From time to time I get somebody who questions what my husband Ka does, exactly. He’s worked so many odd jobs even I have trouble tracking them sometimes: he’s done electrical wiring, and welding, and some landscaping on a short term basis on housing projects nearby the area. He worked in Laguna cleaning boat hulls. He had a time when he used to slaughter chickens in the morning, not for us, but in nearby places where the people raising the chickens didn’t want to do the dirty work. That paid surprisingly well for only 3 or 4 hours of work in the morning, so he’d get 300 or 400 baht ($10-$12). That is not available anywhere around us now.
My husband does not like me being at the bungalow without him for any length of time and I don’t like going anywhere on the old motorbike without him either. If I have to put it up on the stand to kick start it or even worse walk it to a repair shop, or more commonly to a gas station because brother Tee drove it to dead empty, this gets annoying real quick alone. So in general he’s in the background somewhere, often harvesting vegetables or something. And usually at Wat Muang Mai, though since a friend in the area offered us some charging services that has been less common. We still have no refrigerator or TV or lights though.
The sator bean pods are in season. It takes a few hours and often two people to do it, as they grow on very high trees and it often requires manuevering very long bamboo poles. But here it was from yesterday:
The wholesale price on those pictured around this area is 120 to 150 baht. So Ka would make $4 to $5, except his brother did some of the harvesting too. I’d guess in an average day doing this, whether it’s papayas (10 baht each for nice ones), coconuts (10 baht each for hulled ones) bananas (maybe 80-100 baht for a good looking cord of 50 or so), banana flowers (only large ones maybe 15 baht each) or jackfruit (only perfect ones, which can fetch 60-80 baht) my husband earns about $3 per day. Needless to say this is not a liveable wage. In writing down my budget I go through about $50 per week on food expenses (rice, cooking oil, meat, bread, coffee, et cetera). So literally, just for food that does not grow here alone, we spend $4 more per day than my husband is making. I haven’t counted in energy costs (eg driving the motorbike) pet food (a big budget item at about $20 per week) entertainment costs or anything else.
Now that we don’t have so many chickens Ka tried his hand at planting again (they have torn up many a crop before they began to sprout). This is some pahk boon (watercress) which has been blesed by the recent rain and is thriving (the tree branches and such were put up to keep the dogs out):
The neighbor’s wife, who has a vegetable stand, told us she will take them when they are mature. The last time Ka planted them they were so devastated by the chickens and duck that all we got was a few curries and salads out of what was left. When these mature in about 2-3 weeks she said she’ll pay 20 baht per kilogram. That number sounds about right.
I’m going to ballpark that these watercress when mature will yield about 10-15 kilos. So that would equal a payment of 200-300 baht ($7-$10) if everything goes right. I also paid 90 baht for the seeds, which needs to be subtracted out of this cost. My obvious point in this is it is not easy to be a farmer. One of the early objectives in the great cull was to make the job one of the lowest paid on earth.
Obviously there’s ways to scale up and scrape by and get creative, but my experience is that even in perfect conditions it pays, on a non government subsidy cost for cost basis, subsistence level. This is hidden by mountains of debt for various agrigiant schemes to “increase yields” which curiously often tend to decrease yields. The disconnect between raw input and raw output costs has never been so great as it is now. Any real job is a carefully constructed debt entrapment system.
What poor Thai farming family would be able to save up enough money for a $2000 one way flight to America, or pay the $10,000 in visa costs on top of that? None of them, that’s who.
To survive, we need each other.
"To survive, we need each other."
Well said, Amy.
Ah, the sator beans! Reminds me of when I was living in Phuket (over 10 years ago).