Owning a herd of 1,500 snakes with a value of over VND 1.5 billion, Khanh can regularly pocket half a billion VND from the profit of selling baby snakes.

Mr. Nguyen Van Nhut Khanh (31 years old, living in Quy Thanh hamlet, Tan Hoi commune, Cai Lay town, Tien Giang) is currently the owner of the largest production facility of elephant snakes in the region. With 1,500 parent snakes, every year Mr. Khanh sells over 5,000 seed snakes, earning about 700 million VND, minus all expenses, he still makes a profit of about 500 million VND. (1$=25,000 VND)

Mr. Nhut Khanh said that 12 years ago, when he had just finished his military service and returned to his hometown, he, like many other young people, was very confused when looking for a job. Instead of going with his friends to find work in industrial zones, Mr. Thanh decided to take risks and borrow money to raise snakes and elephants.

“The amount of investment of 70 million dongs was a huge amount for me at that time. I had no experience then, if I failed, I would be in debt, but I still risked starting a business, luckily everything was favorable”, Mr. Khanh Shared.

In the early years, in order to increase the herd, Mr. Khanh did not sell baby snakes but kept them for breeding, so he had no income from snakes.

According to Khanh, the elephant ripper is a native wild species, well-adapted, has strong vitality and easy to take care of. Only need to feed the snake 4 times a month and change the tank water once.

“The food for elephant snakes is aquatic waste products such as baby fish and frogs, so it doesn’t cost a lot of money. Snakes are easy to raise. They basically feed themselves, and grow up on their own, but they don’t have to interfere at all. but only 2-3%,” said Mr. Khanh.

One-year-old snakes reach a weight of 1 to 1.5 kg and begin to produce their first litter, from 5 to 7 pups. From the 2nd year, snakes give birth to more than 10 babies, the bigger the parent snakes, the more they reproduce.

After 2 years of raising snakes, Mr. Khanh started selling seed. In the market, the price of newborn snakes is from 70,000 to 80,000 VND/head depending on the time. However, Mr. Khanh chose to keep the baby snakes for at least 3 months before selling them for better quality and higher value.

Snake cages are cement water tanks about 5-10m wide, from 0.5 to 1.5m deep depending on the size of the snake. Inside the tank, let it flood with water from 10 to 20cm, remove the substrates such as coconut leaves, duckweed, earthen mounds, tinder for snakes to live in.

After birth, the baby snakes were not taken care of by their parents but had to find their own food, so Mr. Khanh caught them and locked them in a separate tank, feeding them with suitable food. In order to meet the living space for the growing snake herd, from a few initial tanks, Mr. Khanh has now built nearly 20 tanks. 

Khanh’s parents of snakes weigh about 2kg each. The snake farm owner said that according to the current market price, the snakes are worth over 1.5 billion VND. After 12 years of doing a job that Mr. Khanh commented as “almost nothing to do”, young people in the West had a billion-dollar property with a huge income that made many people dream.

According to Mr. Khanh, currently, snake farmers and his customers are mainly in the West, who are at retirement age.