Now, most of rice seeds that have been promoted to Thai farmers are pretty much selected to grow with chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and insects. Therefore, the cost of chemical farming is very expensive, and the health of farmers is negatively affected.

Farmers gathered, growing rice

In the Ban Nong Lek Ta Chang, Surin, most of farmers are still doing chemical farming and have chronic health and economic problems, as the cost of production is very high. In addition, some of them also have an informal debt problem. In fact, there are a few farmers interested to adopt organic farming because it can improve their heath conditions, but the lack of knowledge and distribution channels cause them doubt on this system.

Also, big rice mills tend to monopolize in terms of buying rice from farmers in this area and could not buy any organic rice because there are so many chemical substances left in the machine. In addition, farmers cannot get a reasonable price because they rush to sell and no rice left in their rice barns.

An example of a rice barn in this community

All of these reasons, we need your helps to build a small rice mill to support farmers interested in organic farming to have more choices and preserve local seeds to maintain food security in our community.

Farmers tried to get weed off of a pilot organic farm