Suan Lahu organic farm in Chiang Rai - Part 1

Like every coffee lover at some point the dream is to be able to spend some time on a plantation to understand how coffee is born and grows what ends up on café tables in liquid form and which many of us love especially in the morning, I am passionate about Asia and Thailand so I searched for a farm that combined coffee with a more sustainable approach and after months of research and thanks to websites such as Wordpackers and Workaway I came across this eco-sustainable plantation, Suan Lahu coffee farm run by the Lahu community on their own land in the mountains between Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.

Website : https://suanlahu.org/

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/SuanLahu

Instagram : @suanlahu_organiccoffee @suan_lahu_organic_coffee

The Lahu are an indigenous ethnic group who reside in the mountainous regions of the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and China meet. They have a rich cultural heritage, a distinct language and a history of resilience, balancing traditional customs with modern influences; in Thailand, the Lahu community is concentrated in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai where they have become known for their agricultural skills, particularly in coffee cultivation.

Once dependent on subsistence farming and opium cultivation, many Lahu farmers have switched to coffee thanks to sustainable farming initiatives and projects introduced by the royal family around 1970, initiated by King Bhumibol who wanted to find a way to replace the opium cultivation that was rampant among the contandins in the so-called Golden Triangle between Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and China.

It was a success, to give you an idea, in most countries in the world that grow coffee the average age of a farmer is now between 40 and 60 with more and more young people moving away from something that does not allow them to earn a decent living, in Thailand it is the opposite, It is also true that King Bhumibol introduced a 90% tax on imported coffee, the second highest after India, and with domestic demand exceeding production, Thai farmers are in an advantageous position compared to other countries.

When I travel before leaving I inform myself the least because I like to discover the reality I am going to immerse myself in real time, once I arrived reading some articles about the Lahu who are hosting me I found a very interesting article from National Geographic where they interviewed the manager of the farm where I am volunteering.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/thai-hill-tribe-teaching-coffee-making-travellers

A fascinating fact is that the Lahu are a matriarchal community and once a couple gets married the man goes to live in the village of the wife, they are the only culture in the whole country and among the other tribes where men and women have equal rights, the heavy work is done by the men but in the house, cleaning, cooking and control and education of the children is shared equally by man and woman, talking to Loue the plantation manager explains to me that divorces were much more common in the past than now, unfortunately the Lahu language is only spoken but not written, fortunately the internet helps us to discover worlds whose stories we would never have known, but how many wonderful cultures of the past with civilisations much more civilised than us have passed without leaving us any information.

You can't go back to serving coffee without getting angry when someone tells you that it costs too much after experiencing first-hand the hardships and hard work on a coffee plantation' and even more so when it is organic and a permaculture method is used, which makes it even more tiring, the absurd thing about this society is that those who produce and should be put on a pedestal are those considered almost the last wheel on the cart, the economic system in which we live is rotten and the concept of economic growth in a small and limited space needs to be reviewed, there is no economic growth without a large segment of the population not being able to enjoy the benefits and in this case it is also the planet that pays a very high price.

In a fortnight of volunteering I have been battered by wasps, fever due to who knows what, perhaps due to food or water, slipped collecting wood to make organic fertiliser, Biochar, and pulled a nerve and unable to move for a whole day, encounter with some kind of completely green viper and a cobra, two weeks alone, these growers have to fight with things like this all year round but they will be the ones who get the crumbs of the final profit, this society is definitely to be rewritten, it absolutely must be and without delay. ….. https://anextraordinaryandordinarylifeblog.wordpress.com/2025/09/01/due-mesi-di-volontariato-in-una-piantagione-di-caffe-in-chiang-mai-con-la-comunita-lahu/