After 5 years of growing clean vegetables, Mr. Nguyen Khac Dao and his wife had to sell each village to sell in the village market.
In 1982, Nguyen Khac Dao was 20 years old. The house has half a sao of vegetables from Tien Le cooperative (Tien Yen commune, Hoai Duc district). In the morning, listening to the gong, Dao carried out the fields with his mother. The strip of land along Day river was before planting fruit trees, but the yield was not high and was destroyed in the 1980s. At the time, Tien Le farmers planted everything from onions, garlic, melon, and leafy vegetables. co-operate.
Mr. Dao has four sao of farming in Tien Le safe vegetable cooperative. Image: Hoang Phuong.
There is a beam of rain, the previous day saw a deep speckled worm eating, the next day only inert leaves tendon. Dao earns a 65-glass bottle, hangs a teng in the handlebars of his bicycle, goes down to an agricultural supplies company in the town, 3 km from his house to buy pesticides. Pesticides and fertilizers are managed by the State, transfer to interest rates according to the rate of books. Each month and a half of vegetable season, Dao’s family “hits” less than a bottle of medicine.
In the 1990s, the Dao and his husband were divided into two sao and gathered their ancestral fields, for a total of four sao, they continued to grow vegetables. The country was open, and the amount of pesticides rushed in, each year around 80,000 tons. Dao does not need to filter his bicycle and buy bikes when shops and drug agents have opened in the village. Many farmers that day could not read the words printed on the packaging, but whenever the vegetables have worms, leaf spots, just take the tree to, “the agent put the drugs, sprayed into the worms will die”.
Vuong Sy Thanh was in grade 6, or with his father cycling 15 km from Cong Hoa commune, Quoc Oai district to Cat Que commune, Hoai Duc district, buying cabbage seeds. “Put your hands on my nose”, Dad turned to tell me, then closed my eyes and closed my nose and kicked me quickly through the road full of the smell of pesticides. For the past thirty years, Thanh has not forgotten the pungent smell that enters his nose every time he passes through vegetable fields that year.
But on his own two acres of land, Thanh’s parents are like Dao and his wife on the “open days” of plant protection drugs, cheerfully pumping and seeing less effort in weeding and disease eradication. Only a couple of thousand went to the beginning of the village to have a package. Chinh Thanh repeatedly sent money to his parents to buy medicine, told him “tell me to sell this, this”, as simple as buying bottles of soy sauce and onion.
The fields of shavings in three years turned black and hard, the rain hardened, the face was solid, the sun froze, holding in the palm of the hand is like holding a stone. Thanh’s parents sprayed with a hand pump, poor valves sometimes leaked out, seeped into their clothes, and they sprayed every time, also complained about people, dizziness, and some days, they missed the rice. The time of drug isolation was then, at least 15 days, with 30 days of type. But no farmer waited so long. Each person who makes vegetables leaves a small garden behind the house, planted separately for “his family to eat”.
In 2008, the capital expanded its administrative boundaries. In one night, former Ha Tay people like Thanh took a household registration in Hanoi, knowing for the first time the planning of safe vegetable growing areas.
New fields of vegetable spraying have biological warning. Image: Hoang Phuong.
In 2009, a project to produce safe vegetables was named Tien Le. The vegetable-growing regions now only meet 60% of the output supplied to more than 6 million city residents, the remaining 40% is imported from the provinces of Bac Ninh, Hung Yen, Hai Duong, Hai Phong and Vinh Phuc.
Mr. Dao was selected to train and learn how to grow safe vegetables. After three months of sitting in the field and practicing in the field, the farmer with thirty years of experience in growing vegetables is instructed by the engineers how to prepare the soil, compost, sow seeds so as to minimize pests and diseases, how to identify types of vegetables. Toxic pesticides should not be used on vegetables.
“You keep saying the whole theory, you must see it if we hear it before we hear it”, Ms. Dang Thi Thu Thuy, Head of Hoai Duc Plant Protection Station, still remembers the saying of a farmer from Tien Le in a reduced training class. minimize chemical use, proceed to test the safe vegetable production area of the capital.
“In those years, farmers carried a spray bottle every week without knowing whether it was already to the point, how many days after each pesticide was sprayed,” Thuy estimated before 2009, more than 70% of the pesticides were sprayed. Plant protection farmers use is still chemistry.
Five female officials at the station each day shared their “wading fields” with their relatives. Ms. Thuy made insects and moth traps in her field. At dawn, farmers go to the field. The staff was later present, explaining the rules of development, the life cycles of the worms and how to prevent them. “People go first, we wade to follow,” every year, working forever, they also gradually believe, reducing the frequency of spraying 5 vegetables a crop a month to 2-3 times.
Hundreds of fields of Tien Le are used to planting all kinds of fruits and vegetables, one piece of each kind, surrounded by a net and a separate section. Nearly two dozen wells are distributed around the net house to get groundwater for vegetables. Mr. Dao also eagerly changed his field, importing his four sao of vegetables into a safe vegetable cooperative. He was elected as the production leader of nearly two dozen households.
For five consecutive years, there were no geographical indications, no brands, Tien Le vegetables had not been consumed, no companies found them. Occasionally going to the fair, Mr. Dao still proposes to the authorities “to find ways to pay for farmers, because we do it safely and do it properly without selling vegetables.” In those years, Mrs. Chien and his wife used to cut vegetables to market. Mr. Dao put his hand on his forehead in the night, crying tears because “clean vegetables mixed with sprayed vegetables, buyers know who”.
Mr. Vuong Sy Thanh once “wrapped” in Lam Dong half a year learning to grow clean vegetables. Image: Hoang Phuong.
Vuong Sy Thanh abandoned the vegetable field from the day he got married, now he is the owner of a vermicelli factory on the banks of the Day River. The profession is quite profitable so in Cong Hoa commune, dozens of roofs have a vermicelli factory. Retired as a vegetable, but Thanh’s life span with chemicals has not ended. To make tough, fragrant and transparent vermicelli, the boss’s hand is soaked in detergents and additives. The shiver of the small days passing through the Cat Que vegetable area, now becoming everyday with Thanh in the vermicelli factory.
“Can not viciously harm each other forever, their children will ultimately be the one to eat”, Thanh said about the decision to close the vermicelli factory. In July 2016, he took a few million dongs back, took the car to Lam Dong to learn how to grow clean vegetables.
At that time, in Hanoi, more than 30 projects and thousands of hectares of agricultural land were planned as safe vegetables, but from 2012 to 2017, Hanoi’s vegetable yield increased by only 7%. The city still relies on outside supply. In 5 years from 2013 to 2017, the proportion of contribution to the growth of Hanoi agriculture continuously decreased, from 0.14% to 0.06%.
Duc Trong district, Lam Dong province at that time was a safe vegetable area with a national reputation with the model of growing vegetables in net houses. Thanh spent the first two months burning his face in the highland sunshine just to learn how to climb to the ground to do weeding, which his parents only needed to carry on a couple of herbicide sprays to beat him as “free time”. The lands in Lam Dong seemed to melt in the hands of a North Vietnamese farmer. It took a long time for Thanh to touch the soft soil.
Another four months to learn how to sow, choose, and fertilize. The rigor of making clean vegetables makes Thanh “sweat”. Most importantly, not using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but using bio-baits, weeding, periodic disease prevention, knowledge that agricultural officials Hoai Duc like Ms. Thuy took years to persuade farmers. Tien Le people.
Half a year of apprenticeship, back to his homeland, Thanh predicted “Making safe vegetables will be 20 times harder than the old farming style”. Arduous came to him right from the day he returned to the countryside In December 2016, Thanh heard that he wanted to rent 2 hectares of land to make clean vegetables. Every villager said he was doting, did not believe and thought about renting land to “make fun of everything”. Thanh had to ask the commune agriculture official to sponsor. In the first year, he only hired 1.5 hectares of 46 farmers.
Relatives and relatives working together make vegetables nearly a dozen people. For years, he used to solve all problems that arise in the field with some medicine, now he returns to the habit of composting green manure, waiting for decay, resting the soil, and then sitting on his back to catch the worms and weeding like decades ago, Everyone shook their heads and it was difficult and expensive. They told him to “do the slab”, Thanh insisted.
VND 600 million borrowed and poured in to rent land, bury poles, build net houses, clear grass and build soil. But only after the first storm in 2017, the pole was buried too shallow simultaneously. The first “safe” cabbage was borer, whistle, sold pathetic prices. Thanh’s wife watched a ton of money put on hats without collecting a profit, impatiently, advised her husband to “recalculate”.
The packages of pesticides that were used by Mr. Thanh gathered them into the bin in the corner of the field. Image: Hoang Phuong.
That same year, the first success came for Mr. Dao and Tien Le clean vegetable farmer. In February 2017, the company went to the field to find out the farming model. Mr. Dao, who was then the leader of the village’s safe vegetable group, was committed to product quality. The production team sets up a monitoring board, checking the field diary for each household.
After 5 years of holding vegetables in a net house to sell at the market “as cheap as”, the freshly grown Tien Le vegetable farmers could taste sweet fruits. Where vegetables cut, car to buy, pay fresh to it. Safe vegetable scales are priced double, triple trade baskets sell.
Safe vegetables share the same problem with most Vietnamese agricultural products: outputs. The following crops of Mr. Vuong Sy Thanh fall into the “traditional” position of farmers across the country, with good harvests but with devaluation. The owner of a vegetable store on the basis of nearly 300 kg of cabbage to baskets, 30 km away across the city for sale. After five months, from June to October 2017, Thanh met the first “term”, who is a cooperative owner who buys big fresh vegetables in Linh Nam market.
“Is it really clean?”, The customer doubted, telling Thanh to take him to the garden, touching each handful of soil, medicine labels, seeing each scrubbing hand-picked grass, biological traps around the net house, only agreeing to buy. . A few years later, skilled, well-known, schools, agencies, and factories came to order vegetables by themselves. At that time, Thanh’s wife stopped giving advice to her husband to quit.
Over the past three years, thousands of truckloads of vegetables carrying vegetables from Mr. Thanh’s field have radiated everywhere, none of them has experienced the problem of pesticide residues when tested. Six sao of vegetables of Dao and his wife in Tien Le harvested 50 kgs a day, about six or seven times a year. If “heaven”, each year the couple also let out more than 200 million.
Chien’s wife Chien, many years ago, no longer had to worry about cutting vegetables at the market early, nor did she need to know how much they sell now.
