High-tech agriculture [1]: A golden moment for digital farming capital

In the early days of the rainy season, inside a greenhouse spanning more than 4,000 square meters in Darahoa hamlet, Hiep Thanh commune, Lam Dong province, rows of baby bell peppers remain lush and heavily laden with fruit. Outside, prolonged heavy rain has forced many open-air farming operations to suspend field work. Inside the greenhouse, drip irrigation systems continue running on schedule, humidity is kept under control, and crops develop at a steady pace.

Dao Chuyen Chinh, owner of the production facility, said that building the greenhouse and net house system along with operating equipment for the more than 4,000-square-meter bell pepper plot required an initial investment of roughly 2 billion dong (approximately 79,000 USD). Even so, he noted, capital is only the starting condition, the decisive factor lies in technical process management.

"Inside the greenhouse, every stage must be tightly controlled, from irrigation water and nutrients to greenhouse sanitation and pest prevention. If you don't follow the process correctly, yields drop immediately, or worse, you operate at a loss," Chinh said. Thanks to controlled-environment production, a plot of more than 4,000 square meters can yield approximately 20 tonnes per crop cycle. At peak harvest, his family ships between three and five tonnes of produce per day.

From the greenhouses of Darahoa to the vegetable and flower belts surrounding Da Lat, the coffee farms applying smart irrigation in the former Dak Nong area, and the fruit orchards and dragon fruit zones of Binh Thuan, a new model of agriculture is taking shape,  one grounded in science and technology, data management, and market integration.

Following the merger of Lam Dong, Dak Nong, and Binh Thuan provinces, the inherent strengths of each locality are not simply being added together in scale. They are generating an entirely new development space for high-tech agriculture.

A golden space for modern agriculture

Few provinces in Viet Nam's agricultural landscape simultaneously possess as many distinct ecological sub-zones as the new Lam Dong. Stretching from the temperate Lang Biang Plateau, across the fertile basalt soils of the western highlands, to the sun-drenched southern central coast, each zone carries its own comparative advantage, yet all are mutually reinforcing within a broader modern agricultural strategy.

While Da Lat has long been recognized as the country's largest high-tech vegetable and flower production center, Dak Nong serves as a critical raw material region for coffee, pepper, durian, and a range of high-value fruit crops. Binh Thuan, meanwhile, holds distinct advantages in dragon fruit, tropical fruit, aquaculture, and a logistics network connected to international seaports. The combination of these three ecological zones creates an exceptionally diverse agricultural production chain, and lays the groundwork for forming large-scale raw material zones, developing processing industries, and building closed-loop agricultural value chains.

According to provincial agricultural data, Lam Dong's total cultivated area currently exceeds 1.048 million hectares, including more than 328,000 hectares of coffee, over 90,000 hectares of vegetables, nearly 12,000 hectares of flowers, and tens of thousands of hectares of high-value fruit crops such as durian, avocado, macadamia, mango, and dragon fruit. This large production scale and crop diversity allow the province to develop multiple key commodity sectors simultaneously, reducing the risk of over-dependence on any single product, a vulnerability that has plagued many other localities.

Ha Ngoc Chien, Director of the Lam Dong Plant Production and Protection Sub-Department, said the province currently has approximately 107,456 hectares of high-tech agricultural production, accounting for nearly 10 percent of total cultivated area, of which around 1,200 hectares apply smart technology. To date, the province has established 16 high-tech production zones covering key commodity sectors including vegetables, flowers, coffee, tea, pepper, mango, durian, and rice.

Chien described this as an important foundation for building concentrated production zones, improving produce quality, meeting traceability requirements, and expanding exports.

Advantages beyond acreage

What sets the new Lam Dong apart is not only the scale of its production but also the technological foundation built up over many years. The province has been a pioneer in high-tech agriculture from an early stage. Greenhouse and net house models, water-saving irrigation, and production to VietGAP and GlobalGAP standards emerged here more than two decades ago and have since become a reference model for provinces across the country.

From that foundation, technology has continued spreading to other production zones. Smart irrigation systems, integrated pest management, digitized production logs, and electronic traceability are being applied with increasing breadth. Experts widely regard this accumulated technological capacity as a competitive edge that few other localities can match.

Dr. Nguyen Do Anh Tuan, former Director of the Department of International Cooperation at the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, has argued that the future of Vietnamese agriculture lies not in expanding cultivated area but in the capacity to apply technology, organize large-scale production, and participate deeply in global value chains. By that measure, the new Lam Dong is converging many of the right conditions.

Beyond its vast raw material zones, the province also possesses a network of enterprises, cooperatives, and farmers with established experience in producing to high-quality standards, a critical factor as export markets tighten their requirements for quality, food safety, and sustainable development.

The chain linkage system is also expanding rapidly. The province currently has 428 production-to-consumption linkage chains involving nearly 47,600 farming households. More than 500 primary processing and processing facilities are in operation, bringing the share of processed agricultural output to approximately 24.4 percent. The development of these linkage chains helps farmers reduce dependence on intermediary traders, stabilize their sales channels, and increase the value of their products, prerequisites for building a modern, transparent, and internationally competitive agricultural sector.

A regional breakthrough opportunity

Agricultural economists argue that the greatest value of the new Lam Dong's formation lies not simply in the added land area or increased output. More importantly, it presents an opportunity to restructure the agricultural sector along the lines of regional integration.

Rather than each locality developing in isolation, the province can now re-plan its production landscape according to the comparative advantages of each zone. Da Lat and its surrounding areas will continue to lead in vegetables, flowers, planting materials, and smart agriculture. The western zone will develop into a large-scale center for industrial crops and fruit trees. The coastal zone will focus on the maritime economy, climate-adaptive crops, and export-oriented logistics infrastructure.

This integration promises to reduce production costs, improve investment efficiency, and create conditions for attracting major enterprises to high-tech agriculture. Tran Hong Thai, Chairman of the Lam Dong Provincial People's Committee, has affirmed that the province's goal is to build a green, modern agricultural sector with strong application of science, technology, and digital transformation, while forming concentrated commodity production zones linked to deep processing and export markets.

This is not merely an agricultural sector development direction; it is the province's overarching growth strategy for the years ahead. The road forward is not without obstacles. Climate change is growing more extreme, the cost of high-tech investment remains substantial, the rate of deep processing still falls short of the province's potential, and high-quality human resources remain in short supply.

Yet looking out from the greenhouses of Darahoa, across the sweeping vegetable and flower fields of the plateau, through the smart-irrigated coffee zones and the expanding durian and dragon fruit belts being brought up to export standards, the foundation for a large-scale high-tech agricultural hub is already visible. The convergence of diverse natural conditions, a modern production base, an increasingly complete linkage system, and the expansive development space opened up by the merger is creating a rare and favorable moment for the new Lam Dong, the basis upon which the province is nurturing its ambition to become Viet Nam's digital farming capital and the nation's leading high-tech agricultural center in the years to come.