🌲 Ban Huai Mak is home to the “Mae Fah Luang” Huai Mak Hill Tribe Community Learning Centre, which passes on farming knowledge suited to mountain ecology, using the real experience of the community's farmers as the basis for learning — in planting, crop care and managing resources in keeping with highland conditions.
Farmers here have formed a community enterprise to bring the production and processing of parchment coffee up to the GAP standard, alongside growing highland fruit trees such as avocado, macadamia and wild Himalayan cherry. These cash crops play an important part in making incomes more stable, while helping to restore soil structure, reduce erosion and ease the pressure on natural resources compared with the single-crop maize fields of the past.
In processing parchment coffee, the community takes care from the harvest onwards: sorting the cherries before processing, then drying on raised beds to control moisture and air flow properly. This reduces the risk of contamination and helps every sack of beans have a quality, an origin and a standard that can be checked.
What shows Ban Huai Mak's strength is the warmth and cooperation of its people, who open their community to learning so that farming becomes safer step by step. The aim is not to change their way of life overnight, but to keep the community in balance, the village at peace and the future sustainable.
Ban Huai Mak is therefore more than a source of highland parchment coffee. It is “a lesson in choosing a future”, showing that quality of life, income and the forest can grow together, with real direction and responsibility for the land.
