Abstract
Abstract
In recent years, reduced rainfall and water stress have threatened the livelihoods of millions of rice producers in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta (VMD). To enhance the rice farmers’ resilience capacity to climate change, it is essential to introduce and promote water-saving cultivation practices such as alternate wetting and drying (AWD) in rice production. Unfortunately, it is fact that the application of this technology in the region is very limited. We, therefore, hypothesized in this study that the ease of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and accurate water measurements could facilitate the uptake of AWD. To confirm this hypothesis, we investigated both the technical and financial feasibility of deploying IoT technology in open-field conditions. This paper focuses on the assessments of costs and benefits of investing in IoT AWD compared to the least cost manual one. We find that the investment is financially viable for smallholder farmers with plot sizes of over 2 hectares and conditions conducive to applying AWD (the case of individual farmers in Can Tho). The assessments also show that the larger economies of scale would make the IoT investment highly profitable (the case of an agricultural company in An Giang). The analysis, however, reveals that the efficiency gains of investing in IoT technology cannot compensate for poor AWD conditions, and thus smallholder farmers in the Tra Vinh case should instead apply the low-cost alternative of manual AWD.