In An Binh village in Phu Tho province in northern Vietnam, a producer who grows oyster mushrooms using the shade of a timber plantation and earns a profit of about VND 700 million a year (roughly \u00a54.2 million, converting at about \u00a560 to VND 10,000) is drawing attention. His name is Quoc Van Hieu. The idea is to fill the waiting time of forestry, which takes 5-7 years until the trees can be felled, with mushroom cultivation under the canopy. In Japan too, the neglect of planted forests and the idling of satoyama have long been issues, and his approach is rich in suggestion in that it generates cash income without felling the forest. A similar picture, in Lang Son in the north, a growing area that earns from amomum (sa nhan) without felling the forest<\/a> has also begun to move.<\/p>\n On Hieu's farm, about 150,000 substrate blocks are lined up under the forest at all times. What he grows is organically cultivated oyster mushrooms (n\u1ea5m s\u00f2 in Vietnamese). The harvest reaches about 3 ta a day, that is, the scale of 300 kg, and daily sales come to about VND 10 million (about \u00a560,000). Working back from this, the shipment unit price is roughly \u00a5200 per kilo, a level that is reasonable even by Japan's freshness-driven sense of the market.<\/p>\n The point is that he has not built new cultivation facilities. Mushroom cultivation inherently incurs heavy air-conditioning costs to lower the temperature in hot periods. But the canopy works, as is, as a natural sunshade and heat-retaining layer and keeps a temperature band suited to cultivation, so the cooling burden can be greatly reduced. The land is a plantation he already owns, and the roof is the leaves of the trees. It is a picture in which the forest itself shoulders both the initial investment and the operating cost.<\/p>\n That this effort does not end as mere mushroom cultivation under the forest is because a cycle is built in. Hieu also raises poultry under the same forest and returns their droppings to the soil as organic fertilizer. The soil improves, and the growth of the timber trees is said to have sped up by about 27% over normal. As the trees grow, the main forestry income comes in earlier, and in the meantime mushrooms and poultry earn the daily take. It is a design in which the elements cancel out one another's costs.<\/p>\n The idea of turning waste into the entry point for another kind of production is quietly spreading in Vietnam's growing areas. On an outlying island in the Mekong, the sandy-soil circular farming of Co To island, which routes shrimp heads to fertilizer to sweeten watermelons<\/a> has continued for 30 years. In turning a by-product with no use into nutrition for the neighboring crop, the core idea is the same as Phu Tho's forest farming.<\/p>\nHe turned the plantation's waiting time into mushroom shelves<\/h2>\n
Poultry droppings become fertilizer and push tree growth up 27%<\/h2>\n