Everyone in Nga Son knows ‘Tuan dong trung ha thao’ (Tuan Cordyceps) or ‘Tuan Dang Khoa’, born in 1985, who grows cordyceps.

According to Tuan, cordyceps is a precious and expensive herbal medicine. He said he was determined to cultivate the herb to make it affordable.

He had the idea when he was a student at Hong Duc Univerity. After he conducted research, he set to work to raise cordyceps. In 2016, he borrowed hundreds of million of dong to buy equipment and set up a laboratory and standard cultivation room.

Despite thorough preparation, he underwent many failures. In 2018, nearly 1,000 products decayed which caused a loss of VND200 million. After four years of research and failure, he learned a lot from his experience. The seeds and the environment affected the quality of products.

He decided to borrow another VND500 million to buy new equipment, install air conditioners and set up cultivation rooms.

The value of cordyceps is determined by the cultivation. Different cultivation conditions will create cordyceps with different quality.

“Cordyceps must be cultured in a clean space, with reasonable humidity and temperature. In the conditions of hot weather in Vietnam with unstable temperature, they will rot. So air conditioners must be installed in all my cultivation rooms, which run 24/7,” Tuan said.

In late 2019, Tuan had some achievements. There are now up to 30,000 pots of cordyceps in his standard cultivation room and he is developing another room.

With cordyceps, Tuan now has six OCOP (one commune, one product), including fresh cordyceps, dry cordyceps, cordyceps wine, salangane’s nest with cordyceps, and honey cordiceps.

Tuan’s cordyceps products have the commercial brand of “Dang Khoa’ . That’s why Tuan is called ‘Tuan Dang Khoa’. The products are much cheaper than imports and other domestically raised products.

He is going to launch two new products - cordyceps capsules and cordyceps tea bags.

In 2020, Tuan’s production workshop brought revenue of over VND1 billion. In addition to his showroom, cordyceps products are sold via 30 sales agents throughout the country. His production workshop uses 10 local workers with monthly income of VND5-7 million a month on average.

Cordyceps works to fortify the body, helps strengthen the immune system, and increases resistance. 

Le Duong

Scientists use brown rice and silkworm as base to grow cordycep in Ha Giang

Brown rice and silkworms can be used as a growing base for cordycep muhrooms, which are very expensive and seen as ‘soft gold’. Cordyceps has made people in the northern province of Ha Giang rich.