Don't fix the salt: Ca Mau's salt-tolerant farming gives rise to the business opportunity of "plant salt"

In Ca Mau province, Vietnam's southernmost province, a 31-year-old who gave up an engineering job in Ho Chi Minh City is getting "farming that works only on salt-damaged land" onto a stable track. What Lam Quoc Nhut grows are salt-tolerant plants that grow wild on the dikes of shrimp-farming ponds. From the processed goods, such as "plant salt" extracted from them, he earns a profit of roughly 100 million dong a month (about 600,000 yen; this article converts at an approximate rate of 10,000 dong = about 60 yen), the Vietnamese agricultural news site Dan Viet reported on July 4, 2026. Rather than "fixing" salt damage, he "earns with crops suited to salt." This reversal of order is relevant both to Japan's coastal agriculture, which has been built on the premise of desalination, and to Japanese buyers looking for the next sourcing destination for additive-free seasonings.

What the "salt farming" chosen by an urban engineer actually involves

Nhut is from the Phu Tan area of Ca Mau province. He had studied mechanical engineering and worked in Ho Chi Minh City, but "decided to leave all his Saigon work behind and pursue salt farming in his hometown of Ca Mau" (the man's own words to Dan Viet), deciding on a U-turn. It was a career switch made after relearning cultivation technology and plant protection while still working in the city.

It was not as if a winning path was visible from the start. Freshwater-premised crops such as lemongrass and eggplant did not bear on salt-damaged land and ended in failure. So he switched his thinking, tested about 30 native plants to narrow down species that grow on seawater alone, and in the end o ro(a thorny shrub that grows wild in mangrove zones), quao (a mangrove-forest tree), luc (a medicinal plant growing by the sea), and so ri (a fruit tree close to acerola)—raised these four species up as product raw materials. He also handles cultivation of sea asparagus and seaside leafy vegetables in parallel.

The flagship product is "plant salt," made by extracting the mineral content from the leaves and stems of o ro with purified water, then concentrating and crystallizing it. It is a method of making salt from the plant itself without chemical additives, and o ro is said to be 3–4 times more efficient at salt-making than other salt-tolerant plants. He also develops o ro tea, o ro-derived supplements, and a so ri fruit drink. In 2021 he established the company Halofai, and in June 2022 turned about 10,000 square meters of abandoned salt-damaged land into his first farm. plant salt"

Why in Ca Mau it is "adaptation" rather than "desalination"

Ca Mau province sits at the southernmost tip of the Mekong Delta, surrounded by sea on three sides. In the dry season, salt water travels far inland, and the region's main industries have already shifted to "salt-water-premised" industries led by shrimp farming. Desalination—drawing in fresh water to wash away salt—piles up investment in sluices and dikes, and in regions where sea-level rise is advancing, the effect does not last.

Since Resolution 120 of 2017, the Vietnamese government has also promoted, under the banner of "following nature (thuan thien)" in the Mekong Delta, dropping its fixation on freshwater rice cultivation and shifting to an industrial structure that makes use of salt and brackish water. Nhut's model can be called a private-sector version that anticipated this national line as an individual business. He turns o ro—once a "weed" that sprang up on its own on the dikes of shrimp ponds—into a raw-material crop, irrigating it with seawater and farm wastewater. Without reshaping the land or the water, the core of this model is that he matched the product he sells to the land.

Halofai's model in figures

We organize the figures that can be confirmed from reporting by Dan Viet and VnExpress.

Plant salt is about 900 yen for 250 grams. It is not everyday table salt but in the price zone of high-priced seasonings chosen for the story of their origin and method. The yield is by no means high, at 200 grams of salt per 10 kilograms of fresh leaves, but because the raw material is "an extension of self-growing weeds" with light sourcing cost, and because it uses salt-damaged land that is originally of zero value, this profitability holds.

How the locals and the industry received it

The reaction to this effort can be confirmed from three directions: reporting, the industry, and overseas.

• Successive features by national media. VnExpress, Thanh Nien, Tuoi Tre, and Dan Viet have taken it up one after another since 2025, reporting with angles such as "the young man earning 100 million dong a month" and "making a fortune from wild grass thriving beside a shrimp pond." The investment paper Bao Dau Tu introduced him in a CEO profile article as "a founder turning salt land green."
• Recognition in startup contests. In 2021 he won second place in a Ca Mau province startup-idea contest and first place in the Mekong Delta startup contest hosted by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI).
• Inquiries from overseas. According to VnExpress, distribution-partner proposals from Australia, Canada, and the United States have already arrived, and an expansion plan with export in view is under way.
• Participation by local farmers. Through technology transfer and coordinated cultivation, the raw-material sourcing area has widened to over 20 hectares. An individual experiment is turning into an area-wide origin.

Breaking from "fix the salt" alone: implications for Japan's coastal agriculture and procurement

In Japan, when it comes to salt damage—as represented by farmland restoration after the Great East Japan Earthquake—the orthodox approach has been to "desalinate and return to the original crop." Desalination is the royal road, but it takes time and money, and in coastal areas and reclaimed land where storm surges, typhoons, and groundwater salinization recur, there is a risk of returning to square one even after restoration. Japan too has examples of commercializing vegetables that make use of salt environments, such as ice plant, but many have stopped at selling single vegetables. What makes Halofai different is that it turned the salt itself into a seasoning, a highly storable processed product. The field's constraint has become the product's very element of differentiation.

The design of earning with crops that suit the environment, rather than reshaping the environment, is the same thinking as origin-building in Lang Son province that earns from forest-floor amomum without felling the forest. The structure in which a U-turn talent from the city creates an origin through a single breakthrough technology also overlaps with the Ha Tinh "Korean melon" that runs three crops a year on 500 square meters and frog farming in Nghe An by a former electrician. It is no accident that this type of success story keeps appearing in Vietnamese agricultural news; it is because climate change keeps increasing "land where the crops of the past can no longer be grown."

From a procurement viewpoint, plant-derived mineral salt is a material well-matched to the Japanese market in the context of additive-free, craft seasonings. Like seaweed salt or lake salt, salt that can tell "where and from what it was made" has uses as a raw material for gifts and high-priced processed foods. However, current output is about 100 kilograms a month, not enough for large-lot sourcing. If you aim for it, the move is to build a relationship now while waiting for the phase when the new plant's start-up triples capacity. The export destinations raised are Australia and North America, with Japan still a blank. The value of making contact first lies here.

A note of caution as well. Locally, o ro tea and supplements are sold in a health context, but if handled in Japan, from the standpoint of the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act and the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, product design and labeling that do not claim efficacy become a premise. Also, how "salt made from plants" is classified under Japan's edible-salt labeling rules requires confirming standards and labeling at the time of import. The stronger the product's story, the more this groundwork pays off.

What to watch from here: practical information and summary

Three next actions. First, track Halofai's new-plant start-up and the trend of output through local reporting. Once lots reach the 300-kilogram-a-month scale, the realism as a raw material for Japanese retail and OEM will emerge. Second, buyers handling craft seasonings and additive-free gifts should get ahead of the Australian and North American players and go as far as ordering samples and confirming labeling. Third, municipalities and agricultural corporations holding idle farmland in domestic coastal and reclaimed areas have value in examining, at the trial-plot level, the option of "earning to suit the salt" alongside a "desalinate and restore" plan. Salt damage cannot be erased, but it can be turned into opportunity. A 31-year-old in Ca Mau is showing that in actual figures.

Sources

• Dan Viet, "Leaving the city to make a fortune through 'salt farming' in Ca Mau" (July 4, 2026)
• VnExpress, "A startup from plant salt"
• Bao Dau Tu, "Halofai founder Lam Quoc Nhut—turning salt land green"
• Thanh Nien, "The young man earning 100 million dong a month from salt-tolerant plants"
• Tuoi Tre, "A young man in Ca Mau making a fortune from o ro that grows wild beside shrimp ponds"