Long time lurker on this forum and I thought I'd add to the thread about how we work with our land.

Our farm is also in the Chantaburi area. Going into this business we had two objectives, a near term and a long term. The long term objective was to have something for our retirement. Making money right off the bat wasn't important to us as we are living well off of my salary. What is important is that the farm is set up properly so when we do retire, we have the option of moving there to work it or to sell the land. The near term objective was to use the farm to help out her family. This is turning out to be a good arrangement in terms of expectations not driving us crazy and more importantly, building trust and loyalty.

Right now her brother and sister run a small section of older trees on the farm. They hire the workers and split the profits with them as if they were the land owners. The also use some vacant land to grow cassava, bananas, and mangosteen in which they keep the money too. In turn they look after, work and manage the rest of the farm which includes a patch of RM600 and 251's in their 2nd year of cutting and a brand new patch of RM600s. The profits from the newer trees are split between us and the workers as usual.

We weren't without issues though. In the beginning we had to deal with some workers that only wanted to cut just enough trees to pay for their living, nothing more. We also had to break-in a BIL. It took the BIL a little while to figure out he had more to lose with shenanigans than if he was on the up and up.

Now the trees are well taken care of. Other farmers in the area even comment on how good our trees are, how straight they are, how big they've gotten, etc. The bad workers are gone, the rest of the family has an interest in the farm and everyone is happy.

Sounds like it require a lot of time, and a lot of precense, two things we do not have. My in laws have a family that they have taken very good care of over the last 10 years, and so far they have been trustworthy enough to manage all their farms. So we will try to see if they have time to manage ours as well, but of course, the more the family have to look after, the less time they have for each place... Our problem is that maybe we can go there once a month, and we would never dream of moving out there, since we do not dream of becoming farmers.

Again, thanks for your replies, it has been very helpful! Just never imagined it would require so much time!

you can always choose to sell.

bank interest needs no time to get on the account, at all. as well as the least headache.

it is still the most generous gift, either way.