For three decades, Vetiver Grass Technology (VGT) has demonstrated extraordinary technical performance in stabilizing engineered slopes—yet struggled with institutional adoption. Hong Kong documented ten years of zero slope failures, then rejected vetiver. Hawaii faced $70 million in flood damage and…
Vetiver Phytoremediation – The Mechanisms Vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides) removes agricultural and waste water (sewage) pollutants through four integrated biological mechanisms operating simultaneously. (1) The foundation is its massive vertical root system reaching 3-4 meters depth, creating enormous surface area…
When Farmers Discover What Science Had Already Proven The Vietnamese Discovery The Vietnam Vetiver Farmers Group (facebook.com/groups/vetiver4vn) has become the world’s most innovative vetiver community through careful field observation and documentation. Their farmers noticed something remarkable: crops planted close to…
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…
Not because it isn’t raining. Because we have spent seventy years building systems designed to move rainfall off the land as fast as possible — graded terraces, drainage channels, sealed surfaces — and into rivers that carry it to the…
“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,…
Across the tropics and subtropics, farmers face a tightening squeeze: rising pest pressure, declining soil fertility, unpredictable rainfall, and the escalating cost of chemical inputs. What the new Vetiver System biological‑control module makes clear is that a single, elegant solution—vetiver…
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…
Across the tropics, farmers are fighting a battle on two fronts: declining soil health and rising pest pressure. For decades, the response has been predictable—more chemicals, deeper tillage, and higher costs. But a quiet revolution is spreading across Africa, Asia,…
For nearly 40 years, the Vetiver Grass Technology (VGT) has been recognized worldwide for its unmatched performance in soil conservation, slope stabilization, hydrological protection, and watershed rehabilitation. But one of its most powerful biological functions—its ability to act as a…