For most of its working life, vetiver has been valued as an “engineer”. It holds slopes, slows runoff, traps sediment, drains waterlogged ground, and treats decontaminated water and land . That reputation is deserved and thoroughly documented. But the same…
Vetiver Against Stem Borers: One Simple Rule Decides Where It Travels In the paddy fields of Zhejiang, China, a quiet revolution in rice pest management has been running for more than a decade. Farmers plant rows of vetiver grass along…
Reading the Land from Space — A Compendium on Satellite Imagery and Field Evidence for the Vetiver System Guide to the seven documents, and the order to read them This compendium brings together what a land-restoration program can and cannot…
The two attached documents make a complementary case for the Vetiver System (VS) as a living, low-cost means of protecting river, canal, dam and sea banks against flood and wave erosion. The first sets out the underlying method and a…
How Vetiver Retrofits Turn 7% Yield Losses Into 200%+ Gains—While Suppressing Pests Farmers Never Expected (the photos in this article are all from Ethiopia and show vetiver planted in the mid 1990s and the early 2000s) The transformation of Ethiopia’s…
Comprehensive Assessment of Staple Grains, High-Value Perennials, and Vegetable Crops Under Rising Soil Temperatures—and the Vetiver Solution The Crisis Beneath Our Feet While the world fixates on rising air temperatures, bare degraded soil now reaches 43-50°C during peak sun versus…
Our February Newsletter is coming out quite late for technical reasons: we have just migrated the TVNI website from its long time host, CSS Communications (of Bellingham, Washington) to a new host and so were “down” during the transfer. As…
“Use geofabrics only when risk demands it — vetiver does the heavy lifting.” “Why pay 5 times more for geofabrics when vetiver does the real work?” “Vetiver isn’t vegetation — it’s bio‑engineering that stops slope failure.” Across the world’s highways,…
Liyu Xu, China Vetiver Network Coordinator, and his team from The National Institute of Soils (Nanjing), as well as many others, notably Xia Hanping (South China Institute of Botany), Lu Zhong-Xian (Institute of Plant Protection and Microbiology, Zhejiang Academy of…