The Last One Who Knows the Trees: A Cashew Farmer, an Empty House, and the Generation That Did Not Stay

Nguyen Van Thanh planted his first cashew trees in 1994, the year his second son was born and the year he decided, with the particular confidence of a thirty-year-old man who has just watched a neighbor turn a modest grove into a new tin roof, that the land in Binh Phuoc Province was worth committing to. He cleared two hectares by hand over the course of a dry season, burning the undergrowth and turning the red laterite soil with a rented cultivator. The seedlings cost almost nothing then. The labor was mostly his own. By the time his sons were old enough to walk the rows beside him, the trees were already producing, and the farm had taken on the particular shape that would define the next three decades of his life — not large enough to be a business in any formal sense, not small enough to be merely a garden, but something in between that the Vietnamese countryside has always had a word for even when economists do not: a livelihood.

He is sixty now, and the farm has grown to four hectares. His older son, Minh, is thirty-two and lives in Binh Duong Province, where he manages a team on a production line at an electronics assembly plant. His younger son, Phuc, is twenty-eight and drives a long-haul truck between Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang, gone for stretches of ten to fourteen days at a time. Neither of them farms. Neither of them, when pressed, says he intends to. Thanh’s wife, Ba Hoa, tends the kitchen garden behind the house and helps during harvest, but the four hectares of cashew — the pruning, the pest monitoring, the irrigation decisions, the negotiation with traders, the reading of the soil and the sky that constitutes the actual knowledge of farming — belong entirely to him.

This is not a story about sons who abandoned their father. It is a story about a transition that happened in plain sight, one decision at a time, each decision reasonable on its own terms, and whose cumulative meaning only becomes visible when you stand at the edge of a cashew garden in the dry season of 2025 and realize that the man working alone among the trees is the last person in his household who knows how to do what he is doing, and that when he stops, the knowledge stops with him.

Binh Phuoc is the largest cashew-producing province in Vietnam, accounting for a significant share of a national output that makes the country one of the world’s leading exporters of processed cashew kernels. The smallholder farms that supply this industry — typically between one and five hectares, family-operated, selling raw nuts to itinerant traders or local collection points — are the base of a value chain that generates substantial export revenue without generating substantial farm income. The gap between what a kilogram of raw cashew nut earns at the farm gate and what a kilogram of processed kernel earns at export is wide, and the structural distance between those two price points is where most of the value accumulates — in processing facilities, logistics, and export margins that the farmer at the bottom of the chain does not access.

Thanh sells his harvest to a trader who comes with a motorcycle and a hanging scale during the April-to-June picking window. The farm-gate price for raw cashew nuts this season has ranged between 26,000 and 31,000 dong per kilogram, depending on the week and the moisture content of the batch. His four hectares, in a reasonable year, yield between five and six tons of raw nuts in total. Gross revenue falls somewhere between 130 and 186 million dong depending on yield and price — a range wide enough to define the difference between a year that services his small remaining loan and one that does not. After fertilizer costs of around 28 million dong, pesticide and fungicide inputs of roughly 8 million dong, and hired labor for the harvest of approximately 15 million dong, his net return in a median year lands somewhere between 80 and 120 million dong. It is not poverty. It is also not enough to explain itself to a twenty-eight-year-old weighing it against a truck driver’s salary.

Phuc, the younger son, earned approximately 15 to 18 million dong per month last year from trucking — variable with routes and hours, but consistent enough across twelve months to produce an annual income that exceeds what the farm generates in a good year, without the weather risk, without the physical exposure of outdoor labor across a six-week harvest under April heat, and with the additional qualities that a formal wage carries in contemporary rural Vietnam: the ability to contribute to social insurance, the legibility to a bank considering a motorcycle loan, the simple dignity of a job that peers in the city recognize. Thanh does not fault his son for this calculation. He made a version of it himself when he was young, choosing cashew farming over factory work in the provincial town because the land was available and the upside seemed real. The upside his sons see is somewhere else, and it is not less real for being different from his.

What concerns Thanh — and what he does not quite have the language for, because the concern lives in his hands and his eyes rather than in any framework he was given for thinking about it — is what happens to the farm when he can no longer run it alone. He is sixty, in good health, capable of a full day’s work in the garden without difficulty. At sixty-five, he imagines the same. At seventy, he is less certain. The cashew harvest requires sustained physical effort across six weeks: bending to collect fallen nuts, carrying loads, climbing occasionally to reach nuts lodged in the canopy, working through midday heat that regularly exceeds 35 degrees Celsius in April. He has seen older farmers in the village slow down and then stop, their gardens either leased to younger families willing to manage them for a share of the harvest or simply left to produce whatever the unmanaged trees will give, which is less each year without pruning and fertilization.

Last February, his older son Minh came home for the Lunar New Year holiday and stayed for nine days. On the fifth day, Thanh walked him through the garden the way his own father had once walked him — pointing out which trees were underperforming, explaining the signs of anthracnose on the younger branches, showing him where the soil compaction from last year’s heavy rains had created drainage problems that needed addressing before the next wet season. Minh listened carefully. He asked questions. He took photographs with his phone of the affected trees, with what intention it was not clear. On the eighth day, he drove back to Binh Duong. He called twice in the following month. The photographs remain on his phone, filed somewhere between his daughter’s birthday pictures and a video of a colleague’s farewell party.

Thanh does not interpret this as indifference. He knows Minh’s life in Binh Duong well enough to understand its structure: the early shift start, the commute, the two children in a rented apartment, the wife who works at the same factory, the exhaustion of a household running on two incomes with no slack. The farm is not a possibility Minh has ruled out with conviction. It is a possibility that the logistics of his actual life have made inaccessible without a rupture he is not yet prepared to make, and may never be. There is a difference between “I will not come back” and “I cannot come back right now,” and most conversations between fathers and sons in this situation live in the ambiguity between those two statements without resolving it.

The question of what to do with the farm is one Thanh has been circling for two years without landing. He has three options as he understands them, and none of them is straightforwardly good. The first is to continue as he is — managing the four hectares alone with hired help during harvest — for as long as his health permits. This is the path of least immediate disruption and the path most likely to end without a plan, the farm’s future determined by a health event rather than a decision. The second is to lease the land to a neighboring family — there are two households in the village who manage more land than they own and who have expressed informal interest — at a rate of somewhere between 8 and 12 million dong per hectare per year. Four hectares at that rate would produce 32 to 48 million dong annually, a passive income that would cover basic household expenses without requiring his labor, but would also mean surrendering the management of trees he has tended for thirty years to someone whose relationship with the land is transactional rather than accumulated.

The third option is the one he thinks about longest and discusses least: selling. Land prices in this part of Binh Phuoc have increased substantially over the past decade, driven partly by the expansion of industrial zones and partly by property speculation that has made agricultural land adjacent to infrastructure corridors more valuable than the crops it grows. His four hectares, conservatively appraised, would sell for somewhere between 1.6 and 2.4 billion dong depending on location and buyer. That is generational capital — enough to support him and Ba Hoa through retirement, contribute meaningfully to his sons’ households, and dissolve the question of the farm’s future in a single transaction. It would also mean the end of something that he finds difficult to name but that he experiences every morning when he walks into the garden at six o’clock and knows, without calculation, exactly what the trees need.

He has not sold. He is not ready to sell. But he has begun, in small ways, to prepare for the possibility — clearing a section of legal documents relating to the land title, asking a cousin who works in real estate what the market currently looks like, noting the price at which a four-hectare plot two villages over changed hands in August. These are the actions of a man who has not made a decision but has begun to make the decision makeable, which is its own kind of movement.

Ba Hoa’s position on all of this is practical in the way that women who have managed household finances through thirty years of price volatility tend to be practical. She does not sentimentalize the land. She has watched it produce abundantly in good years and barely cover costs in bad ones, and her attachment to it is proportional to what it can do for the family rather than what it represents. When Thanh raises the question of leasing, she asks what the lease terms would look like and whether the tenant would maintain the trees properly or run them down for short-term yield. When he raises the question of selling, she asks whether the boys would want a share now or later and what the tax implications are. She does not ask whether he is ready. She already knows he is not, and she has learned over many years that readiness, for him, is something that arrives from the outside rather than being summoned from within.

April comes. The cashew flowers that survived the dry-season winds have set fruit, and the nuts are beginning to swell in the way that tells an experienced farmer two to three weeks remain before the harvest window opens. Thanh has arranged for five hired workers this season — one fewer than last year, because one of the regular pickers, an older woman from a neighboring commune who has worked his harvest for eight consecutive years, has gone to live with her daughter in Dong Nai and will not return. He will manage the gap himself, extending his own working hours into the evenings and asking Ba Hoa to take on one of the rows she does not usually cover.

One evening in mid-April, with the harvest two weeks away, Phuc calls from the road somewhere north of Phan Thiet. The connection is intermittent, the way truck-cab calls always are, and the conversation moves through the ordinary checkpoints — how is mother, how is the garden, how are the children in Binh Duong — before Phuc asks, with a casualness that Thanh recognizes as the particular casualness of a question that has been considered before being asked, whether the old mango tree at the edge of the eastern plot is still standing. It is. Thanh planted it the year Phuc was born, as a marker more than a crop, and it has outlived several rounds of cashew replanting around it. Phuc says he remembers climbing it as a child. He says he has been thinking about the farm lately. He does not say what he has been thinking, and Thanh does not ask, because the conversation is already at the edge of something that neither of them is ready to enter over a patchy phone connection on a highway at night.

They talk for another few minutes about the price outlook for this season’s harvest, and then Phuc says he has to concentrate on the road ahead and will call again on Sunday. Thanh says fine, drive carefully, and sets the phone down on the table next to the fertilizer schedule he has been reviewing for the past hour. Outside, the cashew trees are dark against a sky that still holds the last thin light of the day. The nuts are there, invisible in the dark, growing on their own schedule, indifferent to the conversations happening around them about who will pick them and for how long and what will come after. The harvest will begin when it begins. Thanh will be in the garden at six o’clock, the way he has been every morning for thirty years. Whether anyone will be standing beside him is a question the trees do not ask and he has not yet answered.