These tomato plants provide dozens of times more tomatoes than conventional alternatives. Glass houses enable farmers to provide favourable conditions for tomatoes, leading to higher productivity and better food safety. The practice is being applied in vegetable farms in Lam Dong Province, with 1 hectare returning more than 20,000 US dollars in turnover.
A hectare of high tech vegetable grown in glass houses requires at least 90,000 to 130,000 US dollars in investment. These sorts of sums make it difficult for farmers to invest in high tech growing techniques, as glass houses for growing is not recognised by banks as collateral for loans.
There are now more than 43,000 hectares of high tech agricultural production in Lam Dong Province, accounting for 16% of cultivated land. The sector can develop further if there is more access to capital. Lam Dong Province is trying to find sources of investment. There are about 43 credit organisations and bank affiliates in Lam Dong Province, which provided about 1.8 billion US dollars in credit in 2015. 75 to 80% of that capital was used for agriculture.
Apart from credit, capital from investors, the public sector and FDI was also raised in Lam Dong Province. In the past 3 years, the province attracted 67 investors in high-tech agricultural production with total capital of more than 200 million US dollars.
