Rak the Story

Rak Tamachat is ‘Love Natural’ in Thai

Rak Tamachat is an Education Center located on a conventional Thai farm, focused on growing rice and corn, raising chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea fowl, and pigs.  The Farm covers approximately 50 acres and has been operating its broad scale agriculture since 2008. In January of 2012 Permaculture was introduced to the operations through a Master Plan that was prepared by Terra Genesis.

The owners, a mixed nationality couple (thai wife, american husband), with newborn twin sons, wants to create a healthy, dynamic environment for their family and to use the project as an Education Center to help local farmers shift away from the trap of conventional, fossil fuel based agriculture.

Rak Tamachat is now home to a diverse community made up of family members, workers, residents, interns and volunteers. In accordance with Thai culture the father of the wife’s family is the patriarch on the site and the manager of the broad scale agriculture efforts. He runs these at the subsistence level, which is again in accordance with Thai culture. The residents are persons who have committed to long term stays (1 year or longer) and have taken on the administrative duties of operating the Education Center. Interns and volunteers are persons who want to learn the practical implementation of various permaculture projects or design projects capable of being implemented. The workers assist with both broad scale agriculture efforts as well as project implementation, and provide a wealth of knowledge about daily work on a farm and living in Thailand. …if you are willing to work with them and learn Thai as you share English with them.

The Master Plan was prepared as an overview and has many areas that can benefit from more detailed designs. This creates the basic opportunities here for interns and volunteers to improve their design and implementation skills by filling out the details on the projects designed into the Master Plan. Because of this the Master Plan is considered a living document and is subject to updating or re-writing sections as circumstances or detailed designs require.