A employee carries a bag of rice at a warehouse in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, Vietnam, Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024. Vietnam is the world’s third-largest rice exporter, and the staple significance to Vietnamese tradition is palpable within the Mekong Delta. (AP Photograph/Jae C. Hong)
LONG AN, Vietnam — There’s one factor that distinguishes 60-year-old Vo Van Van’s rice fields from a mosaic of hundreds of different emerald fields throughout Lengthy An province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta: It isn’t completely flooded.
That and the enormous drone, its wingspan just like that of an eagle, chuffing excessive above because it rains natural fertilizer onto the knee-high rice seedlings billowing under.
Utilizing much less water and utilizing a drone to fertilize are new methods that Van is making an attempt and Vietnam hopes will assist remedy a paradox on the coronary heart of rising rice: The finicky crop isn’t simply weak to local weather change but in addition contributes uniquely to it.
Rice have to be grown individually from different crops and seedlings should be individually planted in flooded fields; backbreaking, soiled work requiring a whole lot of labor and water that generates a whole lot of methane, a potent planet-warming gasoline that may entice greater than 80 instances extra warmth within the environment within the brief time period than carbon dioxide.
READ: Low-carbon rice manufacturing helps Vietnam meet emission goal
It’s an issue distinctive to rising rice, as inundated fields cease oxygen from getting into the soil, creating the situations for methane-producing micro organism.
Issues distinctive to rising rice
Rice paddies contribute 8 p.c of all human-made methane within the environment, in response to a 2023 Meals and Agriculture Group report.
Vietnam is the world’s third-largest rice exporter, and the staple’s significance to Vietnamese tradition is palpable within the Mekong Delta.
The fertile patchwork of inexperienced fields crisscrossed by silvery waterways has helped stave off famine for the reason that Vietnam Struggle led to 1975. Rice isn’t simply the mainstay of most meals, it’s thought of a present from the gods and continues to be commemorated.
It’s molded into noodles and sheets and fermented into wine. In busy markets, motorcyclists lug 10-kilogram (22-pound) luggage to their houses. Barges haul mountains of grain up and down the Mekong River.
READ: Dry soil to curb Asia’s early 2024 rice output, stress provide
Rice kernels are then dried and hulled by machines earlier than they’re packed on the market in factories, lined from flooring to ceiling with sacks of rice.
Van has been working with considered one of Vietnam’s largest rice exporters, the Loc Troi Group, for the previous two years and is utilizing a unique methodology of irrigation often known as alternate wetting and drying, or AWD. This requires much less water than conventional farming since his paddy fields aren’t repeatedly submerged. In addition they produce much less methane.
Utilizing the drone to fertilize the crops saves on labor prices. With local weather shocks pushing a migration to cities, Van mentioned that it’s more durable to search out individuals to work the farms. It additionally ensures exact quantities of fertilizers are utilized. An excessive amount of fertilizer causes the soil to launch Earth-warming nitrogen gases.
As soon as crops are harvested, Van now not burns the rice stubble — a serious reason for air air pollution in Vietnam and in its neighbors, in addition to Thailand and India. As a substitute, it’s collected by the Loc Troi Group on the market to different firms that use it as livestock feed and for rising straw mushrooms, a preferred addition to stir-fries.
Decrease manufacturing prices
Van advantages in varied methods. His prices are down whereas his farm yield is similar. Utilizing natural fertilizer permits him to promote to European markets the place prospects are keen to pay a premium for natural rice. Better of all, he has time to are likely to his personal backyard.
“I’m rising jackfruit and coconut,” he mentioned.
Loc Troi Group CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan mentioned that these strategies allow farmers to make use of 40 p.c much less rice seed and 30 p.c much less water. Prices for pesticides, fertilizer, and labor are also decrease.
Thuan mentioned Loc Troi — which exports to greater than 40 international locations together with in Europe, Africa, the USA and Japan — is working with farmers to increase acreage utilizing its strategies from the present 100 hectares to 300,000 hectares.
That’s a great distance from Vietnam’s personal goal of rising “prime quality, low emission rice” on 1 million hectares of farmland, an space greater than six instances the dimensions of London, by 2030.
READ: Vietnam faces $3-B annual crop losses from rising saltwater ranges
Vietnamese officers estimate that would scale back manufacturing prices by a fifth and improve farmers’ earnings by greater than $600 million, in response to the state media outlet Vietnam Information.
Vietnam acknowledged early on that it needed to reconfigure its rice sector. It was the most important rice exporter, forward of each India and Thailand, to signal a 2021 pledge to cut back methane emissions on the annual United Nations local weather summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Every year, the trade suffers losses of over $400 million, in response to current analysis by Vietnam’s Water Assets Science Institute. That is worrying, not only for the nation however for the world.
The Mekong Delta, the place 90 p.c of Vietnam’s exported rice is farmed, is among the world’s areas most weak to local weather change.
READ: Rising seas threaten Vietnam’s prime rice producer
A U.N. local weather change report in 2022 warned of heavier flooding within the moist season and droughts within the dry season. Scores of dams constructed upstream in China and Laos have decreased the river’s circulation and the quantity of sediment that it carries downriver to the ocean.
The ocean degree is rising and turning the river’s decrease reaches salty. And unsustainable ranges of groundwater pumping and sand mining for development have added to the issues.
Altering centuries-old types of rice farming is dear, and despite the fact that methane is a stronger trigger of world warming than carbon dioxide, it solely receives 2 p.c of local weather financing, Ajay Banga, the World Financial institution’s president, advised the U.N. local weather summit in Dubai final 12 months.
Local weather-resilient farming
Combating methane emissions is the “one uncommon, clear space” the place low-cost, efficient, and replicable options exist, Banga mentioned. The World Financial institution is supporting Vietnam’s efforts and has begun serving to the Indonesian authorities to increase climate-resilient farming as part of greater than a dozen initiatives to cut back methane worldwide.
The hope is that extra international locations will observe, although there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all,” mentioned Lewis H. Ziska, a professor of environmental well being sciences at Columbia College. “The one commonality is that water is required,” he mentioned, including that totally different strategies of planting and irrigation might help handle water higher.
Rising extra genetically various rice varieties would additionally assist as a result of some are extra resilient to extra warmth or require much less water, whereas others may even emit much less methane, he mentioned.
Nguyen Van Nhut, director of the rice export firm Hoang Minh Nhat, mentioned its suppliers are utilizing styles of rice that may thrive even when the water is briny and the warmth is excessive.
Now, the enterprise is adapting to the unseasonal rains that make it more durable to dry the rice, including to dangers from mould or insect harm. Sometimes, rice is dried within the solar instantly after harvest, however Nhut mentioned his firm has drying amenities of their packaging manufacturing unit and likewise will set up equipment to dry the grains nearer to the fields.
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“We don’t know which month is the wet season, like we did earlier than,” he mentioned.
