LONG AN, Vietnam (AP) — There is one thing that sets the rice fields of 60-year-old Vo Van Van apart from a mosaic of thousands of other emerald fields in Long An province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta: It is not complete flooded.
That and the giant drone, with a wingspan resembling that of an eagle, puffing high above the ground as it rains organic fertilizer on the knee-high rice seedlings undulating below.
Using less water and using a drone to fertilize are new techniques Van is trying and Vietnam hopes will help solve a paradox at the heart of rice farming: the finicky crop is not only vulnerable to climate change, but contributes to it unique way.
Rice should be grown separately from other crops and seedlings should be planted separately in flooded fields; grueling, dirty jobs that require a lot of labor and water and generate a lot of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas that can trap more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the short term.
It’s a problem unique to rice farming because flooded fields prevent oxygen from entering the soil, creating conditions for methane-producing bacteria. According to a 2023 Food and Agriculture Organization report, rice fields contribute 8% of all human-produced methane in the atmosphere.
Vietnam is the third largest rice exporter in the world, and its importance to Vietnamese culture is palpable in the Mekong Delta. The fertile patchwork of green fields, crisscrossed by silver waterways, has helped prevent famine since the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Rice is not only the mainstay of most meals, it is considered a gift from the gods and continues to be revered today.
It is poured into noodles and sheets and fermented into wine. In busy markets, motorcyclists drag 10 kilo bags home. Barges transport mountains of grain across the Mekong River. Rice grains are then dried and dehulled by machines before being packaged for sale in factories, lined from floor to ceiling with bags of rice.
Van has been working with one of Vietnam’s largest rice exporters, the Loc Troi Group, for the past two years, using a different irrigation method known as alternate wetting and drying, or AWD. This requires less water than traditional agriculture, because his rice fields are not constantly flooded. They also produce less methane.
Using the drone to fertilize the crops saves on labor costs. With climate shocks driving a migration to the cities, Van says it’s harder to find people who want to work on the farms. It also ensures that precise amounts of fertilizers are applied. Too much fertilizer causes the soil to release earth-warming nitrogen gases.
Once the crops are harvested, Van no longer burns the rice stubble – a major cause of air pollution in Vietnam and its neighboring countries, as well as in Thailand and India. Instead, it is collected by the Loc Troi Group for sale to other companies that use it as animal feed and for growing straw mushrooms, a popular addition to stir-fries.
Van benefits in several ways. His costs are lower, while the output from his farm is the same. By using organic fertilizer, he can sell to European markets where customers are willing to pay a premium for organic rice. Best of all, he has time to take care of his own garden.
“I grow jackfruit and coconut,” he said.
Loc Troi Group CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan said these methods allow farmers to use 40% less rice seed and 30% less water. The costs for pesticides, fertilizer and labor 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 expand the area under its methods from the current 100 hectares to 300,000 hectares.
That is a far cry from Vietnam’s own target of growing “high-quality rice with low emissions” on 1 million hectares of farmland by 2030, an area more than six times the size of London. Vietnamese officials estimate this would reduce production costs by a fifth. and increase farmers’ profits by more than $600 million, according to state media outlet Vietnam News.
Vietnam realized early on that it needed to reconfigure its rice sector. It was the largest rice exporter, ahead of India and Thailand, to sign a 2021 pledge to reduce methane emissions at the annual United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
According to recent research by Vietnam’s Water Resources Science Institute, the sector suffers losses of more than $400 million every year. This is worrying, not only for the country but for the entire world.
The Mekong Delta, where 90% of Vietnam’s exported rice is grown, is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change. A 2022 UN climate report warned of more severe flooding in the wet season and droughts in the dry season. Dozens 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. Sea levels are rising and the lower reaches of the river are becoming salty. And unsustainable levels of groundwater pumping and sand extraction for construction have compounded the problems.
Changing age-old forms of rice farming is expensive, and even though methane is a more powerful cause of global warming than carbon dioxide, it receives only 2% of climate financing, Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, said at the UN climate summit in 2011. Dubai last year.
Combating methane emissions is the “one, clear area” where cheap, effective and replicable solutions exist, Banga said. The World Bank is supporting Vietnam’s efforts and has begun helping the Indonesian government expand climate-resilient agriculture as part of more than a dozen projects to reduce methane globally.
The hope is that more countries will follow suit, although there is no “one-size-fits-all,” said Lewis H. Ziska, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “The only similarity is that it requires water,” he said, adding that different planting and irrigation methods can help manage water better.
Growing more genetically diverse rice varieties would also help, as some are better able to withstand excess heat or require less water, while others may even emit less methane, he said.
Nguyen Van Nhut, director of rice export company Hoang Minh Nhat, said his suppliers use rice varieties that can thrive even when the water is salty and the heat is extreme.
Now the company is adapting to unusual rain showers that make it more difficult to dry the rice, increasing the risk of fungal or insect damage. Normally rice is dried in the sun immediately after harvest, but Nhut said his company has drying facilities at the packing plant and will also install machines to dry the grains closer to the fields.
“We don’t know which month is the rainy season, like before,” he said.
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