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How ‘Farmfluencers’ Are Making Vietnam’s Rice Fields More Sustainable
Vietnamese rice farmer Van Dinh Nguyen is hardly on social media, but he has become an influencer in a face-to-face sense in his own community.
Nguyen has encouraged 1,645 fellow rice farmers to take up more sustainable methods through a “train-the-trainer” program rolled out over the past three years by the Viet Nam Farmers Union (VNFU), in a bid to overcome farmers’ fears that adopting greener practices would come at a cost to their output and livelihoods.
Nguyen was one of around 20 influential and motivated farmers across six communities the VNFU selected to be trained in how to change their approach to rice farming in three key ways: reducing the burning of crop residue, offering alternatives to chemical fertilizer, and improving water management.
“Before the project was implemented, I saw that most local farmers burned their rice straw and stubble after the harvest, excessively used chemical fertilizers and continuously had rice plants flooded throughout the crop,” says Nguyen. He is the chairman of the VNFU Nghia Hung local branch in the Bac Giang province, in the country’s northeast.
Terraced rice fields in northwest Vietnam. Credit: kataleewan intarachote / Shutterstock
“I understand that helping the farmers to shift to more sustainable farming is important. So, when I was invited to be part of the train-the-trainer program to increase environmentally friendly rice cultivation, I was very eager because I heard that this program would help to propagate and mobilize the farmers to apply more sustainable techniques, contributing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
Rice is both a staple food and backbone of Vietnam’s farming industry. With over 15 million smallholder farmers working 7.12 million hectares of land, Vietnam is the world’s third largest rice exporter. Rice accounts for 15 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, so sustainability efforts in the rice industry are a key part of the Vietnamese government’s strategy to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Moving to low carbon rice production, according to the World Bank, offers significant potential for Vietnam to meet that goal.
For every ton of harvested rice, over a ton of rice stubble and straw is left behind. Burning it has been a traditional practice in rice farming, but every ton burned pollutes the air with nearly 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide. The use of chemical fertilizer, which became popular in the 1980s thanks to economic pressures prompting farmers to prioritize higher yields, has also led to soil acidity and reduced soil fertility, as well as air, water and soil pollution.
Meanwhile, flooding rice fields with water was long considered the way to create an optimal environment for rice plants. However, an “alternate wet and dry” (AWD) irrigation method, in which farmers switch between flooding a field and letting water levels drop, rather than continuous flooding, started becoming popular in the early 2000s. AWD irrigation has been shown to use 38 percent less water than continuous flooding, and can reduce methane emissions by up to 85 percent since pumping in less water requires less fuel. Researchers have also found AWD irrigation increases water productivity, or crop yield by cubic meter of water consumption, by around 17 percent compared with continuous flooding. With continuous flooding, up to 51 percent of water is lost through seepage.
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