Consumption of milk and dairy products in Vietnam expanded rapidly with the economic growth launched under Doi Moi. In Ho Chi Minh City’s Cu Chi Province, which is a typical dairy‒farming area of southern Vietnam, technologies for dairy farming in high‒temperature conditions were developed and spread in the 1990s. The region’s dairy farming expanded rapidly until recent years, aided by favorable market conditions and by public subsidies. By 2013, disparities were evident in the numbers of cattle held by different farmers, but given that area dairy farmers in general had increased their stock of cattle into the 2010s, these disparities did not arise because some farmers expanded their stock while others decreased theirs. Rather, they were the result of differences in the rate of increase in the number of cattle held by farmers.

Since 2013, dairy farming has been influenced by the internationalization of dairy companies, which led to lower raw‒milk prices and imposed stricter purchasing standards, and also by the rise in land prices due to urbanization, as well as by trends in the labor market. The internationalization of dairy companies elicited different responses from farmers, producing hierarchical stratification and fragmentation among them. Some large‒scale farmers tried to counteract the price reductions by increasing their stock of cattle and thereby their gross income, while others sought to recover their feed self‒sufficiency by reducing the number of cattle and thereby increasing their per‒cow area of grassland. Meanwhile, many mid‒ and small‒scale farmers combined dairy farming with non‒farm work and responded in various ways to the lower raw‒milk prices and rising land prices. While some tried to sell more raw milk to offset the lower prices, others sold farmland and cattle to repay debt, reduced the size of their dairy farms, and took on more and more non‒farm work. In conclusion, this analysis shows that the structural changes in agriculture seen in the rice‒growing areas of the Mekong River Delta are becoming apparent in the dairy farming areas of Ho Chi Minh City as well, namely the simultaneous expansion and contraction of scale by area farmers.