In a corner of Noi Bai, Hanoi, a female farmer in her 70s is using earthworms (giun quế) to return lean land to a field where crops grow. She runs GHT Farm. She enlisted in 1971 and spent over 30 years in the military before returning to farming, and has run a cycle of feeding livestock manure to earthworms to turn it into compost and growing crops again with that compost. Annual revenue is about 2 billion dong (about 11.8 million yen converted at 1 yen = 170 dong), and the products are rated OCOP three-star. The reason Japanese sourcing managers should keep an eye on this small farm is antibiotic-free organic input materials and the crude-drug material dia long (dried earthworm), in that it is a primary supply source for materials both hard to secure upstream.
Earthworms turn livestock manure into compost, and that worm-casting soil remakes the earth
Faced with ruined land, what she chose was not to force up soil fertility with chemical fertilizer but to have earthworms break down organic matter and remake the soil itself. Earthworms eat livestock manure and food waste, worm castings (earthworm compost) remain, and that is returned to the field. In the livestock shed she uses an earthworm-derived microbial material and is said to have curbed odor by about 80%. In 2021 she was runner-up in a national contest on household organic-waste processing, and in 2022 she was honored as an outstanding woman of Hanoi. Near Hanoi, a move to switch lean paddies to greenhouses is also advancing (The price of turning poor paddy into greenhouses: the land switch advancing near Hanoi), and attempts to change land use around the same Noi Bai are running in parallel.
Annual revenue of 2 billion dong, employing 15 locals, distributing seed stock free to 11 households
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Annual sales | About 2 billion dong (about 11.8 million yen) |
| Product rating | OCOP 3-star |
| Employment | 15 locals, 8-12 million dong a month (about 47,000-70,000 yen) |
| Livestock-shed odor | Reduced by about 80% with microbial material |
| Technology transfer | Earthworm seed stock provided free to 11 poor households |
The cycle does not complete with compost alone. Dia long, dried earthworm itself, is a material traditionally used as a crude drug, and becomes a revenue source separate from compost. Annual revenue of 11.8 million yen is small seen as a counterparty for an export contract, but what to watch is less the sales figure than the production design of organic materials that run antibiotic-free, and the structure where a separate material called dia long emerges from it as a byproduct.
Compost is a material to use locally, dia long a material to carry to Japan: separating their characters
The Japanese side's interest splits in two directions. One is earthworm compost as a soil-improvement material for organic and special cultivation. Compost made without relying on antibiotics is easy to handle in terms of proving input materials. However, because compost is heavy and bulky and transport cost eats into unit price, rather than importing it to Japan to spread, a design that has production areas growing Japan-bound crops in Vietnam incorporate this kind of material is more realistic. In fact, a case where the starting point for reducing pesticides was soil building is also seen in a Ha Tinh citrus orchard (It was the soil that cut the pesticides: the order shown by a 7-ha citrus orchard in Ha Tinh). The other is dia long. While it is light and high in unit price and easy to carry, because its use is as a crude drug, an inspection setup for specifications, drying conditions, heavy metals, and the like is a prerequisite. Before speaking of efficacy, it is an area where the material's traceability is first questioned.
Look at the technology's power to propagate, spreading to 11 households, rather than one household's production volume
This kind of ultra-small farm cannot satisfy Japan's large-lot demand on its own. What is realistic is production-area-unit supply that bundles multiple farms of the same type, or lateral expansion of a technology package. The fact that she has distributed seed stock to 11 households is the bud of that. If you cut it off looking only at one household's volume, you miss the possibility of areal spread. Whether circular agriculture can be evaluated as a sourcing source has also been questioned in the large-scale Ha Tinh case (About 7.9 billion yen for five plants: can Ha Tinh's circular agriculture become a sourcing partner?), and GHT Farm, while at the opposite extreme, is the same in principle in that the pedigree of its input materials is clear.
If you explore a point of contact, start from separating the product category and the inspection setup
First, you want to separate whether the product covered by OCOP certification is compost or dia long. For compost, confirm the stability of components and the raw material (which livestock's manure); for dia long, the drying and storage conditions and inspection records come first. Because both are small-scale and lots are hard to read, you need to have the annual production plan shared at an early stage. Approach in this order and the detours decrease.
