Somewhere around 800m up, amid rocky spines and crisscrossing gullies fanning out of Vietnam’s Northeast massifs, Ha Van Cuong gave up his scooter, parking it by a small babbling stream. “No wheel can get to this farm,” said the businessman in his 40s, taking off his helmet and setting off on a narrow trail uphill on foot. Over his shoulder, nature offered a dazzling view of the misty cloud forests and rolling peaks of Bac Kan province, an emerging tourism magnet in northern Vietnam. But to Cuong and many of his partner farmers, the best offering is not above but underneath: knobby rhizomes of deep orange flesh, locally called nghe ba de, literally translated “turmeric for breastfeeding mothers.'' For generations, his Tay fellows have been using it as an essential health-recovering elixir for, you guessed it, nursing moms. It was not until very recently that the underground stems were introduced to a much larger crowd of consumers, and in turn have brought in profits for local growers.
Ten years ago, Ha Van Cuong would hardly think of curcuma longa as a promising foundation for a business. Although the spice tinged his childhood with delightful memories, its recent rise to one of the world’s fastest-growing dietary supplements somehow stayed out of his sight. “I remember wrapping our turmeric leaves around some fish caught from the streams and grilling the whole green pack,” the Tay man giggled as he described how nghe ba de spiced up his playtime as a kid. “They would exude a spicy, earthy and woody aroma to the fish inside, and wash off the fishy smell.” Growing up, he had certainly heard of the plant as either a folk medicine whose healing power was extolled across the country for clearing scars and soothing stomach aches, or as a traditional spice that delivers the bright yellow colour in many dishes. But Cuong was, and is, no doctor nor chef. By 2014 he had been working as an airport security personnel for years while spending evening hours pursuing his law degree. He was well on this career path when he paid a visit to his friend in Nghe An province that year.
“There I saw a booming processing business of turmeric powder,” he recalled. “They had a whole village doing just that, and got a massive customer base in medicine institutes and in the commercial market, too.” The material stalks, he learned, were sourced indiscriminately from all areas available. And compared to the stems growing in his garden back home in Bac Kan, the bulbs there looked bigger, but tasted “washier” and smelled nowhere near as pungent. “I ate a lot of turmeric growing up, I know what a good one tastes like,” Cuong said of the light bulb moment.
Eyeing the flourishing market, Cuong returned home with a business idea for the native strain of the plant. To confirm his surmise of its quality, he took a small amount for a quality test. What makes curcuma longa a golden herb, literally and figuratively speaking, is its active ingredient called curcumin. The key chemical compound decides the rhizomes’ hue, its flavour, its health benefiting properties like antibacterial and anti-inflammatory qualities, and hence its value. Turmeric growers worldwide race for this curcumin content; and while growing fields elsewhere in Vietnam register around 20g to 50g of curcumin in a kilogram of the dried spice, the starch Cuong produced for the test reported 78.13g, almost four times higher. “The testing guy asked me if I did any trick to the turmeric,” Cuong laughed. “He said the one I had was rare and really valuable.”
Pleased with the result, that same year, the Bac Kan-born entrepreneur ventured into the mountain ridges in neighbouring districts, scouring for more of the spice to buy and resell. Its curative properties make the spice sought-after by both commodity and processing companies, but the supply side on the other hand was no easy feat. Although locals might let some thickets sprout in their backyard, it never appeared to them as a crop valuable enough to sow in rows on their fields. “So at best I could gather only a few tons a year, not enough to launch a commercial business around it. I figured I would have to grow it instead,” Cuong concluded after months zig-zagging on his scooter.
For the best nghe ba de tuberous roots, he wended his way through slippery slopes and steep hills to a H’mong village in the remote district of Pac Nam, 80 km from his home in Bac Kan city. After two days of gulping corn wine with the villagers (“I was told no drinking, no business”), they let him go home with enough bulbs to produce a few tonnes of seeding tubers.
Cuong rented a vast, flat rice field in a nearby valley and turned it into a spice farm. “The land had water, it had sunlight, it was easy to access,” he said. He replicated the practices of Hung Yen province, the country’s largest turmeric grower. A friend in Pac Nam was interested in the spice, too, and asked him to send him some to pilot on his hill. “I thought let him grow it for fun, as my mind and my money went all in the valley field,” he said.
As the tester in the lab had said, the type of curcuma longa Cuong had was starkly different from others, and it was soon proven that it does not thrive under conventional farming methods.
A few sunny months later, when the long tapering leaves reached the height of the growers’ bellies, they suddenly began to curl in and wilt, and within days the whole field withered. “It was a massive blow,” Cuong said, recalling himself sitting on the edge of the field, in disbelief over the dying farm, and with it the money he borrowed from friends and family and the bank, all coming to naught. Nobody knew why, including local agricultural engineers who helped him. “None of us had any experience growing nghe ba de on a large scale. Some guessed there was too much water. I myself was ready to give up, thinking I would never touch turmeric ever again,” he said.
A ray of hope appeared when his friends’ farmland in Pac Nam harvested a bumper crop. To Cuong’s surprise, a few hundred kilograms of the tubers he sent earlier thrived into seven tonnes of yield. The businessman realised the key missing piece of the puzzle: “The plant needed shade, not direct sunlight.” And from there things turned the corner.
On an autumn morning five years later, Cuong stood on the hill top of one of the turmeric farms, totaling 118ha, that his company has partnered with, and pointed at large native neem trees that tower over the cultivated land. They help provide shade, he said, and so do the surrounding mountains. “I basically learned about the crop on the fly,” Cuong said as he started climbing downhill in his leather shoes. “What condition of soil the plant would accept or how much water is ideal. The leaves and the stalks thrive in moisture, for instance, but the roots would not.” And it is not just about finding sheltered, partially sunny spots with well-drained soil, but also reliable farmers to tend the spice. “When they work with us, no herbicide and pesticide is allowed,” he said of the growing cadre of local smallholders he has cooperated with, “because the stems would suck the chemicals in and eventually fail all the organic standards for export.”
Other than that, the cultivation process is pretty simple. Farmers who have worked with Cuong for a few seasons said all they have to do is bury pre-sprouted rhizomes in loose soil mixed with aged farmyard manure, and leave them for two years. “Rains will do the watering,” said Trung, an indigenous Tay turmeric grower in his 60s in the hilly Ban Luong village. “You do the weed pulling a few times. And that is just it.” With such little care, the stems quietly swell and stretch out like chunky hands hugging the ground. The long gestation promises better curcumin and a darker shade of the orange flesh. If the environment is right, growers can yield from a few dozen to a hundred tonnes of turmeric per hectare. That means they can pocket up to a few hundred million dong after the harvest.
From the bumpy start, Cuong now is running a warehouse that handles the meticulous tasks of sorting, cleaning and packaging the brown-skin bulbs. He recently added a drying facility that pulverises the fresh rhizomes from the mountains into piquant powder. The latter has been in high demand lately among female consumers, as it is believed to help women beautify their skin and detoxify their body.
Between the fields and the 2,000m2 factory complex, he employs 20 workers, not to mention over a thousand partner farmers that his company, started in 2016 and called Bac Kan Agricultural Products, buys from. The turmeric it churns out is among the few in Vietnam that has been certified USDA Organic, and qualified for export to Japan, the EU, and the US.
When asked about future plans, Cuong said he wants to “go more professional” with the business, meaning building up the company into a self- sufficient homegrown producer in Bac Kan and nurturing a solid brand for local agricultural products. He entered the EFD program a year ago for the very purpose, after hearing about it at a trade fair. “Just as with the turmeric farming, I was a newcomer to business management, too,” Cuong said. In the past, if he had an idea, he would go all in for it, with no specific strategy or goal or calculations of the input and output. Sometimes they had an overloaded warehouse with no buyer, and sometimes they ran out of stock in times of high demand. Advisors from the program filled the gap by equipping him with the business structure, production model and other management tools. “I have managed to build a detailed plan and pin-point our objectives for this year, how much we can sell with this number of customers and that amount of partner farmers,” Cuong said of the initial efforts to professionalise his young company.
The current crop of his partner farmers in Ban Luong, Trung’s included, was still in the ground when he sat down with them in November, but Cuong has already talked them into another haul. “I am tapping on bananas, too,” he said. “Bac Kan’s hillsides are covered by the trees. And I am trying to figure out some output for it.” His facility has been drying a few batches of the fruit, making the most use of idle time between the turmeric seasons. Cuong’s network of partners has recently expanded to local Dao women in nearby villages and a traditional medical doctor to create a product line of bottled therapeutic herbal bath water. Awakened to the native agricultural potential, Cuong believes there are more plants than nghe ba de that can be turned into cash-crops to pull more farmers out of destitution. “There is a lot of potential in this land,'' he said of Bac Kan, one of Vietnam’s poorest provinces. “It just needs some push from doers with guts to realise it.”
Phuong Nhung
Read more here