Vietnam Agriculture Shots

Like most places in Asia, rice is a staple food in Vietnam. Here, I find myself eating it every day.

Therefore, like most rural regions in this continent, rice is grown all over the place. Especially in flat lands, one can find so many stretches of rice fields. Some are smaller and just look like they feed families, but others look like they grow it to sell.

In the hill country of the Central Highlands, coffee is a huge crop. I learned that most of the beans are Robusta, but some are Arabica. Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee exporter, after Brazil, and this rural drive certainly made it seem so.

In the driveways of this region, the farmers carry the coffee beans out to dry under the sun.

After we were out of the Central Highlands, the weather got hotter, and all of these green, dread-locked plants started appearing.

I was wondering what they were, until we got up close, and discovered they were dragon fruit cacti.

We’d been eating these our whole trip, but still had never seen one grow. Now, we were surrounded by them, and couldn’t escape if we tried.

Here is a shot of the finished product of coffee, and the finished fruit of dragon. Coffee in Vietnam is served very strong. It is given on the spot to drip right before you drink it. Often, people need to consume it with condensed milk, as the taste is too intense, but some can handle the thick bitterness and drink it black. Most of the time, Vietnamese coffee is accompanied by green tea, which helps neutralize the flavorful caffeine and sugar.

Monkeys are also fans of dragon fruit, for future notice, whenever you happen to run into a monkey and have a dragon fruit handy (and preferably a knife to cut one up). I was able to toss this piece to this monkey, in which it caught with its two hands!

This market is in the city of Dalat. Supermarkets are not common in most of Vietnam, but markets are. Even in towns that have a big supermarket, markets still dominate how produce is sold.

Apart from plants being grown to eat, there are also plants used for other factors. For example, rubber tree plantations are common in Vietnam.

Up close, it kind of looks like they are wearing visors around the tap. Sort of like the ones that older women in Korea wear, for anyone who has seen those.

Looking at them as a whole, though, they look extremely carefully planned, mathematically measured on all dimensions.

So, it’s been quite the educational experience driving around Vietnam, getting to learn about the different crops and other products I’ve been consuming here and elsewhere, where they come from and how they are processed from the earth. Even so, there are so many things I’ve eaten or seen and still not known the name of, let alone have any idea about the agricultural process it takes to create them.