Sisaket Creative Farming Network Community is a rice grower group established by 105 members and located in 02 provinces in the northeastern region of Thailand prone to drought. Sisaket and Yasothorn provinces in the Isan region. As Isan is a dry area, without an irrigation system, farmers can produce rice only once a year. With the poor income, it is becoming challenging for the farmers to improve their living quality in spite of the efforts of the Sisaket Creative Farming Network Community to teach them to improve their rice productivity. As such an additional source of income for members become a necessity.
Since there is a huge potential and demand for Thai herbs in the domestic and international markets, the producer organisation saw this as an opportunity for their members to generate an alternate income. With the Resilience funding support, the members have now set up a homestead garden with a solar dome as a pilot project to produce and dry a variety of crops such as mung bean, local medicinal herbs, lemon grass, Kaffir lime, citrus, ginger, galangal, and pea flower for self-consumption and for increasing their income.
The project has enhanced their knowledge of vegetable and herb cultivation and will support 105 small holder farmer families with a sustainable livelihood. The income generated from selling the products will be divided for distributing to the members as dividends, keeping a reserve in the producer organisation’s saving account, and also for being utilised to fund the project for further development.
Mrs. Nujaree Chanawong, a member of the organisation mentions-
“ I do organic rice farming and grow organic vegetables for selling. However, due to the COVID pandemic, the business has not been good. My friend from the organic rice group introduced me to planting organic pea flowers and selling the dried flowers. Once the flowers are harvested, we dry them with the solar dome.10 kgs of fresh pea flower get processed into 1 kg of dried pea flower. We weigh and sell it once a month at a price of 400 baht/ kg. This fetches us an additional source of income.
