In a border village of Son La Province in northwestern Vietnam, a single farmer who turned a cornfield into a citrus orchard harvests roughly 100 tonnes a year, earning more than ten times what he did when growing corn and cassava. It is the case of Hoang Cong Van of Long Sap village (x\u00e3 L\u00f3ng S\u1eadp), reported by the local paper Dan Viet. For Japanese sourcing staff and fruit-tree people, the article that followed a young man taking on Son La Arabica<\/a>\u2014 the same flow of 'switching to a cash crop' seen there is now happening with citrus too. What is worth noting is not the amount but the substance of the cultivation: for 15 years using no herbicide at all, planting along contour lines on the slope, and growing with the grass left in place. Because it overlaps, to a surprising degree, with the thinking Japanese horticulture people have built up over many years.<\/p>\n Van's orchard is 5 hectares. The mainstays are cam Canh (a thin-skinned, sweet local mandarin) and seedless tangerine, with about 1,000 seedless mandarin trees added. From this, roughly 100 tonnes of fruit are harvested each year.<\/p>\n Previously this land centered on crops like corn, cassava, and ginger. Continuous cropping on the slope wears out the soil, and income is unstable. Van, who decided on a full switch to fruit trees in his 40s, toured advanced northern citrus areas such as nearby Cao Phong to bring back techniques, and has spent more than ten years building up the orchard.<\/p>\n At the core of this orchard are two labor-intensive choices. One is the method of planting along contour lines on the slope, keeping the row width at about 2 meters and minimizing digging. This is to curb the loss of topsoil, the biggest enemy on sloped land, and to keep nutrients in the soil.<\/p>\n The other is grass-cover cultivation. For about 15 years, Van has used no chemical herbicide at all. The grass in the orchard is mowed by machine, and the cut grass is laid at the base of the trees as mulch. It is a system that protects the soil's humus layer and keeps returning organic matter. Fertilizer, too, is mainly organic compost he prepares himself from corn and soybeans, with chemical fertilizer added only in very small amounts during flowering and fruiting.<\/p>\n This is almost the same idea as the method known in Japanese citrus areas and tea gardens as 'grass-cover cultivation' and 'no-till.'a demonstration in Quang Tri Province that returned forest to coffee fields and raised the unit price<\/a> As with that, the path by which cultivation that lowers environmental load ends up pushing up both quality and price is beginning to appear in citrus too.<\/p>\n Lining up the positioning of Van's orchard and Son La Province's citrus and fruit trees with reporting and the province's published figures looks like this.<\/p>\nA crop switch that happened in a border village<\/h2>\n
Why he kept 'using no herbicide' for 15 years<\/h2>\n
The gap with corn, in numbers<\/h2>\n