Organic Farmstay & Volunteering Permaculture Thailand, Asia
Rak Tamachat Permaculture Volunteering Program
Welcomes You to Experience:
Organic Farming, Permaculture Volunteering, Asia Farmstay
Rak on!,
The Rak Tamachat Community
How Volunteering Works at Rak Tamachat Intentional Permaculture Community
The Rak Tamachat Intentional Permaculture Community works hard to keep its pricing structure as low as possible, in accordance with the Permaculture Ethic of “Fair Share“.
We want to reach a large audience and not exclude students or guests through high pricing; thus limiting the Permaculture Movement.
We want to make Permaculture Volunteering with the Rak Tamachat Intentional Permaculture Community an Experience in Thailand, Asia, available to everyone, so we have created our pricing structure based on a Non Profit business model.
We operate Volunteer stays on a “fair pricing” model, whereby we provide our volunteers and students with coffee/tea and 3 meals a day, and accommodation.
We work hard to keep the cost to our guests low, while also providing some of the best home cooked and creative communal meals. Skimping on food is never done at the Rak Tamachat Permaculture Community. Food is the nourishment for the body and soul, you cannot learn or work effectively on an empty stomach. It’s easy to eat well when you have such a bountiful Garden and Food Forest to harvest from.
We hope you will consider your Permaculture Volunteering Thailand Experience at Rak Tamachat. We work hard every day to make our Dreams a Reality by keeping our gardens producing nutritious food. And we always welcome people wanting to learn more about Asia Permaculture, Thai Permaculture Farming, and Holistic Living.
COST FOR PERMACULTURE VOLUNTEERING
210 USD / Week (1-week minimum stay)
30 USD / day – This is an all-inclusive price for a private teak bungalow stay (15 USD), three meals a day and communal overheads (15 USD).
Please Note: we will put in considerable time to show you around the farm and where to help out, so we ask for a One Week Minimum Commitment for Permaculture Volunteering.
We are looking forward to having you come to stay and learn with us!
Rak on!
The Rak Tamachat Permaculture Intentional Community
The Rak Tamachat “Pay it Forward” Program
As a graduate student of Rak Tamachat, you will become a member of the Rak Tamachat Community and receive the right to sit on any refresher PDC at 50% of the regular course price.
PDC graduates from other institutes around the world have the right to sit in on a Rak Tamachat PDC for 25% off of the regular course price.
If you would like to stay after your course, we also offer Resident Programs which you can read more about Here.
Check Out Agatha’s Testimonial of her
“Pay it Forward” Experience!

Woofing in Thailand
We operate as a non-profit and the traditional western woofing model does not allow us to operate in a third world setting. We are not able to offer the level of comfort we have as a base for our volunteers and resident programs, and move Rak Tamachat’s social causes forward, if we only offset your work for food and board.
The prevailing local wage rate in Thailand is too low, and if we were to employ westerners, we would be taking work away from the local economy.
We have a passion for teaching and do it for the love, not the money. We operate as a non-profit and do this for the love of Permaculture and Social Outreach to less fortunate, not to get rich.
- We work hard to keep the Rak Tamachat Education Center at a high level, which requires minimal routine maintenance.
- We construct all our sustainable buildings to reduce the maintenance needed to keep them in top shape.
- We are fortunate to not have to bear the construction cost of Rak Tamachat, thus allowing us to keep our pricing low.
Please Note: We also have a Permaculturist in Residency Program for qualified persons which offsets some fees in exchange for Gardening, Cooking, Education and Managerial work duty assistance (we work to train the participants in how we run Rak Tamachat and in teacher training for their possible teaching or consulting career). Diploma and Internship graduates will have first priority in available spaces for the Permaculturist in Residency Program.
The Rak Tamachat Permaculture Lifestyle

- We enjoy sharing our meals communally with our family and friends;
- We enjoy kicking back together after a fulfilling day’s work;
- We enjoy the sense of accomplishment we feel after a successful day’s work with our friends;
- We enjoy sharing the joys of work on a common goal which will enrich our community with our friends;
- We enjoy sharing our lives with others;
- We enjoy sharing our knowledge and learning from others.
Our Actions
We know that our actions are the result of our beliefs, choices and goals. We know that to create the world and lifestyle we want we will have to do something to make our dream a reality. Our actions are the manifestation of our choices. We choose our lifestyle and work to create our own destiny. The Integrated farming activities on the farm are the actions that we use to create our environment. We love to work to build new systems and maintain the ones we have, learn how they interact and how they can be improved. We never stop learning how the synergies play upon each other to always find a higher state of being. Like the synergies we as a community, through our actions together, bring our combined lives to a higher state of being than we could achieve alone. You can explore below, how we make our actions our reality.
Our Beliefs
At Rak Tamachat we believe that everyone regardless of where they are from, their background, social standing, economic circumstances, education, etc have basic rights as humans. We understand that sometimes these people do not know or understand that they have basic rights as the conditions they are in or were brought up under does not allow for them to believe they can have these. We do understand that everyone has these rights and further that it is our responsibility to speak up for or defend them. We feel that at the most basic level people have the right to prosper. They have the right to raise their family in peace and harmony. They have the right to live a healthy life free of war, famine, chemicals, slavery. The unequal distribution of resources is the real source of most people’s problems at the bottom of the economic pyramid. The inability for the poor to have access to land and resources such as water and seeds to plant and grow their own food, forces them to become economic slaves to the system designed to create wants and desires that make them rats in a maze. They do not know how to escape from. We feel that we have the obligation as persons who have had the education, upbringing to understand the problems and the solutions to show and teach the less fortunate how to break out of the cycle enslaving them to the corporate systems.
- We believe that everyone should have the right to economic freedom to provide a basic life for themselves and their family;
- We believe that everyone has the right to food security;
- We believe that everyone should be allowed to have a place to grow food for themselves and their family;
- We believe that everyone has the right to be happy and that the environment to provide that happiness is a right;
- We believe that everyone has the right to raise their family in social harmony and peace without undue economic stress;
- We believe that everyone should be afforded the right to earn a living to provide for themselves and their family;
- We believe that every family should have a home without the burden of a mortgage;
- We believe that education is a right.
Our Choices
At Rak Tamachat we know that the choices we make will drive our outcomes. We know that some of the things being told to us by the main stream are not right. We can feel that their needs to be some changes, but don’t see the answers to these concerns being promoted by our governments, or large businesses. While we fully support the green movement in business to promote renewable resources and recycling we also realize that the goals of making the most money severely hampers the effectiveness of these operations and slows the development of these much needed industries. We know that we have the choice to wait and hope the fats cats can fix the problems they made or we can choose to limit our consumption of their products or in some cases stop using them altogether. We make choices everyday at Rak Tamachat by limiting our consumption and thus reducing the waste and destruction of nonrenewable resources. Not allowing the use of chemicals on our gardens and thus working to break the chain of chemical agriculture. We choose to live our lives closer to nature as westerners, so that the local Thais can see that not all western people are what are shown on the movies. We limit our lives to share with others; we choose a different path to show that the consumerism promoted through the media is not the only way.
- We choose to grow our own food without chemicals;
- We choose to use natural building in our shelters;
- We choose to build our shelter without mortgages;
- We choose to live together in community and foster social harmony with each other and nature;
- We choose to corporate with nature instead of fighting against it;
- We choose to share our knowledge and abundance with others;
- We limit the consumption of meats to only what we grow ourselves on our farm in a humane manner assuring our animals full lives and a humane deaths;
- We chose to limit the consumption of scares resources such as fuels by sharing our transport and appliances by living in a communal way;
- We choose to eat locally when buying vegetables or other food stuffs from outside Rak Tamachat;
- We choose to cook and share our meals together to reduce the waste from cooking;
- We choose to follow the Ethics and Principles of Permaculture.
Our Goals
Goals Articulation Statement Summary:
- The farm will be a thriving Natural Living Education Center full of activity, providing inspiration to locals and international visitors, while allowing the educators to share and expand their knowledge base.
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The farm will provide a dynamic, abundant life for the local family, resident community, guests, interns and students while providing a safe haven for learning and expanding one’s horizons.
- The farm will serve as a model of profitable Permaculture Design in action and Regenerative Agriculture, showcasing the power of Integrated Sustainable Farming Systems utilizing Holistic Management techniques with diligent Animal Husbandry practices.
- The activities on the farm will require less economic and fossil fuel inputs over time, as an outcome of the Integrated Sustainable Farming Systems following Permaculture Design Principles and ethics, utilizing Regenerative Agriculture and Holistic Management techniques with diligent Animal Husbandry Practices.
Goal 1: The farm will provide a dynamic, abundant life for the local family, resident community, guests, interns and students while providing a safe haven for learning and expanding one’s horizons.
- The environment of the farm provides an ideal place to raise children, with a wide variety of stimulation and activities which help them have a strong physical and mental development and to stay healthy.
- The farm promotes respect for each generation and is home to meaningful activities for everyone, such that all participate in creating the abundance of the farm.
- There is an atmosphere of encouragement and engagement in the social and productive activities of the farm for all.
- Production from the farm and gardens provide the residents with a wide variety of delicious and healthy food free of any chemical inputs.
- The food forests are perennially producing and have an ever changing variety of fruit, nuts, fiber, fuel and timber while also providing habitat for many wild animals as well as our holistically raised chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows.
- The gardens have an overabundance of fresh food coming from them year round, providing a stable source of healthy food allowing for reduced stress from food security.
- All of our meat, fish needs are supplied on-site through our holistically managed humane animal husbandry systems, while producing the fertilizers from their waste to feed our gardens and thus ourselves.
- The aquaculture systems provide an abundance of fresh fish and a emergency supply of edible tubers, for the nourishment of the community, while also providing habitat and food sources for our integrated animal systems.
- The farm produces enough timber and bamboo for all the natural building needs of the community.
- The surplus produced on the farm earns us enough income to pay for the day-to-day needs of the residents and the upkeep of the farm in a subsistence manner.
Goal 2: The farm will be a thriving Natural Living Education Center full of activity, providing inspiration to locals and international visitors, while allowing the educators to share and expand their knowledge base.
- The farm hosts Natural Living Education Courses, to share our knowledge and systems with as many people as possible, running on a break even cost structure based on providing a living wage for the resident teachers and offsetting the lost agricultural revenue to the farm for the area utilized by the center, throughout the year.
- The farm is a thriving community made up of the local family, farm staff, resident educators, guests, interns, and students.
- The farm allows for the many residents to participate in the rewards and abundance of their work.
- The farm is part of a larger worldwide movement, both here in Thailand and beyond to promote sustainability through Permaculture principles while demonstrating that a community of like minded people can live in harmony with the land and each other and prove that they can do so in an economic efficient manner.
- The farm’s systems continue everyday to evolve and become more efficient and interconnected with the local and world communities.
- The systems on the farm provide the residents with endless opportunity for creativity and invention, they joyfully and playfully utilize these opportunities to find new ways to increase efficiency, beauty and sustainability on the farm.
- The farm utilizes a Permaculture Master Plan which is a living document, easily updated and revised, enabling the farm and its residents to adjust the plans to ever-changing natural conditions.
- The farm has a steady stream of passionate people, who bring ideas of their own and who take with them valuable experience and inspiration when they leave.
- The residents of the farm interact with the local community in a way that respectfully invites them to learn Permaculture farming techniques and ideas about successful permanent agricultural practices.
- The farm gives the residents the opportunity to feel thankful and to share our good fortune with the local community.
- The farm provides low-cost Natural Living courses to the local Thai community and international students from around the world.
- The farm and its actions help the people that live in our village and Thailand to view us with respect and camaraderie.
- The residents of the farm work together to create social systems that promote individual growth and group strength.
Goal 3: The farm will serve as a model of profitable Permaculture Design in action and Regenerative Agriculture showcasing the power of Integrated Sustainable Farming Systems utilizing Holistic Management techniques with diligent Animal Husbandry Practices.
- The farm is able to reach break even after five years on the invested capital for the Regenerative Agriculture and Permaculture techniques utilized in its transition from a commercial corn and rice farm to a Integrated Sustainable Farm.
- The farms systems provide the world with another real example of Integrated Permaculture and Regenerative Agriculture systems utilizing Holistic Management and Animal Husbandry as being economically feasible.
- Through implementation of the Integrated Permaculture Master Plan, the farm has reduced costs, improved quality, and connected with new markets.
- The Integrated Permaculture Master Plan helps guide the farm, allowing it to be well-managed and focused on the future. In the short term, medium term, and long term, the Integrated Permaculture systems implemented on the farm are practical and easily replicated by the local communities.
- The farm connects with the Worldwide Permaculture community and shares what we have done and what we have learned through our website and movies.
- The farm experiments with different agricultural techniques utilizing proper scientific methods and construct and builds them with a thorough understanding of the engineering behind the projects.
- The farm is a demonstration center of Permaculture systems and Natural Building practices for the local and international community, where people can come to see and learn how these systems work and how they can implement them on their farms, “Action Learning”.
Goal 4: The farm will be a thriving Natural Living Education Center full of activity, providing inspiration to locals and international visitors, while allowing the educators to share and expand their knowledge base.
- The farm will shift from energy intensive activities, like conventional tillage agriculture, to more progressive modes of passive production, like perennial crops and aquaculture.
- The farm will experiment with and implement different alternative energy systems. The systems include solar, wind, bio-gas and farm made bio-fuels to work to the goal of sending power back to the grid to offset our energy cost.
- The residents constantly refine and re-evaluate the farm’s techniques to become even more efficient and effective.
- By abiding with the Principles of Permaculture and Integrated Farming, the farm’s systems have become much more synergistic. This synergy helps to ensure the health and abundance of the farm and reduce waste thus producing a larger overall return on each system.
- Every element of the farm is benefiting the system in multiple ways, the residents work to make the interactions as efficient as possible.
- The farm strives to mimic nature in her diversity, stability, fertility and productivity.
- The “waste” from one element fits seamlessly into the needs of another. Throughout the farm we are reducing waste, and improving the health of the overall system.
Our Community
Rak Tamachat is made up of a group of international people who have come together to work to change their lives and the lives of others by choosing to follow a different path than the one laid out by the consumer economic driven global economy. We currently have 12 residents living on the farm together full time and a constant stream of Guests, Interns and Students forming our larger community. We wish to live our lives in a more natural way, closer to nature and respecting life. We feel the Thai Culture is close to the way we see the optimal lifestyle revolving around raising our own food in peace. We strive everyday to build the environment we need to keep our lives at a basic level through providing for our food, shelter, medicine and clothing. Once our base has been established we can then work to help others to learn the techniques, ideas and practices we use to make our desired lifestyle possible. We know through our combined hard work we can share in the bounty that nature was designed to provide for its people. We take care of nature and rest assured that we will thus in turn be taken care of.
Rak Tamachat means “Love Natural” in Thai
We feel our name sums up our Thai lifestyle in the simplest form for both international and local Thais to understand. We follow both Permaculture Principles & Ethics, and the:
Learn More about the
King of Thailand’s “Sufficiency of Economy Theory”
- We practice Permaculture on a broad scale all the while striving to holistically integrated animal systems into our Permaculture Design.
- We have a Core Community of Thais and Westerners living and working together on the farm to make the transition from a mono-cultured rice and corn farm to an Integrated and Dynamic Permaculture Farm. The transition from a destructive farming system to a holistic systems, is the basis for our Permaculture and Natural Building Education Center.
- We strive to educate anyone who comes to the farm be it a student, guest, a day visitor, or a Thai member of our local village. We believe in “PAY IT FORWARD” to make the changes you want to see in the world.
- We work to do this every day with our choices and actions.
- We like to think of this as “Our style of Permaculture”, we value diversity and love to know that there are so many other successful prospering examples of Permaculture ranging over and infinite scale from balcony gardens to thousand acre farms.
- We aim to spread communal living, learning, and earning with local Thais who live off of subsistence farming. Some of our guest have refereed to Rak as the world’s first “Perma-sort“, we still feel of it as our home and we are thankful of the hard work that has been put into Rak by the many loving hands that made it possible with Permaculture, their hard work has made Rak into to amazing place it is today.
Rak Tamachat is comprised of 75 acres; supporting 13 full time community members and hosting guest and students year round. The large farm and daily operations and transition give us the perfect classroom environment to educate others on how the transition from a mono-culture to a sustainable “Permanent Agriculture” is done. Our average community population is around 15 but goes up and down with the seasons. Our facilities have been designed based on Permaculture principles and built with Natural Building Techniques to deal with our large community. We would love to share our lifestyle with you and hopefully help open your horizons to what is possible, when people live and work together in harmony with guiding Ethics and Principles and a Common Goal.
Our Permaculture Communities Home
You have to Love the Natural Building facilities at Rak Tamachat

The Rak Tamachat Community
At Rak Tamachat we like to grow our own food free of chemicals. We like to raise our animals humanely. We look at our animal systems in the same way we look at our gardens. We get sustenance and a yield from both and believe that there are cycles that connect the animals with the land. These cycles are connected and give us the organic fertilizers we need to make or garden prosper. We believe these integrated systems allow us to close the loops and make our gardens as dynamic as possible. One system’s waste fuels another and cycles keep repeating. Through observation we are able to help them along and create more abundance. Our Bees, butterfly, wasp, worms and plants are our workers at Rak Tamachat, our life is spent facilitating our workers and waiting for the trees to grow, this affords us the free-time to explore ourselves and the world. We have an independent Nursery for giving our seedlings, juvenile plants, and young trees the head start that they deserve before planting in the gardens or across the farm. At the Nursery, we also make our special blend potting soil and practice Seed Saving of mainly Thai acclimatized seeds. Seeds are life and without life we are nothing, our mission starts with Seed Saving!
Check out the Tabs below for more Depth
Communal Cooking
We like to create and eat delicious meals from the fruits of our labor with our friends and family. We like to make natural food products for our enjoyment, economic saving, and honestly, we think they are better naturally. Some of the products we make include homemade wines, kimchi, kombucha, pickles, jellies, cheese, tofu, dehydrated snacks, long-term sauces and dressings, and smoothies made from the fruit from the farm with love on our bicycle blender. Our lifestyle values diversity and personal choices and our kitchen reflects this. We have Raw-food, vegetarians, vegans and gluten-intolerant guest all the time; we strive to accommodate food sensitivities, however, you should inform us about your dietary needs and we may advise that you bring specialty snacks as we live far away from any major cities and we may not have access to certain food items. Keeping snacks in the tropics is very hard, therefore flexibility and open-mindedness is highly advised. All efforts are made to get locally grown chemical-free foods. We always have lots of fresh fruits and vegetables on hand so going hungry is never an issue. Trying to find different ways to cook or preserve bountiful harvest is our major issue. But, this is the fun of growing food, experimenting in the kitchen is some of the best times we have and we all enjoy the beautiful Rak Tamachat kitchen immensely.
Communal Living
Once you make the lifestyle you want a reality you free up your time for the things that really matter, relaxing with your friends, sharing good food, discussing life while we wait for the trees to grow!!!! We enjoy spending our time:
- Having Pizza parties in our adobe oven
- Making Natural Products
- Seed saving
- Playing Cards and games together
- Playing a relaxing game of pool
- Swimming in the Pond
- Bar-b-que’s (Both Thai and Western Styles)
- Day Trips to local attractions
- Reading in the Library
- Watching movies for education and entertainment
- Practicing Yoga
- Practicing Meditation
- Going for runs around the rice fields and local villages
- Biking around the local villages
- Playing drums and music together
- Relaxing in a hammock
- Just discussing life, while we wait for our seed to grow
Natural Homemade Products
We really like to make soaps, mosquito repellents, organic fertilizers and pesticides. These products allow us to both save money and the plant at the same time. If you would like to learn any of these skills, read further to see if our lifestyle is a good fit for your personal motivations.
Fair Share and Equality
We believe and practice many Permaculture principles associated with communal living such as; communal cooking, communal gardening times, communal cleaning of common areas, but especially Fair Share and Equal Value. Put simply, Equal Value means that we value everyone’s work equally. On any given day at Rak Tamachat you may find instructors teaching in the classroom, people working in the garden, community members creating delicious meals in the kitchen, students constructing natural buildings, managers or interns conducting email correspondence, or Thai members of our farm community involved in daily farm and family tasks. In all honesty, we learn about gardening, building, and farm lifestyle from our Thai family members just as much as we would by practicing solely on theory learned from books or trial and error. When we have questions about how or if something will grow under certain soil and climate conditions, we always seek out our Thai brothers and sisters for advice.