Young Asian entrepreneurs embrace green-collar lives as technology makes farming ‘sexy’

Educated farmers are taking to the fields in countries like Vietnam and Indonesia, spurred on by new technologies and progressive ideals

The back-to-the-land movement comes at a time of shifting attitudes about working in rural areas, with some younger people seeing it as a better option than city life

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Tran Thi Khanh Trang harvesting rice straw in northern Vietnam. Photo: Far Green

Published: 10:00am, 8 Nov 2020Updated: 10:42am, 9 Nov 2020

For Tran Thi Khanh Trang, who holds an MBA degree from Colorado State University in the US, going into farming was not exactly a trendy career option in an agrarian country where parents typically expect their university-educated children to score urban jobs. For Andreas Ismar, a 38-year-old Indonesian financial journalist, quitting the city for country life was just the ticket he needed to realise his dreams.

Both Trang, who is Vietnamese, and Andreas are among a wave of younger, educated farmers in the Asia-Pacific region that are part of the nascent “green collar” movement that seeks a return to the land – through farming and viniculture, by starting renewable-energy and social-enterprise projects, or by investing in sustainability-related jobs. Such entrepreneurs could be at least part of the solution to reviving regional economies hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, helping create new career opportunities in the wake of corporate downsizings and generally declining fortunes.

Regional governments have also got on board in the sector, with Singapore planning to generate 55,000 green jobs over the next 10 years in the environment and agricultural sectors and South Korea budgeting US$95 million for green projects to help lift its economy out of the doldrums.

Trang, 34, the founder of FarGreen, an organic farming start-up, was the first in her family to have received a higher education, let alone gone overseas to study. Hailing from the small northern Vietnamese town of Ha Nam, she said her awareness for the surrounding environment and for limiting waste came about as a result of many childhood influences, including living next to a polluted river and witnessing her parents’ deliberate avoidance of leftovers.

In 2015, she came up with a zero-waste agricultural production system based on the use of rice straw – one of the by-products of rice production that is typically burned by Vietnamese farmers after a harvest.

Trang set up a network of local farmers in northern Vietnam who collect the rice straw and use it to grow gourmet mushrooms. After the mushrooms are cultivated, the leftover mushrooms and by-products are used as bio-fertiliser to enrich the soil to grow more rice and other vegetable crops. Their products have been served at high-end hotels and restaurants, a niche target market of Trang’s start-up. Her customers include Hanoi’s Metropole hotel, where US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met for a summit last year.

Andreas Ismar, top left, with two of his Horekultura partners. Photo: Handout

Andreas, meanwhile, is collaborating with more than 600 local farmers around his own farm in Sirnajaya village, in West Java province for his start-up project, Horekultura – wordplay on “hooray” and “agriculture” – which he said is aimed to “drum up interests for a sector avoided and deemed unsexy by youths”.