Crops & Agricultural Products

In Ha Tinh province, Vietnam, mung beans had both a bumper crop and high prices. Dried beans go for around 300-some yen per kilo, and middlemen come to the fields to buy, selling out immediately. For Japan's sourcing of bean-sprout and bean-paste raw materials—almost entirely reliant on imports—it becomes a yardstick for rethinking dependence on China.

Rice farming in the Mekong Delta has long been said to be "done by experience." The timing of sowing, how water is let in, how much fertilizer is spread—all of it rests on intuition passed from parent to child. Yet in a strongly acidic corner of An Giang province, a farmer who replaced that intuition with soil design, without letting the rice wither...

Buyers appear the moment it is picked in the field—such a chili-growing area is developing on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. In the An Nhon Tay area, formerly called Cu Chi district, farmers who switched the small hot-pepper-type chili "ot chi thien" to contract farming with a company are no longer tossed around by wild price swings...

When they hear "Vietnamese seafood," many Japanese buyers picture Mekong Delta shrimp and pangasius, or marine aquaculture in the south-central region. But this time, a small piece of news from a reservoir in the mountains of Nghe An province lights up a block missing from that map. In the sea...

In the mountainous region of northern Vietnam, aged native-variety tea is beginning to be sold as the opposite of "cheap mass-produced tea." The Shan Tuyet snow tea handled by a processing workshop in Tan Lap hamlet, Vinh Thuy commune, Tuyen Quang province, circulates in small quantities in a price band of 6 million dong per kilo, and its processing...

The steep slopes of Son La province in northwestern Vietnam are changing from fields of maize and cassava into a growing area for coffee and fruit trees. The Vietnamese newspaper Dan Viet took up the transformation of the Na San plateau in Chieng Mung district, formerly Mai Son district, reporting how the cultivation value of the sloped land has jumped...

Pruned branches and leaves from coffee plantations and the husks left after processing used to be nuisances, merely burned in a corner of the field or left to pile up. But in Vietnam's main growing areas, these "things that were meant to be thrown away" are being remade into organic fertilizer, curbing the use of chemical fertilizer while even pushing up farmers' incomes...

At an orchard in Dong Nai province in southern Vietnam, short dwarf palms are bearing fruit heavily on their branches. The orchard is run by a disabled war veteran who, despite having lost his right hand, has stood in the fields for half a century. The local outlet "Dan Viet" praised it as "lam nong tu te" (honest farming)...

A rundown wetland on the outskirts of Haiphong has become a poultry house whose temperature and humidity are watched by smartphone. The free-range-chicken farm a veteran opened on his own holds 25,000 birds, and a partner company drives trucks to the site to buy the entire flock. Though this case looks like one person's comeback story, for Japanese meat sourc...

Ducks usually bring to mind flocks on ponds and waterways, but in Nghe An province in central Vietnam, a farmer has emerged who runs 60,000 birds without using any open water at all. It is operated by Dinh No Phu Quy, born in 1992. The shed-raised duck business he started in 2021, after deducting expenses, earns a year...