A hands-on farming day with the Lahu hill tribe offers travellers a unique insight into how remote communities are working towards a more sustainable future.
Like a finely brewed macchiato, roasting your own coffee beans is a layered affair. Standing at the bench of a makeshift mud-brick hut deep in northern Thailand’s fertile forests, coffee farmer Lo-Ue Jayo is about to guide me through my first coffee-making lesson using a 72-year-old Probatino roaster.
Lo-Ue should know. When he first established his Arabica coffee farm 14 years ago, he had no experience in growing or making coffee and wasn’t even a regular coffee drinker. He practised by roasting 100kg of the stout beans from scratch before eventually finding a recipe he liked.
Around a hundred people live in Lo-Ue’s village, Doi Mod, a motley collection of tin-roofed stilt huts scattered along the mountain face close to where we’re roasting coffee. It’s a place where dogs doze on porches while free-range roosters scratch in the dust. Bright-pink Dora the Explorer T-shirts hang out to dry, overlooking a sacred arena that has witnessed countless barefoot dances and animal sacrifices.
Instead of manipulating nature to create manicured rows of produce as you’d see in large-scale commercial farms, forest farming is a practice designed to sustain the ecosystem by supporting the pollinators, birdlife, insects and other animals who live within it. The result, says Lo-Ue, is a healthier environment in which to grow crops. Passing beneath the dappled light of slender teak trees, he explains how Arabica coffee thrives in shaded environments.
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