​Mr. Nguyen Van Anh recalled that at the beginning of the rainy season in 2006 when he and his family were living and working in Chu Se district in Gia Lai, he witnessed school-aged children having to stay at home and help his family to sow seeds in time for the crop instead of going to school and this made him unable to keep worrying. Studying a machine might help farmers to sow seeds faster and save labor. The idea is like that but when starting to do it there have existed a lot of difficulties. After numerous times of changes, Van’s idea did not become perfect until he moved to Cam My district in 2013. That year, for the first time he brought his creative product to Dong Nai Technical Innovation Contest and won the first runner-up prize. Later, this invention also participated in and won prizes in many contests organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union Central Committee, and so on. Beating more than 80 solutions of the authors from provinces and cities in the country, the invention of seeding and fertilizing machine for agricultural production by author Nguyen Van Anh, a farmer living in Be Bac hamlet, Xuan Dong commune, Cam My district, won the first prize in the “Creativity in your hand” contest. The contest was jointly held by the Southern Region Department at Ministry of Science and Technology, and Departments of Science and Technology of the Southeastern region. Thanks to the machine’s convenience and efficiency in seed-sowing and fertilizing phases, this is a worthy companion of agricultural farmers all over the country.

However, after Van’s invention is put into use to serve farmers’ production needs, it has revealed a lot of weaknesses. When sowing seeds, the machine releases seeds in an uneven way, which makes unequal distance between rows and more seeds are needed. For foreign farmers, those errors are minor as they sow seeds on a large area. However, land is gold in Vietnam and sowing seeds in an unequal way will affect the yield and fail to convince farmers to use a defective product. Van kept conducting more research to complete his product. He was happy enough to attend the “Creativity in your hand” contest 2019. His machine was complete enough to sow seeds in an equal way and sow many types of seeds without using more seeds than before. More happily, his machine has been successfully transferred to two orders and each order needs 100 machines. Giving more speech on the invention of a seeding and fertilizing machine for his agricultural production, Mr. Nguyen Van Anh said: “The machine has a fairly simple structure. It has a steering wheel, wheels, chains, gears and main parts including a tool containing fertilizers and seeds, a tool to adjust the aperture to fit the size of seeds to be sowed and a blade for seed-sowing beds. The gear of the chain is designed in various sizes to suit the density and thickness of the seeding process. As seeds (or manure) are placed in the tray and transported by vehicles, the aperture of the seeding part opens and closes smoothly, which causes seeds (or fertilizers) to fall down evenly. The machine’s structure and operating mechanism are quite simple. Just take a glance at first Van’s customers might think that they can “steal” the idea to manufacture a similar one. However, even after Van gives a careful instruction on how to measure and draw the standard size of each detail and then put them together, the machine might still work with errors and seeds are easy to be shot outside or the falling speed is not the same and many places where seeds are needed but they have no seeds. Van said, it requires a skillfulness in the processing and welding process and if there is just one welding error the machine won’t operate according to required standards.

At present, Van’s seeding and fertilizing machine has been basically completed and operated stably with a seeding capacity of 4,000 to 5,000 sqm per day (for medium-sized seeds like soybeans, peanuts, corn, and so on) and 3,000 to 3,500 sqm per day (for smaller-sized seeds like sesame, amaranth, water spinach, green beans, and so on). One weakness Van found in his current invention is that if the machine is entirely processed with stainless steel like Inox 304, both costs and sales prices must be increased many times; therefore, for the machine to be more durable it is necessary to change machine parts made of metal into plastic materials. However, to produce plastic parts the initial investment cost is very large and at least the 3D printing technology must be applied for the mold- making process. Van’s wish is to be able to gain an access to the loans from the State or other credit institutions with a preferential interest rate so that he can make modern machines on a mass production scale on modern assembly lines and then the product will go to farmers’ hands at the price of under VND2 million.

Duy Minh (Thanh Hai)