A group of young people working in agriculture combined with Israeli tourism

Combining agriculture and tourism

These April days, we have the opportunity to visit The Moshav Farm, a farm located in Suoi Mo valley, Ninh Thuong commune, Ninh Hoa town, more than 50km north of Nha Trang city center (Khanh Hoa).

The Moshav Farm is a Hebrew name. The moshav is a Hebrew word, is an agricultural model in Israel, is understood as an agricultural village with many farms around, the people there live on farms. That area has many services such as agricultural supply stores, agricultural products distribution shops and educational institutions, hospitals... very convenient.

Therefore, The Moshav Farm was born with the desire to develop such an agricultural service model. That is the sharing of Mr. Nguyen Ta Dong, who is considered the "leader" of this farm about the idea of farming.

Established in 2018, The Moshav Farm has 5 members including Mr. Nguyen Ta Dong (born in 1995, the hometown of Dak Lak), Nguyen Manh Tien (born in 1995, the hometown of Nghe An); Truong Hoang Nam (born in 1995, from Dong Thap); Pham Minh Thong (born in 1996, the hometown of Ben Tre) and Vo Hong Liem (born in 1973, the hometown of Khanh Hoa) jointly invested.

The group of 9X young people all graduated from university but did not major in agriculture, but had a common passion for agriculture and spent time as a trainee in Israel while studying and working on farms to "learn more". religion" modern agricultural practices. Since then, they went against the trend, leaving the city to work in the countryside.

Nguyen Ta Dong himself worked at a company specializing in import and export with an income of about 20 million VND/month, but he left to work in agriculture.

“I see that our country has many valuable agricultural products, but the export quantity is small and the value is low. As a farmer's son, I personally want to contribute something to improve the value of Vietnamese agricultural products," Dong shared and said that in 2015, he had been a trainee in Israel for more than a year. After that, continue to visit many farms in the country and countries such as Thailand and the Philippines to compare what you have learned with the actual way of doing it before starting a business.

And, The Moshav Farm chooses the direction of organic farming combined with tourism to exploit the full potential and efficiency of agriculture like Israel they are doing. By doing pure agriculture, the value of exploiting this field will not be optimal.

After a long time of traveling to many places to survey and find a location, the group of 9X youths chose Ninh Thuong commune to invest because they found that this place is basically suitable, meeting the criteria set out to deploy agriculture. Farms such as: convenient transportation, road infrastructure, available 3-phase electricity, adequate water source for production and large land bank, cheap price. From there, the farm can expand to adjacent areas in the future, as well as combine tourism-oriented exploitation.

With an initial area of 10ha purchased from people's sugarcane plantations, The Moshav Farm has now expanded to 56ha. The farm is designed methodically including 4 areas for cultivation and breeding; factory area, office area and dormitory area. In which the cultivation and husbandry area occupies most of the area, is growing fruit trees such as coconut, grapefruit, guava, grapes, jackfruit, mango, medicinal plants and raising sheep, deer, deer and ostriches... Total capital Farm investment is currently more than 50 billion VND.

If testing suitable and effective plant and animal varieties, the farm will transfer the model to farmers. After that, the amount of agricultural products after harvesting the farm will buy back to the farmers at a price equal to or higher than the market price. The farm is trying to create valuable products and take farmers as a link in the farm's product chain in the near future.

Build customers before selling products

Currently, the farm is applying mechanization quite synchronously for production. The planting areas here are marked with separate numbers for management, along with the application of automatic drip irrigation, misting, and automatic fertilizer application. Each area is arranged for each group of workers, including engineers in cultivation, animal husbandry, and crop and livestock management. All daily work is reported and tracked on computer software.

According to the 9X youth group, after a period of trial planting, many plants have been confirmed to be suitable for the climate and soil conditions here. For example, dwarf Siamese coconut, the main farm is growing with an area of more than 20ha. In addition to coconuts, many areas are growing Taiwanese mangoes, four quarters mangoes, pomelos, oranges, jackfruits, guava, bananas, and grapes. Currently, some crops have yielded fortune telling. In terms of medicinal plants, the farm is growing many species such as prickly pear, tangerine, cloves, and lemongrass..., all of which grow and develop well and are harvested in a rolling style.

“In the early days of coming here, the land was arid and infertile, but the team improved the soil by adding hundreds of tons of organic fertilizer every year from the available sources on the farm and taking advantage of the people's straw. bagasse from sugar mills at low cost. The farm also does not use pesticides to kill weeds, only controlled lawn mowing to keep soil moisture and help microorganisms grow, "said Nguyen Ta Dong.

In addition to crops, the farm has pioneered sheep farming and found it very suitable. So from the original 30 sheep, now the farm has multiplied to 100. In addition, here are also raising deer, ostrich and will soon raise more horses to serve tourism in the near future.

The Moshav Farm is still in the "long-term farming" phase because it has only been established for 3 years. However, in the past time, the farm has initially introduced to the market 10 product lines made from medicinal plants and short-term plants such as frankincense leaves; grape wine, hand sanitizer, freeze-dried ginger powder, peppermint oil, mineral mud mask... In addition to being produced on-site, the farm also cooperates with many processing factories to optimize the process. manufacturing.

Initially, the products were mainly retail, now distributed to more than 400 agents nationwide, almost every province, with total revenue of 1 billion VND/month.

Sharing about how to sell the farm's products, Mr. Nguyen Ta Dong said: "For a long time, the usual production mindset is to make products and then look for outputs. The Eastern group did the opposite, offering the product first. We do communicate from the beginning, in the process of making products, we will communicate there. So, before the product was launched, everyone knew about it, so it was easier to sell from there. However, it is the quality of the farm's products that determines the sustainable output."

It is known that The Moshav Farm currently has 34 employees, mainly qualified, well-trained young people and 10 local workers. Besides, every year the farm also receives dozens of trainees to learn how to do modern agriculture.

According to Mr. Nguyen Ta Dong, at first, recruiting highly qualified personnel for the farm was very difficult because most of them stayed in the city to work. So the farm has only 5 people working day and night.