IsaanAussie

From a pond to rice paddy? Why not set up a syphon system from 4" plastic pipe?

Of course it is possible, this is Thailand. For the farmer, the question is what is the volume of rice needed and the price paid. We grow Hom Mali 105 (jasmine) and mill our rice on farm for family use and for retail sale. Anyone that wants me to grow another type of rice has only got to ask and stump up for the costs. Friends grow many different organic heritage types. Anything is possible if there is a market.

WOW, look at the telephone number on this thing! Laser cut! Shows just how far things have come in the last 15-20 years. When I started looking for implements "hand painted" or stencilled was the normal for the best. I am feeling so old.

Hi KS, What sort of money for those units?

Can I suggest you do some research on the recent development of Thai farming from a local farmer perspective? Start with the reality of a nation upended in 1997 by the economic crisis when everything stopped. A time when over 70% of Thai people were regarded as subsistence farmers who had no income and paid no tax.

Interesting dialogue between you guys. I would suggest you bring this to the main Farming Forum to get a wider audience. I have been interested in balers here for twenty years. The first to appear here in Isaan were very secondhand small square balers that were imported by the container load from places like Australia. At the time Australia was moving to large rounds and the old ones were scrap metal. Fifteen years ago I could buy a "rebuilt" baler here in Sisaket for about 50K baht. Some were rebuilt using only the baling segment onto pickup chassis and used as static units to load manually from straw piles from the threshers. Currently the import tax laws have changed and secondhand implements are not favoured. Kubota assemble a category 1/2 baler here in Thailand which I believe will gain market share. The main change here is the fact that the harvesters leave windrowed straw which makes baling the straw a simple task. But as with all things the farmer here has little money to pay subcontractors, so it is extremely price sensitive. I have looked very closely at importing a baler to make small round bales. Plans on hold until the current global situation normalises.

Today was the first real run. I milled 3 bags of approx 40 kg of paddy and the harvester rubbish. The longest part was I had to run some through the screens 3 times to get all the grass, sticks and empty husks out. The actual milling step went really well. From the 120Kg (approx): 52 Kg of rice - 32 kg clean unbroken rice, 13 kg of 50% broken , and 7kg of broken rice. The family wanted to dump the 50% in with the good stuff but it had a few seeds (smaller haystack to search). 57 Kg of rice bran, germ and husk. That has buyers already at 5 baht a kg. I might get a separate husker later but current thought is to use it as feed. For the maths guys, the harvester contributed about 10 kg of extra cleaning. That is a fact of life here and I am pleased to be able to get clean unbroken rice at all. I hate picking out seeds.

Well it has arrived and been setup. Run a half a bag of dry dirty rice through it. The first cleaning stage took the straw, empty husks etc out. It managed about 90% of the small seeds. A fair bit of broken rice which is to be expected in dry grains. More trials to figure it out but overall so far not bad, getting at least as good as the local millers are doing plus I get the broken rice and bran. Polish level looks OK.

Well I have just purchased a 5 in 1 rice mill on the inter-webs. What a leap of faith! Actually I have spent a <deleted> load of time looking at this issue. This machine allows you to preclean the paddy of junk via the multi screens before it goes through mill. The cyclone fan removes empty husk and straw. Smaller stones and other seeds removed by the screens. Objective, mill nothing but paddy rice! For those interested

Can I ask if you have estimated the start up time and cost to achieve 20 market pigs target? Having been through this, I advise you to study how you will achieve this carefully. Happy to discuss.

I am finally going to buy a rice mill for the farm. Should have done it years ago when we kept pigs. Anyway hopefully someone will clue me in if I have choosen another recipe for disaster. I like the small cyclone on the bran chute. But what do I know? Anyhow will go down to Buri Ram and check it out for 18,500 baht. thaitopvip-rice mill model 7.mp4

Most countries including Thailand, have public and private health systems with different price points. It may be feasible that the public system pricing could be used to develop a basic health insurance offered by the health department to foreign nationals on long stay visas. I for one would not be against paying the average cost of health by capita here to get basic cover. That is, pay the annual cost based on my age as a fee to the government. For those who want private cover let them enter insurance company plans. Perhaps some form of gap insurance could be offered to those covered by the government plan.

Correct, O-A visas are sourced via overseas Thai embassies and some consulates and granted under the Ministry of Foreign affairs. O visas (3 month) were also granted by MFO external to Thailand. The O visas and extensions are granted inside Thailand by the Ministry of Internal Affairs via the Immigration department. Note: For an O-A retirement visa you have to show 800K baht or foreign equivalent in a bank account but not necessarily in Thailand. That visa runs you 2 years before you need to extend it. Hence, before this pandemic etc, you could stay here without any funds deposited before you needed to satisfy the local deposits necessary to obtain an extension of stay based on your visa.

Yes for extensions. Not for new visas?

Does anyone know what the health insurance requirements are?

I am trying to sort out the health insurance requirements for my O-A retirement extension. Not unusual to find much conflicting information. I visited the Thai Embassy site in Australia (which is usually accurate). https://canberra.thaiembassy.org/visa-categories/ O-A was either retirement or marriage, retirement is still. Marriage visas are now only under O. The health insurance requirement for new Retirement Visas is now 3Million baht. For renewals up until Sept 1, 2022 it remains at 400K inpatient and 40k outpatient. This is from the longstay site. https://longstay.tgia.org/guidelineoa Can anyone point me at the "official" information?

Happy to help out if you can give me a few more details of the farming operation. Given response here so far I would suggest you send me a message if you are interested and we take it offline. There are many variables to consider such as: Is she operating independantly or contracted? If contracted what are the details? If independant..... What is the weight of piglets she buys? Where does she buy them? Feed brand used. Grades used. Buy by bag or bulk. Quantities purchased? If known, what are the bag prices of feed or per tonne bulk? What FCR (feed conversion ratio) is achieved? Mortality rate on average? How sold, quantities and who buys? Current Bank of Thailand farm price quoted is 67 baht/kg. What is she getting? The feed cost you quoted seems high for a batch of 50 pigs, assuming they are grown out and sold at 100kg.

I think the current scheme is direct assistance to the farmers (up to 15 rai) not rice pledging. Could be wrong will ask the wife and advise if different.

Most butterflies lay eggs on a very limited number of plant species, often a few as one or two. Tracing the food source is a good way to identify which butterfly species the caterpillar is, or at least narrow the range. You can search the web for species based on the specific food plant is being attacked. We have butterflies that are active all year, in higher numbers at times when food is more plentiful. Thai climate (Isaan at least) does not effect them as much as cooler climates.

Try any of these For one liter (one quart) of natural caterpillar repellent, add a combination of the following: 1 teaspoon mild dish soap 1 tablespoon of any of the these (chopped): garlic cloves, onion, red pepper or ground chili To extract the active compounds, you can either: blend the mixture and let it sit for 24 hours, then filter it (keep the juice, discard the pulp). or, boil the chopped plants for 30 minutes, let it sit and cool down. After that, strain out the spent plant materials, keeping the liquid preparation

OK where to next to get to archived topics?

I would like to reference some posts that were removed when the Farming Forum was restarted around 2018. If possible to do this, then a few clues on how to find the archived posts would be helpful. Thanks.