by LONG AN, Vietnam (AP) — There’s one thing that distinguishes the rice fields of 60-year-old Vo Van Van from a mosaic of thousands of other emerald fields across Long An province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta: It’s not about water completely.
That and the huge drone, its wings like an eagle, soaring high overhead as it rains organic fertilizer on the knee-high rice seedlings that are falling below.
Van is using less water and using a drone to fertilize and Vietnam hopes they will help solve a paradox at the heart of rice growing: Not only is the finicky crop vulnerable to climate change but he adds distinctively.
Rice must be grown separately from other crops and seedlings must be planted individually in flooded fields; backbreaking, dirty work that requires a lot of labor and water that generates a lot of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas that can trap more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere in the short term than carbon dioxide.
It’s a problem unique to growing rice, because overgrown fields stop oxygen from entering the soil, creating the conditions for methane-producing bacteria. Rice paddies put 8% of all human methane into the atmosphere, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2023.
Vietnam is the world’s third largest exporter of rice, and the importance of the staple to Vietnamese culture can be seen in the Mekong Delta. The fertile patchwork of green fields crisscrossed by silvery waterways has helped keep famine at bay since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Rice is not only the staple of most meals, it is considered a gift from the gods and continues to be. to be famous.
It is shaped into noodles and sheets and fermented into wine. In busy markets, motorcyclists lug 10-kilogram (22-pound) bags to their homes. Barges pull mountains of grain up and down the Mekong River. The rice is then dried and seeded by machines before it is packed for sale in factories, which are sacked from floor to ceiling.
Van has been working with one of Vietnam’s largest rice exporters, the Loc Troi Group, for the past two years and is using a different irrigation method called alternate wetting and drying, or AWD. This requires less water than traditional farming since its paddy fields are not continuously flooded. They also produce less methane.
Using the drone to fertilize the crops saves on labor costs. With climate shocks forcing migration to cities, Van said it is harder to find people to work on the farms. It also ensures that precise amounts of fertilizer are applied. Too much fertilizer causes the soil to release nitrogen gas which warms the Earth.
Once a crop is harvested, Van no longer burns the rice stubble – a major cause of air pollution in Vietnam and its neighbors, as well as Thailand and India. Instead, the Loc Troi Group collects it to sell to other companies who use it as livestock feed and to grow straw mushrooms, which contribute significantly to the occasional fry.
A van benefits from it in several ways. His costs are reduced and his farm output is the same. By using organic fertilizer he can sell on European markets where customers are willing to pay a premium for organic rice. Best of all, it’s time to take care of his own garden.
“I’m growing fruit and coconut shad,” he said.
Loc Troi Group CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan said these methods enable farmers to use 40% less rice seeds and 30% less water. Pesticide, fertilizer and labor costs are also lower. Thuan said Loc Troi – which exports to more than 40 countries including Europe, Africa, the United States and Japan – is working with farmers to increase acreage using its methods from the current 100 hectares to 300,000 hectares.
That’s a far cry from Vietnam’s own goal of growing “high-quality, low-emission rice” on 1 million hectares of farmland, an area more than six times the size of London, by 2030. Vietnamese officials estimate that would reduce production costs by one fifth. and increase the profit of farmers by more than $600 million, according to the state media outlet Vietnam News.
Vietnam soon recognized that it had to reconfigure its rice sector. The largest rice exporter, ahead of both India and Thailand, signed a 2021 pledge to reduce methane emissions at the annual United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
Every year, the industry suffers losses of over $400 million, according to recent research by the Vietnam Institute of Water Resources Science. This is a matter of concern, not only for the country but for the world.
The Mekong Delta, where 90% of Vietnam’s exported rice is farmed, is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change. A UN report on climate change in 2022 warned of heavier floods in the wet season and droughts in the dry season. Scores of dams built upstream in China and Laos have reduced the river’s flow and the amount of sediment it carries downstream to the sea. The sea level is rising and the lower reaches of the river are turning salty. And unsustainable levels of groundwater pumping and sand mining for construction have added to the problems.
Changing centuries-old forms of rice farming is expensive, and although methane is a more powerful cause of global warming than carbon dioxide, it receives only 2% of climate finance, said Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank, with the UN climate summit in Dubai last year.
Tackling methane emissions is the “obvious, rare area” of low-cost, effective and reusable solutions, Banga said. The World Bank is supporting Vietnam’s efforts and has begun helping the Indonesian government expand climate-resilient farming as part of more than a dozen projects to reduce methane around the world.
More countries are expected to follow, although there is no “one size fits all,” said Lewis H. Ziska, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “The only commonality is that water is needed,” he said, adding that different planting and irrigation methods can help manage water better.
Growing more genetically modified varieties of rice would also help because some are more resilient to excess heat or require less water, while others may emit less methane, he said.
Nguyen Van Nhut, the director of the Hoang Minh Nhat rice export company, said that its suppliers are using rice varieties that can thrive even when the water is dirty and the heat is extreme.
Now, the business is adapting to unseasonal rains that make it more difficult to dry the rice, increasing the risks of mold or insect damage. Normally, rice is dried in the sun immediately after harvest, but Nhut said his company has drying facilities in its packaging factory and will also place machinery to dry the grains closer to the fields.
“We don’t know what month is the rainy season, like we had before,” he said.
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