Nam PhươngThe lab

The room
behind everything.

A working microbiology lab in Đồng Tháp, fourteen people, and a strain library we have been building for a decade. Nothing flashy — just the room where the work actually gets done.

I.The method, in six steps

From soil sample to a product on a shelf.

A patient sequence. We do not skip steps and we do not market on hope — every product on our list has been through all six.

01
Collect
Field
Soil from healthy fields. Compost, ditch mud, anywhere life is doing well. Catalogued by site, season, depth.
02
Isolate
Bench
Pull single strains out of the mix. Each isolate gets a code, a freezer slot, and a story.
03
Identify
Genome
DNA sequencing tells us what we have caught. Most of it we already know. A few we do not.
04
Screen
Lab plant
Pair the strain with a host plant in pots. Watch what changes — root mass, nitrogen uptake, stress response.
05
Trial
Field, season
Small plot trials in real fields with farmers. Measured against an untreated control. Multiple sites.
06
Formulate
Production
Stable formulation, shelf-life test, regulatory dossier. Then — and only then — onto the catalogue.
II.What is in the lab

The kit, listed plainly.

A working inventory. We are not a giant facility — we are a focused one. Everything on this list is bought, paid for, and used weekly.

Strain library
~ 1,400 isolates
Native Mekong microbes. Full freezer redundancy. Annotated by source site, performance, and date isolated.
Sequencing
In-house Illumina + Sanger
Identification down to species level. Whole-genome work for our priority strains. Batch sequencing weekly.
Bioreactors
4 production lines
From bench-scale to 5,000 L. Liquid and solid-state fermentation. Dedicated lines for sensitive strains.
Cold chain
~ 220 m³ controlled
Master cell banks, working banks, formulated product. Multiple temperature zones with full redundancy.
Greenhouse
2 controlled bays
Pot trials on rice, vegetables, fruit, cassava. Year-round, isolated from field conditions.
Field network
~ 2,400 ha enrolled
Working farmers across the delta. Treated and control plots. Staff agronomists visit on a rotation.
III.A look inside

The room we work in.

Photos as we have them. Sterile bench, fermentation hall, the cold room, a scientist at the microscope, the greenhouse on a rainy morning.

Sterile bench · placeholder
Fermentation hall · placeholder
Microscope work · placeholder
Cold storage · placeholder
Greenhouse · placeholder
Field plot, Long Phú · placeholder
IV.The team

Fourteen people.
All of them, hands in the work.

Five microbiologists, three agronomists, two formulation engineers, two production technicians, a quality lead, and a research director who still pipettes.

We hire from the universities here — Cần Thơ, Nông Lâm, An Giang — and we keep people for a long time. Most of the team has been at Nam Phương for more than four years. We pay properly, we send people to conferences, and we do not have a "marketing department" looking over the science team's shoulder.

If you want to come and visit the lab, just write. We do tours for partners and journalists by appointment. Bring an appetite — there is good rice waiting in Đồng Tháp.

Want to read deeper?

A working set of documents — our method note, recent trial summaries, and the Long Phú case in full. Sent on request, by a real person.

Open a door →Read the case study →