‘To our children’s children’

‘To our children’s children’

Kajonsak Photakan (Tee), Thailand

There are both good and bad memories for Tee Kajonsak Photakan of growing up on his family farm in the rural district of Photharam, Ratchaburi in Thailand.

Good memories were the harvesting times when friends and neighbors would gather to help pick vegetables and prepare them for storage and the markets. Tee remembers that it was also when children in the community could come together and play while the adults were busy in the fields.

But there were also some less pleasant memories. ‘I remember as a kid sometimes when I asked my father for treats or candy, he would say he could not afford them because the middlemen had taken all his profits.’

Farming was a hard life, and Tee’s parents knew this, urging him not to follow in their footsteps but instead to study further. Tee did study, choosing the field of mechanics and engineering. After graduating, he opened an electric repairs shop. But after a few years in business, cheap electronics and appliances flooded the Thai market, upending his ‘secure career’. ‘It was cheaper for people to buy new appliances than to have them repaired in my shop, so I knew my business was not going to be sustainable,’ says Tee, who is now 34.

He returned to the family farm, helping his parents work their land. East-West Seed had long been his parents’ seed supplier and partner,

so he knew their solid reputation and established footprint across Asia. It would lead Tee to take up a job with the company in their marketing and promotions team.

‘In that role, I got to visit many different farms and meet many farmers. Many of them encouraged me to return to being a full-time farmer, saying I should not wait to return to my village only when I retire. The farmers were willing to share their knowledge and experiences with me. I was also learning a lot about the modern techniques for smarter farming and the business side of farming through my East-West Seed work.’

By 2015, Tee was ready to leave his job at East-West Seed to become a full-time farmer. He continued to be a loyal buyer of EWS seeds, having had good ‘insider’ knowledge of the seeds and confidence in the partner support available for farmers. He started by planting two fields and chose a mix of vegetables. It included Chinese cabbage, eggplant, celery, and gai-laan (Chinese broccoli).

‘I prefer to plant different vegetables so that you always have something to sell and you are not dependent on seasonal harvests or the price fluctuations of different vegetables,’ he says.

He also keeps up his research on finding new markets to give farmers greater direct access to the end customer – the dreaded middleman can be cut out where possible.

Tee says modern-day farming has many opportunities not available to his parents. This should encourage a new generation of farmers to become food growers. Now is the time to leverage these opportunities, because farming has become less labor intensive, more commercially viable, and can be sustainable for generations to come. He says the lessons of a global pandemic during the past two years should also be a wake-up call for people to grow their food for food security.

‘The older generation didn’t know the best farming methods. They didn’t do smart pest control and didn’t know how to use chemicals and

fertilizer in a managed way. Today farmers know how to use their networks, how to call on experts like those from EWS to get information, how to use the internet to do their research, and how to negotiate better with buyers.’

Tee says he’s also working to streamline his farming business while optimizing his harvests and ensuring his vegetables are of the highest quality.

‘The most difficult thing is to reduce costs, making sure you have a product that is in demand, so people want to buy it,’ he says. It means when he’s not out in the field, he’s exploring ways to expand his market, cut down external costs like those for transportation, and keep produce fresher for longer. He’s also put profits back into the business, for instance by installing an irrigation system so he could reduce labor costs in the long term.

It’s been paying off. Farming and raising his three-year-old son on the farm has become the good life that his parents imagined for him. ‘Success for me is when my family and my parents are well taken care of and when they are happy – I can see my son enjoys being on the farm. Even the waterway on the farm is like his personal swimming pool,’ he says with a laugh.

As for his happiness, he admits that when he made his first profits from farming, he couldn’t resist treating himself. But not with the candy he asked for as a child. It was with a motorbike, one he always dreamed of owning and could now make a reality, all thanks to profits from farming.