Daruma Eco Farm · Bang Phra, Thailand
Built to teach, not to sell.
Daruma Eco Farm is a 4 rai, owned working farm run as a learning facility, not a commercial one. What it grows and raises is eaten or used by the family, staff, students and volunteers on site, or shared and sold to the community around it. The learning is the point; the produce is what proves it works. The farm sits inside the wider Daruma community, a permaculture-designed ecovillage grown around it since 2007.
Daruma runs its own volunteer programme, HELP, and keeps active listings with WWOOF, Couchsurfing and WarmShowers. People coming to help can expect anything from planting rice paddies to sustainable construction to lending a hand at Mosaic, the school on site. See volunteering, interning and apprenticing at Daruma.
One system feeds the next.
Mango, banana and other fruit trees border rice, vegetable and herb gardens. A large fish pond runs an integrated aquaculture system, and the rice paddies are planted according to the System of Rice Intensification, SRI. Ducks fertilise the paddies; their run-off feeds the catfish in turn, and chickens contribute eggs, fertiliser and meat.
Sheep, pigs, cats and a dog round out the resident animals. Mango, mahogany and cassava plantings mark the farm's borders, with views to the hills beyond, and there is almost always a construction project underway somewhere on the land.
Something is always underway.
From a rock path to a building extension, there is usually a natural building project in progress somewhere on the farm, often built by students and volunteers.
Perseverance, mostly.
The farm's name comes from the Japanese daruma doll, a symbol of perseverance and good luck modelled after Bodhidharma, founder of the Zen sect of Buddhism.
Earth care. People care. Fair share.
Daruma Eco Farm is built around those three ethics, as laid out by permaculture's founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Read more on what permaculture actually means.
See it for yourself
Come learn on the land.
Daruma sits an hour from Bangkok Airport, on the Gulf of Thailand's Eastern Seaboard. The best way to understand how the farm works is to study on it: nine days on the Permaculture Design Course, or a two-day introduction.