energy analysis of plant factory production. A case study of plant factories in the Taiwanese market is presented.

Most consumers in Taiwan have never eaten pure rice noodles (PRNs) and some may mistakenly treat corn starch-based rice noodles as PRNs. This study examines consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for PRNs using discrete choice (DC) experiments with a blind tasting test to understand consumers’ ability to identify PRNs with varying rice content on the basis of their appearance and taste. Collecting data from the Taipei metropolitan area, our DC experimental results of both pre- and post-experiment conditions show that Taiwanese consumers do prefer PRNs and their WTP for PRNs was strengthened. A latent class model highlights that attribute preferences tend to differ by group and thus rice content ratios should be properly labeled so that consumers can make a better choice according to their preferences. Our WTP estimates also imply that offering tasting trials to consumers is an effective marketing strategy to encourage potential purchases of PRNs for the rice noodle industry.