Agroecological farming innovations: Cases tudies in Hoa Binh and Lam Dong province, Vietnam

Implementation time: Nov 2015-Mar 2016
Funding agency: GRET Vietnam
Prepared by: Dr. Pham Van Hoi , Dr. Ngo The An

Summary
AE practices are good, especially for small-scale and partly self-sufficient farmers in Vietnam. This is a way from which farmers can take most benefit from nature (i.e., sunlight, carbon and nitrogen), instead of relying on external inputs which have been increasingly expensive and taking larger part of agricultural harvest returns from farmers.

However, existing impressive AE practices have been developed or readapted by individual farmers mostly after paying costs for their dependence on chemical inputs. Instead of relying on farming inputs widely available in Vietnamese market such as NPK, AE innovative farmers have learnt themselves for their own formulation of compost production or mixing of individual chemical fertilizers – to fit with nutrition demands of their crops at different stages, and very important, to save production cost. All of these practices are not only making economic sense to farmers themselves, but also to their farm sustainability – the target that some policies have been clearly aiming at. Ironically, these locally rooted farming innovations have not yet paid attention by governments, or institutionalized for further development.

AE practices have been taken an expansion with the innovative farmers as focal points. So far, innovative AE expansion has been rather limited to close-surrounding communities. However, as the case of pepper farmer in Lam Dong province, under increasing pressure for better farming efficiency given increasing external input costs and more information access and exchange, it is likely that innovative AE expansion will keep taking expansion in future.

In addition, given more (administrative) secure of land ownership from which farmers have more demands for conserving and protecting their soil (& water), and more linkages between farmers and market actors (i.e., through contract farming) from which farmers have more demands in diversifying their crops to meet daily/periodically demands of their market actors, AE practices, in particular conservative agricultural techniques will have more opportunity to be developed. Lessons learnt, especially from conservation coffee and pepper in Lam Dong province, can be effectively and feasibly applied widely in Vietnam, not only for these crops, but also for other fruit crops such as banana, cashew nut, citrus, litchi, longan etc., Governments, research institutions and NGOs can work more to boost this expansion process effectively faster.