TP – Many plantation owners, farmers and tycoons are “heating up” with the opportunity to get rich from macadamia, a plant giving fat nuts that is threatening to “sold out” across nurseries. However, there are also problems behind the attractive profit from macadamia that investors need to understand clearly before “empty their pocket” to lease land and buy seedlings.

Macadamia trees grown on pilot fields

Valuable, slow and lacking

Since more than a century ago, macadamia was brought from the rainforests of northeastern Australia to be planted in the garden to get fat nuts for food and oil pressing. Later, macadamia was domesticated as a commercially profitable crop in Hawaii, Central America, Brazil, and South Africa.

Macadamia nuts are known as the queen of dried nuts. After peeling, old and ripe fruit will reveal round, white, smooth, fatty, crispy, sweet and cool nuts which can be eaten raw or processed in cosmetics and many delicious foods with abundant energy without cholesterol, so it is very good for health, especially for people with chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease. Macadamia trees live for hundreds of years, the older they are, the larger the nut yield are.

Recognized for its high value, but the area of ​​macadamia in the world is still growing very slowly, not enough to meet consumer demand, because it is quite picky about soil and climate.

After 20 years of coming Vietnam, recently, macadamia has been zoned and planned to be grown in a number of districts and cities in the Northwest and the Central Highlands, where the average temperature fluctuates between 13-28 degrees Celsius.

Currently, there are only about 3000 hectares of macadamia cases in the whole country. Among them, more than a hundred hectares of macadamia are planted scattered in the Northwest highlands, in Dien Bien, Son La, and Ba Vi, growing slower than most of the cultivated areas in the Central Highlands, in Lam Dong, Dak Nong, and Dak Lak.

Most of nuts harvested are still remained for propagation, so 2 macadamia processing factories in Thai Binh and Dong Nai have been importing nuts from Australia and Africa for more than ten years to process and re-import, not yet sold in the domestic market.

Get rich with macadamia

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of old coffee requiring a huge capital to replant and tens of thousands of hectares of economically inefficient rubber can be an opportunity to consider replacing with macadamia.

Formerly the Project Manager of CARD 037/05/VIE on macadamia under the Vietnam-Australia Cooperation and Rural Development Program, Professor Hoang Hoe had many trips to learn from intensive macadamia cultivation in Australia, China, Thailand, Guatemala, USA and organized many technical training courses and scientific seminars on this plant for officials of departments and interested persons.

When visiting the headquarters of Vinamacca Joint Stock Company (Tan Hoa Ward, Buon Ma Thuot City – Dak Lak) to learn about macadamia seedlings, I was fortunate to meet him who had just flown from Hanoi to the Central Highlands to visit his two sons- who have passionate about macadamia as their father, the co-owners of this business.

Professor Hoe said: All of the world’s leading macadamia varieties have been brought here to be tested, and some varieties have been selected with outstanding advantages, especially suitable for the soil and climate of the Central Highlands, causing macadamia experts from Australia to come here to marvel.

Bachelor of Economics Hoang Tung – director of Vinamacca, and forestry engineer Hoang Phuc – deputy director of Vinamacca, his two sons, during their years of studying in Australia, used to learn deeply about macadamia through weekend jobs for the owner who has a non-wage income of 1 million Australian dollars from a 100-hectare macadamia farm, which is very compact in management.

Tung said he is calling for capital from Australian partners to build a macadamia processing factory right in the middle of the Central Highlands raw material area, while Phuc is taking care of expanding the total area of ​​​​the farm to more than 50 hectares.

At noon on July 24, I went to the experimental macadamia field of 8.8 hectares in Ma Drak district where Vinamacca leased an inefficient coffee plantation that had to be cut down from the 715B coffee plantation, and witnessed many young green macadamia trees less than 3 years old were full of heavy green fruit chains. Phuc said that only this first harvest crop, with the current world price of nuts at $3.5/kg, he has collected enough investment capital to plant and take care of the field for the past 3 years.

Seeing the great prospects from macadamia, LienVietPostBank recently built a project to lend farmers 10 trillion dong to grow macadamia in the Central Highlands.

Mr. Nguyen Duc Huong, the project’s host, said that this is an opportunity for farmers to transform their crop structure by replacing coffee with macadamia, with the comparison: The investment cost of growing macadamia nut is lower. For coffee, the life cycle of coffee gives an average profit of about 75-86 million VND/ha per year for 20 years, while Macadamia can give profit from 510 – 520 million VND/ha/year for more than 60 years.

The demand for macadamia nuts in the world market is still very large with very diverse processing and consuming capabilities, and this is the most expensive agricultural product on the world market today.

Be careful if you do not want to lose your capital

Many years ago, I was taken by Dr. Le Ngoc Bau – Director of the the Western Highlands Agriculture & Forestry Science Institute to visit the Institute’s experimental macadamia field with dozens of different varieties, some trees with many fruits and some trees without any fruit. Up to now, the reality remains the same.

Dr. Bau said that after 12 years of testing, the Institute only selected 2 most suitable macadamia varieties. However, even these two varieties have good and bad years, unstable yields, and the cold weather is easier for trees to bear fruit. Macadamia seedlings are cultivated and grafted by the Institute have been sold for nearly 2 years, priced at 50,000 VND/tree. According to him, not all areas in the Central Highlands are suitable for macadamia trees, so growers need to be very careful in choosing investment locations and mastering techniques.

However, many places in Dak Lak and Lam Dong have nurseries selling macadamia varieties for only 15-18 thousand VND/seedlings. Most of these seedlings are from premature fruits picked by gardeners and sold to nurseries for direct sowing. While it should have been waiting for the fruit to ripen before picking it up. If garden owners buy cheap seedlings from unclear origin, it is likely that they will lose their capital after many years of waiting for the macadamia to fruit.

According to tienphong.vn.