Cold vinegar, hot vinegar and medicinal vinegar

In the world, I am most struck by the banana of memory, the country pepper banana, although small, with an eggshell, when ripe it does not look very beautiful, but in the cold weather, I took a bite and then just want I am forever immersed in its seductive taste.

The second is the pepper banana exported to Japan by LaBa Banana Da K’Nang cooperative (Dam Rong district, Lam Dong province), a specialty once grown in Phu Son commune (Lam Ha district, Lam Dong province). and the king was presented with Bao Dai and the old French officials ate. It’s fragrant, sweet, and flexible, making people want to chew forever.

This time, arriving at the gate of Viba Banana Cooperative in Tan Son Village, Lien Son Township, Luong Son District, Hoa Binh Province, I was attracted by a sweet, jubilant aroma. When I was able to eat the “Plane Banana” I immediately realized that it was also a tasty fruit, not like the large but sour light banana that was sold in many sidewalk shops and supermarkets.

Tran Trung Duc, director of Viba Banana Cooperative, was born in 1991, is a true Kinh but lives in Muong country with green forests, deep mountains and clear rivers. After graduating from university with a focus on business administration, he worked in Hanoi for some time, opening a shop for fruit and agricultural products in the region. When he took the green bananas from everywhere with no vinegar, they didn’t ripen as well as other people, so the vendor must have all the vinegar on demand (in many ways) for the bananas to ripen evenly.

Due to his professional study in English, Mr. Duc has studied foreign documents, especially USA and Europe, and found that their companies make heavy use of modern technologies in planting, pre-processing and canning. They were too far ahead of Vietnam, if we don’t change we won’t be able to keep up forever. For this reason, in 2015 he decided to invest in a banana vinegar system in a cold room using bioethylene gas with 7 completely natural steps, so that it is both safe and helps the fruit stay hard, fragrant, flexible, sweet and hard when ripe, for a long time durable.

It’s totally different from people’s traditional hot vinegar method, which consists of putting bananas in jars, covering them with blankets, or burning incense sticks to generate heat, or using drugs of unknown origin to make the fruit ripen quickly but mushy become ., sour taste, not fragrant, quickly damaged. If the vinegar is cold, the temperature in the room must be kept at 13-14 degrees Celsius continuously for 7 days, if the setting is too low, the banana will easily frostbite, if it is too high, the banana will spoil taste…

Realizing that consumers in the north prefer pink pepper bananas to old South American bananas in the south, he cooperated in importing goods from Hung Yen Province for pre-processing, classification, ripening, packaging and delivery. As the market began to expand, supply was suddenly limited because a 2016 storm swept through Hung Yen Province, scattering banana gardens on riverbanks. This incident prompted Mr. Duc to return to establish the resource area directly on his homeland of Hoa Binh.

After leasing 3 hectares of land in the valley, he adopted the method of hand-made banana cultivation of the Hung Yen people. However, since the banana is a short-term, fast-growing crop, the yield will be very small if not cared for in time. In addition to the cost of planting on large terraced lots and high labor costs, he lost VND 400 million in the first year. In the second year, a storm hit the banana garden and it was flooded and collapsed, but it took a lot of time and effort.

After each such failure, he learned from experience, destroyed the garden, planned a new plan, leveled and planted in rows, easy to care for, convenient in mechanization, machine to fertilize every root , weeds, water and crop. As a result, in the third year, the banana garden has optimized its productivity and reached 50 tons/ha, three times that of the first year, and earned over 300 million VND.

Since then, he confidently transferred pink peppercorn banana trees to 20 households in Cao Duong and Lien Son townships, totaling 15 ha. In the past, people in these areas grew corn, potatoes and cassava to encourage them to take up new crops To make the switch, he first donated tissue culture bananas, technical support and product sales at a stable rate of 4,000 to 6,000 VND/kg. After a while, those with lots of land and crops will effectively expand the area, and those with little land and inefficient planting will give up and go back to the old crops when the use cycle is over.

Farming under VietGAP is on an industrial scale, but Mr. Duc works closely with locally available and abundant fertilizer sources to increase productivity, reduce costs and ensure production and nutritional security.

The sophistication of the “flying banana”

Viba Banana Cooperative was founded in 2018 with 20 members, now there are only 16 members but all are passionate about their profession. The unit not only cooperates with members, but also develops external connections totaling 100 ha in provinces and cities such as Hung Yen, Hoa Binh and Hanoi, and then consumes the proceeds. In 2019, Mr. Duc established Viba Agriculture Company Limited. Both entities are part of the chain that goes from planting to pre-processing, canning, marketing, sales, after-sales service and in the near future processing of banana products.

The main task of the cooperative is to connect members to focus on technical exchange and build together a banana material area that satisfies both quality and quantity. The role of Viba Agriculture Co., Ltd. is to connect the market and align the cooperative on how to produce and grow to meet consumer tastes.

On average, Viba delivers around 1,000 tons of bananas to the market every year. Having experienced 4 waves of the Covid-19 epidemic, the whole company and the cooperative thanks to the operating license were determined to overcome the difficulties to both work and fight the epidemic with the highest spirit to ensure that in Hanoi there is no shortage of goods. . The unit has more than 500 loyal customers who are supermarkets, chain stores typically like Winmart, Coop Food, Tmart, Noi Bai Airport…

It is also particularly clever to bring bananas on the plane so that customers do not enjoy them in the middle of the sky at 10,000 m. In addition to the general requirements of the VietGAP standards, there are also separate requirements for impeccable design and in particular for size, so each fruit weighs around 120 – 140 grams to fit on the tray on the plane, both larger and smaller fruits will be disqualified.

Many units require a performance of 12-13 tons/day, but currently the cooperative can only guarantee 5-7 tons/day, so don’t dare to subscribe more. Mr. Duc not only believes in bananas for the domestic market only, but also plans to grow a variety of crops such as corn, potato, cassava, lychee, longan, avocado… and then freeze them for export.

“During banana cultivation, I went to buy raw bananas, each farmer has a different creativity, worth learning from experience. Bananas are once a year, there are many problems that occur in production, such as the irrigation system needs to be changed accordingly, then the machinery and equipment where tissue culture seed order is guaranteed, because I once mixed with green pepper banana into pink pepper banana .

There were also a lot of orders in the sales phase at the beginning, there was a lack of workers and my customer service was not up to date. I fixed that later by ordering accounting software and looking after customers on zalo and facebook. The cooperative is responsible to consumers for ensuring that the product is tasty and safe, but if the code is bad, it can be returned. The responsibility of the cooperative to the farmers is to guide them to produce the next crop better than the previous one, to try to buy according to the promise, but I do not encourage planting when the market cannot be guaranteed.

Many failures have now left me callous, nothing makes me too sad or too happy, always determined that farming, even just before harvest, can often lose everything. If I don’t make drug-free bananas, I don’t know who will. Even if I fail, I will not give up because I know that if I stop, hundreds of farmers who have followed me for so long will be affected,” said Tran Trung Duc.

In 2019, the Viba Banana Cooperative received a 3-star OCOP product certification for their cold pink peppercorn vinegar banana product, the “Airplane Banana”.