The Story of You Sabai Garden

Developing an Eco-Social Enterprise from the Ground Up

By Michael B. Commons

In my work as a course facilitator and collaborating writer on an FAO guidebook, I focus on helping small-scale farmers develop functional, profitable eco-social enterprises that restore the health of our planet, communities, and people. I don’t often find that those who choose this journey fit the traditional business-person mold — and I’m glad they don’t. In our present world, we cannot ignore the impact of money, business, and trade, and must harness the power of all people to cultivate positive, sustainable change that goes further than charity or volunteerism alone.

As our guidebook, “Enabling Sustainable Food Systems: Innovators’ Handbook”, claims, I believe the potential to out-scale such initiatives is enormous. Most of the developing world is made up of small-scale farmers and changing societal norms — including social media, logistical services, and educated children and grandchildren of these same farmers who understand new markets and technologies — along with a planetary populace that largely recognizes that abusing Earth is not good for our health or our future. This means conditions are ripe with opportunity.

This journey of transformation from farmer to-farmer eco-entrepreneur is challenging — but if we continue to keep up the conversation and spread knowledge to one another, we can travel this path more easily by avoiding the pitfalls our predecessors fell into.

The story I wish to tell is one I know most intimately. It is the story of my wife Yoke, who after an internship with local wise elder farmer, Pooyai Viboon Khemchalerm, returned home to practice farming against Thailand’s societal norms and the wishes of her family. It is a story of strength, self-reliance, perseverance, attention to quality, and standing up for what you believe in.

Now, over 10 years later, Yoke has developed a small eco-social enterprise: You Sabai Garden.

Thai society generally views farming as a last-resort career for their children, a perspective not at all unreasonable considering the hardships most small-scale farmers in Thailand face today. Money is needed for almost all inputs: seed, fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, fuel, and labor — and the price is continually rising, with flood and drought risk constantly looming on the horizon. After harvesting their commodity crops (such as rice, sugar cane, cassava, rubber, etc.), farmers have no power of negotiation over the price and conditions of sale. This leaves farmers with two options: sell at the price and conditions offered, or don’t sell and let rot.

High national market prices tend to reflect bad harvest years, but when yields are high, prices are lower to match demand and may not cover the full cost of cultivation and harvest. Farmers lose far too often — proven by the exponentially rising farmer debt and small-scale farmers being forced to sell their land or cede it to the banks for loan defaults.

A critical first step to transforming this cycle is understanding and recognizing that another pathway is possible. Yoke was very fortunate to be able to study under Pooyai Viboon, whose path took him through conventional agriculture and the Green Revolution from early successes to increasing debts and bankruptcy. He had the foresight, courage, and luck to stop, sell off enough land to pay his debt, and keep 1.5 hectares for himself. He learned to stop chasing money and start producing what his family eats and needs — and then to only sell surpluses.

This was the beginning of Pooyai Viboon’s journey of self-reliance, from which he developed a philosophy and practice combining forest gardening with the revival and furthered development of knowledge on how to properly utilize our resources to meet our needs — for food, medicine, energy, fertility, or any good we use in our daily lives, known as “Wanakaset”. Not long ago, such knowledge and practice was the norm in Thailand. Pooyai Viboon still remembered much from his childhood, found it still possible and applicable, and continued to find new knowledge and exchange experience with others.

Yoke studied under Pooyai Viboon for an internship requirement in her Agricultural Extension studies with King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang. Pooyai Viboon inspired and changed the views of many, and Yoke, too, became infected with his wisdom and ways.

After graduating Yoke settled into a well-paying salary job, but she was not happy. She returned to learn more from Pooyai Viboon and apply such methods on her family’s land. At that time, Pooyai Viboon had a few long-term apprentices residing in his forest garden. Lodging and instruction were provided at no cost, but students were required to practice self-reliance by collecting and cooking their own food and learning to make their own charcoal, fertilizer, soap, shampoo, and much more. Pooyai Viboon encouraged them to sell the natural products, foods, and seedlings they created to visitors or, when invited, to larger meetings and fairs in Bangkok. Pooyai Viboon did not expect these young students to remain with him — he supported them to take these new practices and skill-sets into the world, and apply them to their own land, in their own situation. Pooyai Viboon believed that to restore the health of the Earth, the most efficient and effective way is to restore the health and spirit of the people. For while one person can restore a piece of land to become an abundant and biodiverse forest, every person has the ability to apply, adapt, and bring forward such knowledge. When we look at the impact of land, health, and livelihood of all who have learned from Pooyai Viboon, it is clear to see that his 1.5 hectares has been multiplied well over 1,000 times and continues to grow.

Yoke is one such student who found a joy in forest gardening and creating natural cosmetics. Her speciality? Kaffir lime shampoo.

As Pooyai Viboon taught and encouraged, the joy of play and experimentation is the best way to truly learn a skill — and involves little risk. Yoke thus developed her ability to create natural cosmetics while learning with each failure and success how to do it better. Using products of her own cultivation, she has a holistic understanding of the final product.

After realizing that there is another path forward, this is the next critical step: experimentation and play with observation and evaluation. This inevitably leads to wisdom: knowledge from experience that has been tested and found to be valid.

It is critical to start from this entry level. Many who are enticed by the possibilities of earning great quantities of money start investing a lot to try something that they have little to no experience with. They may not even know if they like the work or the products of this work. This, as taught by Pooyai Viboon, often leads to failure, losses, and debt. Starting small by simply producing for one’s own needs organically leads eco-entrepreneurs forward on a steady path while developing products with consistently high quality.

It is common to experiment with one’s skill over a range of products before finding which product(s) best suit their conditions and skills. Varying climates, soils, and environmental conditions leave our global population with inherent natural gifts that lead to an infinite amount of possible pathways. Many plants can be used in a great variety of ways, such as the banana: a fruit that can be transformed into jams, wines, vinegars, chips, medicine, and more. Its flowers are another delicious food, and its cores can be stewed. Its fibers make an attractive natural twine. Banana stalks are good feed for livestock and worms or can be processed into great biofertilizers. From the banana alone, we see a single farming community could have a couple dozen non-competing small enterprises yielding a diversity of ecological products. Students of Wanakaset learn how to use their resources, skills, conditions, and passion to develop livelihoods in balance with the land and ecology. This may not be so different from how we lived as ancient humans, or nearly any time before the arrival of cheap consumer goods, the market economy, and advertising.

When I had the good fortune to meet and fall in love with Yoke about 10 years ago, she was living between Pooyai Viboon’s forest garden and her family home just 10 kilometers away. She was earning very little, but also spending very little. She was growing and selling seedlings, developing her own garden, and producing small amounts of kaffir lime shampoo that she sold to Pooyai Viboon’s visitors and at the occasional fair. People viewed her as crazy for giving up her corporate job that earned over 20,000 THB ($630) per month, instead choosing to work in the sun to plant and grow a forest. I have met and interviewed many other ecological farmers over the years who have similar experiences of being called crazy for choosing such a path. My arrival to the family gave her additional support and together, we seemed just a little less crazy.

Not so long after meeting, we joined an annual herbal fair where Yoke was approached by a large natural foods store. To Yoke’s delight, the store asked if she could supply them with her shampoo regularly. This brought the first major shift in production and income — her selling point shifted from perhaps 200 bottles over the course of a year to 50 bottles a month. With growing purchases from this store and others, Yoke transformed her production from being entirely her own work to involving local women in her community to help in the many production steps. She invested in bigger pots, more charcoal stoves, a bigger blender, and developed relationships with more local farmers to fulfill her expanding kaffir lime supply needs. Throughout her growth, she has been attentive to learn and address any quality issues. Whenever quality problems arose, it meant an opportunity to find its cause, change the production system, and achieve better and more consistent quality. While the learning process never ends, this sort of attention to quality is critical in securing and maintaining customers and preparing an enterprise to be ready for more demanding markets.

The next critical shift in Yoke’s business and the Wanakaset Network was our decision to develop a Participatory Guarantee System. The group wanted to be able to clarify and denote what it means for a farmer to practice this system, and what constitutes a Wanakaset product. Pooyai Viboon’s forest gardening methodology has always been taught as an ecological farming system without any use of chemical inputs — similar to organic, but with additional requirements of high biodiversity, integration and self-reliance principles, the standards developed reflected IFOAM basic organic principles and this special character. Mr. Vitoon Panyakul, General Secretary of Earth Net Foundation where I was also working and Pooyai Viboon was President, was key to helping the group through this PGS development process. This is an example of how networks and relationships can play a critical role in business growth processes. While the process of developing and implementing Wanakaset’s PGS was slow and gradual, it has now progressed with a peer inspection process and set of criteria that can certify products as Wanakaset Organic +.

Three years ago, Yoke ventured into creating a PGS organic line for her shampoo. Because the shampoo has only one ingredient aside from water, Citrus hystrix limes, the certification was fairly easy. It just required that the limes used in production come from farms congruent with the Wanakaset production standards. Her processing, storage, and packaging also needed to be clearly separated to avoid possible mixing between the new organic line of shampoo and old line using limes from farmers whose farms were not organic.

This was quite a substantial investment. Yoke paid a significant premium for organic limes, which gave a lot of support and value to the farmers practicing organic forest gardening.

Unfortunately, there was no market at the time for this new premium product with a price that matched. We found a few smaller-scale buyers, but we began to worry.

It was during the Mindful Markets Social Enterprise Course that I was helping coordinate that the leader of an online organic shop in China met Yoke, saw her operation, liked her product, and requested to import it for their sales. Though the journey up until that point had been a long road, we see that Yoke’s involvement and investment in the network to develop organic + PGS did, in fact, open up new market opportunities that allowed for growth of her business and of other farmers in the network.

Enterprise can be a bit like dancing: two steps forward and one step back. I stepped in to work with this Chinese partner to find a way to get our product to them at a manageable cost, which turned out to be a challenge. Packaging and shipping services charged rates that were too high when calculated per bottle for this rather heavy product. On the other hand, our order size was too small to fill any shipping container, and the Chinese importer did not have any experience or staff to clear imports from a port and get it to their location. I finally had the fortune to find an agent that provides land transport through Lao PDR and into China that could welcome our smaller order sizes with reasonable per-bottle shipping rates. Thanks to this customer in China, our organic line was able to take off that year.

… One step back. The next year, when we had planned our organic line supply and bottling based mostly upon expected sales to our key client in China, we ran into logistical problems with the first shipment. Washed out roads in the rainy season delayed shipment for nearly 6 weeks, and once finally arrived, about 1/3 of the bottles were not up to their original quality. I could imagine the truck container baking in full sun somewhere in Laos for weeks and temperatures inside reaching over 50°C.

Whatever the case, that shipping method failed to keep the product in good condition, and resulted in a big loss. We tried a second order to replace the faulty bottles free of charge, but encountered even worse shipping luck. While it is still not clear what happened — whether the trucking company went bankrupt or the whole shipment was derailed because another shipment in the same truck was not properly declared — the product never arrived. Worse yet, unclear communication, delays, and lack of alternative affordable choices propelled us into Chinese New Year, when everything shuts down for a month. Then it was decided to better start afresh the next production year. This taught us how critical logistics are for export. It is a reminder that while margins can be greater when things go right in higher value export markets, losses can be enormous when things go wrong. Most of our organic line of shampoo from that year was given away — a huge financial loss.

In the midst of our unsuccessful shipments to China, a small chain of supermarkets focused on organic products that we knew from collaborations in many areas including Participatory Guarantee Systems, asked our Wanakaset Network to supply them with PGS organic kaffir lime shampoo to sell under their house brand. The margin was much lower, with pre-payment and a substantial initial order that we were confident would lead to regular sales. Yoke, with the most experience and consistent quality, was in charge of the majority of production and overall quality management.

As Yoke expected, the product sold well, clients wanted more, and thus, this has developed into a strong regular client relationship. This is also an interesting case to consider the benefits of selling under one’s own brand versus selling under the house brand of another with a strong market. While it is critical to know your costs — including labor, product losses, equipment and other overhead and investments — selling in volume with pre-payment can make just a moderate margin interesting as risks are low. However, it’s also important to consider the nature of the relationship. An organic product requiring special skill to produce at the consistent quality grade such as that offered by You Sabai Garden, coupled with the fact that the client shares common values should provide a strong motivation for maintaining and building the supply chain together rather than looking for other suppliers to improve their margin.

Without the development of PGS, quality management, or our network and relationships with other organizations such as this one, it would have been quite unlikely for this to have happened.

Fortune also turned in terms of our logistics to China. A colleague informed us of another logistics and shipping service that was affordable, but upon our arrival, the business was closed and vacated. We left without a clue as to where we would find another such service. After stopping to change our daughter’s diaper at a gas station, Yoke fortuitously spotted signage in Thai, English, and Chinese of a logistics company in time for me to swing around and stop in front. Fifteen minutes later, their team was professionally repacking our products and preparing them for shipment. We found this superior service for only slightly more than what we were paying before. If it proves to be as good as it seems, we will have solid logistical support for getting our product to China.

Yoke, like many other social entrepreneurs I have met approaching what might be called “success,” does not feel a drive to expand in a big way. She did not get into this for the money. While money has its role and is needed to keep both the business operational and to provide for the family, her primary motive for taking this journey was to be able to be with and care for her family and land. As both a practicing Buddhist and a student of His Majesty King Rama 9’s sufficiency philosophy finding peace with having enough is a key to happiness. While she started her journey with these ideals, she now feels a certain obligation to follow her teacher Pooyai Viboon’s footsteps, and in her own way play a role as a teacher for others. While she hopes to maintain operations and a very gradual continued growth of her enterprise, she is investing more of her time in sharing her knowledge and experience with others looking to become farmer eco-entrepreneurs and returning to play and experiment with new products and services that, like her shampoo, link with the agricultural biodiversity and traditional knowledge of the people of Thailand. She sees far more need and opportunity for people to reconnect in such a way and to develop livelihoods that also heal the Earth.

When one has such a life with meaning and joy in what you do, who you are with, and where you live, satisfaction is easy to reach and simple pleasures such as eating your own freshly harvested fruits and vegetables, or spending an afternoon with your children, have far more meaning than earning enough money to, for instance, buy a luxury car. Yoke is part of a growing Thai farmer entrepreneur movement with members of the new generation choosing to return to their family’s land to practice ecological agriculture, and use niche skills and experience to shift the family farm or community into an enterprise that can uplift and invigorate the local community as well.

With challenges, changes, learning, and innovation every year so far, I know that the journey of You Sabai Garden and Yoke’s personal journey following the Wanakaset methods and principles and working to develop the health of her land, family, and community, is far from over. I hope her story may be of some inspiration and value for others looking to find their own path with similar ideals. If you would like to continue following the progress of her enterprise and evolution of our forest garden, you may follow her on Facebook.

References:

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Rome, 2020
2. http://www.fao.org/3/i3729e/i3729e.pdf
3. http://www.chaipat.or.th/eng/concepts-theories/sufficiency-economy-new-theory.html,