Vietnamese Haystacks

What Are Vietnamese Haystacks Made with & What Are They Used for?

In Vietnam, farmers feed their livestock with haystacks made of rice storks and shaped like a tall dome and these are called đụn rơm in Vietnamese. Particularly when riding bicycles through the villages in the countryside around the buffer-zone of Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, you will see many of these đụn rơm haystacks outside every house.

The haystacks are put together during the rice harvest season. After the rice is cut, it is threshed to remove the seeds – or grain – and that’s the part that we eat. The remaining storks from the rice are stacked around a tall wooden pole to create the hay of the haystacks. The hay on the outside of the stack becomes weathered by the rain and the oxygen in the atmosphere, but the hay is stacked in such a way that the rain and moisture cannot penetrate more than a few inches into the stack, preserving the hay of the inner layers which is used as fodder (food for livestock).

Haystack Design

The haystack has a central pole firmly beat into a hole in the ground. The centre-pole to support haystack can often be seen poking out of the top of the haystack. In this case, it will have either a bucket or blue plastic tarp draped over it to stop the rain from flowing down the middle of the haystack and ruining the fodder stored inside. The cows are fed the fodder from the haystack during certain times of the year when the rice crop is growing because the cows are not allowed to freely roam about eating, as it will ruin the crops. The cows will be able to roam freely again after the crops are harvested in June, and between October and December when the cropping areas are left fallow.

A Story about a Haystack

Every summer, the US Department of Defence will send groups to Vietnam to search for the bodies of their fallen countryman that were not retrieved or classified as MIA (Missing In Action) during the American/Vietnam War. The MIA recovery team consists of specialists from many fields of expertise including archeologists, bomb and landmine technicians, historians, genetic analysis and more. Prior to taking to the field in search for a body, a lot of research will be carried out using sources such as flight logs, diaries, witness accounts and copies of orders that were given at the time. They then go to the general location of where they believe the body to be and talk to elderly locals to see if anybody knows or remembers anything about it.

When the missions to recover the bodies first began in the late 1990’s, an MIA team were searching for the body of a helicopter pilot whos aircraft was shot down in a village between Hoi An and Da Nang. The team went to the village where they believed the helicopter had come down and using the interpreters, both assigned by the Vietnamese Government and from their own ranks, began interviews with some of the older village folk in order to find the body of the pilot who has been missing for around 30 years.

While the senior officers and interpreters were compiling all of the information to help with the search, one of the team members decided to go for a stroll around the village to essentially have a look around. He was walking through the village along a path, when he spotted something that intrigued him. It was a fodder haystack with the central pole poking from the top, which instead of being sheltered by a bucket or tarpaulin to stop the rain from running down the middle of the stack, there was a US pilot’s helmet perched there instead.

He rushed back to get the rest of the team.

They all returned and approached the house to ask the old lady living there if she remembered an American helicopter being shot down in the area during the war. She certainly did remember, and revealed to them that it had actually crashed around the back of her house. They all came inside and sat down in the altar room of the old lady’s home, where she explained to them, upon further questioning, that when the helicopter crash landed, there was a survivor who scrambled out and staggered away from the wreckage. The recovery team were excited to hear about the survivor and continued to ask if she knew what had happened to him. She told them that her and her sister had buried him and she then lead the team outside and pointed at a strand of banana trees. They asked her why they had buried him in the yard if he had survived the crash and she responded with…

The MIA team exhumed the body that afternoon. It was confirmed immediately that it was in fact the body they were looking for when the team found the identification tags. The body was returned to the US and the lady was reimbursed for the damage that had been done to her garden due to the digging and excavating and the pilot’s helmet was left right there on the haystack to keep the fodder dry.