Raitong Organics Farm

This evening I attended a lecture about organic farming in the Landmark Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand. It was organized by Green Network Days, an ecological initiative of my friend Denis, who plans this kind of events  every month in Bangkok. This was the first time that we had a Thai speaker (speaking in English luckily ) Mrs Lalana Srikam, the co-founder & marketing manager of Raitong Organics Farm , she was assisted by her husband Bryan Hugill, co-founder & environmental manager, clearly a green guy with a lot of good ideas. 

 The farm is not very big, is situated in the North East of Thailand (province Sisaket), where farmers have only one harvest a year, as they depend only on the rain, there is no real irrigation possible as this part of  Thailand is very dry.
Still they manage to get more rice per acre than the "normal" farmers.

During her lecture she spoke about GABA rice, and as I am a rice freak, for the last 32 years 50 % of my daily intake of food  is brown rice, I was amazed that I never heard about it.

GABA rice is germinated brown rice with a greater amount of the naturally-occurring amino acid gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and is surely very good for babies, elderly and people who recover from diseases, who have problems with digestion, as the enzyme GABA is pre-digesting the rice.

We had a sample and my first impression was that the GABA rice is a bit sweeter than their normal brown rice.

I spoke with both of them and they seem very nice people so I hope to hear from them more in the future.
I also think this GABA rice is very good to make rice milk, but for daily food I prefer their normal brown rice. Why?? Because it has life, when I plant a grain of normal rice, it will grow soon , but GABA rice dus not have the  life force, as you can plant it, but it will never grow. But I agree that I like the taste and I would like to experiment with the GABA rice a bit more, surely to make rice milk for children (if the mother cannot breast feed) or to make some desserts.

If you look at the picture you can see a little "head" that is the germ, and sometimes it has also a little root.

Lalana is also Fundraising Assistant at Greenpeace Southeast Asia - Thailand Chapter, so she is also green beyond her own business, and has a degree of Silpakorn University.

There is much more to tell about Raitong Organics Farm, but I hope that they will contribute their story on this website themselves.