Bringing Ky Son ginger to the world

Ginger trees yield 10 times more income than corn and rice

Mr. Nguyen Van Luan was born and raised in a farming family in Son Giang commune, Huong Son district, Ha Tinh province. In 1987, he and his family went to Muong Xen town, Ky Son district, Nghe An province, to start a business with many jobs to make a living.

By 1999, he realized that in Ky Son land, there was a great need for an agricultural services and handicrafts cooperative to serve ethnic farmers in villages with conditions to contact, trade, and exchange agricultural products produced by them, especially in highland villages bordering Vietnam and Laos, such as Muong Long, Huoi Tu, Tay Son, Ta Ca, and Dooc May communes. In these communes, he saw that the villagers' lives were extremely difficult. People produced many products, such as Shan Tuyet tea, ginger, silkie (black chicken), Mong beef, etc., but did not know where or to whom to sell their products.

From his thoughts and what he saw in his hometown of Ky Son, Mr. Nguyen Van Luan boldly established the Huong Son Agricultural Services & Handicrafts Cooperative, of which he was directly the director, to both do business and serve farmers in agricultural production. The Cooperative’s first job was to purchase and consume ginger products for the villagers.

To sell ginger, Mr. Luan had to dig up whole ginger clusters in the villages' mountain fields by himself, wash them, and bring them to traders to offer. Fortunately, Ky Son ginger was favored by traders inside and outside the province because the ginger here is low in fiber, fragrant, and very spicy, so traders bought it more and more.

Realizing the potential of Ky Son ginger trees to help villagers eliminate hunger and reduce poverty while also being suitable for the Cooperative's business purposes, in 2013, Mr. Luan began to find out how many ginger varieties farmers were growing, which varieties had the highest yield, growing seasons, growing techniques, etc.

Accordingly, he learned that in Ky Son there are two ginger varieties, including De ginger with a small root, low yield, but very spicy taste, and Sung Trau ginger with a large root, high yield, low fiber, and less spicy taste than that of De ginger. All of these two types of ginger were bought by customers.

The weakest thing about ginger production in Ky Son is low productivity due to poor investment in intensive farming and a lack of methods to choose good root seeds when planting. Therefore, Mr. Luan had to find district and provincial agricultural technical staff and read books to master the basic knowledge of growing ginger intensively with high productivity. Since then, before each ginger-growing season, he has invited technical staff and agricultural experts from the district and province to train villagers on how to plant, care for, prevent pests, harvest, and preserve ginger. Among them, according to Mr. Luan, the most important measure is to not break or crush the ginger when harvesting to preserve it for a long time.

Initially, the Cooperative mobilized 20 households to join in the linkage of growing 10 hectares completely following the organic ginger production process. By 2023, the Cooperative had 146 households in 6 villages in 4 communes in Ky Son district (Tay Son, Ta Ca, Muong Long, and Dooc May) participating in growing ginger on an area of 40 hectares.

Thanks to the application of science and technology in production, from growing to harvesting, the average ginger yield reaches 30 tons/ha, the highest ever. In particular, ginger is grown at an altitude of over 1,200m, so it is very spicy and fragrant and is favored and bought by many customers. It is estimated that the average income from 1 hectare of ginger is about VND 200 million, 10 times higher than that of growing corn and rice on burnt-over land.

Bringing Ky Son Ginger abroad

As of now, the ginger production and consumption linkage model between villagers and Huong Son Agricultural Services & Handicrafts Cooperative has expanded to an area of up to 400 hectares in many communes in Ky Son district and expanded to some communes in Tuong Duong district such as Nhon Mai and Mai Son, which are poor communes bordering Vietnam and Laos. Initially, these communes regularly provided the Cooperative with 40–45 tons of ginger root/year.

Currently, Huong Son Agricultural Services & Handicrafts Cooperative is a unit specializing in purchasing, consuming, and exporting ginger products to domestic and foreign markets. On average, each year, the Cooperative purchases more than 1,000 tons of ginger for villagers to pre-process, classify, and process into clean dried ginger products to supply to domestic customers for export to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and some European countries.

In order for ginger trees and ginger products to become domestic and foreign brands, Mr. Nguyen Van Luan and the Ky Son District People's Committee worked hard to build a brand for Ky Son Ginger. On November 15, 2019, the Intellectual Property Office of Viet Nam (Ministry of Science and Technology) issued a geographical indication registration certificate for the Ky Son Ginger product. Thereby, it has created favorable conditions for ethnic people in the Ky Son border highlands to expand growing areas and open the way to export ginger products to domestic and foreign markets.

Currently, there are 4 ginger-growing communes in Ky Son district that meet the quality criteria for exporting ginger abroad, including Tay Son, Ta Ca, Muong Long, and Dooc May communes. In 2020, the product "Ky Son Ginger" of Huong Son Agricultural Services & Handicrafts Cooperative was granted a 3-star OCOP product certificate by the Nghe An Provincial People's Committee.

In order for ginger products to be increasingly improved in quality, in addition to choosing good, high-yield ginger varieties and growing intensively according to organic agricultural processes, the Cooperative also invests in more modern machinery to improve the quality of products made from ginger while enhancing the value of the Ky Son Ginger brand in domestic and foreign markets.

With acumen, passion, and dynamism in the market mechanism, Mr. Nguyen Van Luan has become a model in production and business in the Ky Son highland district. The work of the Cooperative and Mr. Luan personally has created motivation for villagers to feel secure in producing ginger, especially in the current ginger production and consumption linkage between the Cooperative and villagers in four communes of Ky Son district and two communes of Tuong Duong district. Not only that, the Cooperative also creates regular jobs for 13–15 workers in Ky Son district with stable income (average VND 6–6.5 million/person/month).

As for Mr. Nguyen Van Luan personally, in 2021, he was awarded a certificate of merit by the Ministry of Planning and Investment. Recently, Mr. Luan was also awarded the title of “Good Veteran in Production and Business” at the provincial level in 2022 by the Nghe An Provincial Veterans Association.

However, the success in which Mr. Nguyen Van Luan is most interested is that he has contributed to helping hundreds of highland farmer households escape poverty, which is highly appreciated by the Ky Son District People's Committee. Most importantly, the Ky Son Ginger product has become a brand that is present in domestic and foreign markets.