When we joined the tour group visiting the north-west mountains, we happened to meet Ms. Can Thi Quynh Trang who was buying veal at Lo Market (Tan Lac, Hoa Binh). It is known from conversations that Ms. Trang, a native of Hanoi, went to Quyet Chien Township, Tan Lac (Hoa Binh) to lease land to grow clean vegetables and initially made a profit. Ms. Trang also founded the V.organic Organic Agriculture Cooperative, of which she is the Managing Director. Very pleased to meet familiar customers, Ms. Trang immediately invited the whole group to visit the cooperative.

The road is only about 10 km, but since the pass is steep and foggy, it takes almost 1 hour to go by motorbike to the cooperative office at the foot of Khe Bo Mountain (Quyet Chien Township). If you call it an office, it’s really just a makeshift hut for housing, directing, and signing Ms. Trang’s production deals.

Visit the area where the cooperative grows vegetables. This field is located in a ravine more than 10 hectares wide, the soil is fertile, rich in nutrients, cool weather, favorable for growing cold-loving vegetables all year round. Perhaps these are the reasons that motivated Ms. Trang to get involved in organic vegetable growing.

Ms. Trang pointed to the harvested potato fields and said that the day she came here, this place was full of grass and rocks. To grow vegetables and tubers, she had to rent a grader and plan field traffic, pull electricity from the community grid to the field, then drill wells, dig tanks to treat and store water for harvest.

“The well water here contains a lot of calcium (Ca2+) and magnesium (Mg2+), the scientific term is called hard water, if not treated to reduce hardness, watering vegetables will reduce the ability to grow, not guaranteed food safety protection. People who bathe in this water also have rough skin and hair. So I had to dig a 300m3 tank lined with a tarpaulin, pump water to deposit the above substances to irrigate the vegetables,” explained Ms. Trang.

Discussing the fate of coming to this country, Ms Trang shared that during her “journey” in three upland communities of Tan Lac, she was a dancer with the military arts troupe to ease the pressure due to the Covid epidemic – 19 lasted in of the capital, when she saw that Quyet Chien commune had a deserted gorge of Khao village and the land was quite fertile, she immediately thought that she would surely make a big profit by growing clean vegetables and bringing them back to Hanoi, to sell it.

Afraid of missing the opportunity for a long time, Ms. Trang immediately asked the township people’s committee to lease land, was unexpectedly invited by the local government to “roll out the red carpet,” and promised construction of more than 2 km of concrete roads on it Field to help Trang bring many motorized vehicles into production, accelerating the planned implementation timeline.

Thanks to this, after just a year of implementation and searching for joint venture partners, Ms. Trang has established V.organic Organic Agriculture Cooperative with 10 ha of farmland. As a result (in 2021), while everyone is still struggling to prevent Covid-19, Ms. Trang still grows 80 tons of potatoes (specializing in processing) and supplies Hanoi Orion Company 80 tons of potatoes, the profit is 1.5 billion dongs. The recent crop of potatoes just finished harvesting, they want to “harvest” the same period of last year, not to mention the benefits of growing many other types of vegetables and fruits.

The good news from afar, knowing that Ms. Trang has favorable conditions for vegetable production all year round, many domestic companies have tried to link consumption, with orders to transfer planting techniques and to consume asparagus and cabbage, taro -Onions and Korean radish.

Mr. Bui Van Khoa, Vice Chairman of Quyet Chien Municipality People’s Committee, assessed that V.organic Organic Agriculture Cooperative has helped 30 local workers get jobs and a stable income of VND180,000/day. By working for the cooperative, people also learn many new farming techniques. In the long term, the cooperative will convert the fallow ravine into farmland, helping the community increase the farmland fund. In addition, the cooperative gives many gifts totaling tens of millions of dongs to the kindergarten every year. In this way you make a contribution to the municipal administration in order to guarantee social security in the region.

Farewell to the cooperative, farewell to us, Ms. Trang said. It is known that the cooperative has 7 members, but each person is responsible for an area and needs to move. Ms. Trang, the manager, has to stay at the cooperative 24 hours a day. During the day, technicians and people come to work to make me feel less lonely, at night I’m alone, in the middle of the gorge, confused, every time I hear the baby monkey crying on the mountain, I feel heartbroken. .

It helps her boost her energy thanks to the power grid that’s lit all night and the extra dogs. “Almost 3 years here, when I clearly heard a tiger’s roar from somewhere, there was also a dog in the house that was hit by a bear and lost its teeth,” Trang said.