By Faculty of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources
April 27, 2026: In the highlands of northern Thailand, maize and rubber monocropping remains the norm. Yet, it takes a toll. Prolonged reliance on insecticide, herbicide, and synthetic fertilizer has worn out soil, contaminated water sources, and reduced biodiversity across these upland landscapes. Farmers, meanwhile, are caught between environmental degradation and climatic stresses: droughts that last longer than they used to; harvests that keep shrinking; and income that swings unpredictably from year to year. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as one way to address these problems, offering highland smallholders some tools to cope with climatic stresses while also curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
Nitchakan Inkong, known as Mean, is a very fresh Ph.D. graduate of the Faculty of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). She completed her doctoral degree under the supervision of Dr. Takuji W. Tsusaka. During her doctoral years, she focused on answering a deceptively simple question: can highland farmers realistically move away from unsustainable monocropping toward something better? Her dissertation approaches this from four different angles. First, she looked at how villagers in the highlands actually perceive climate change. Then she examined which farming challenges weigh on them the most. She also investigated what makes farmers willing, or reluctant, to try CSA technologies such as solar-powered irrigation, biochar production, biochar application, and keyline plowing. Finally, she ran the numbers on whether switching to alternative crops would actually pay off.
Mean’s study site was Buayai Sub-district in Nanoi District, Nan Province, rugged terrain where 76% of the land is mountainous and forest cover has been eaten away by maize planted to feed the livestock industry. The work was linked to an ADB Technical Assistance project titled Climate Change Adaptation in Agriculture for Enhanced Recovery and Sustainability of Highlands, co-funded by the Japan Fund for Prosperous and Resilient Asia and the Pacific (JFPR), led by AIT, and joined by Nippon Koei Co., Ltd. and TEAM Consulting Engineering and Management Public Company, Ltd.
Collecting the primary data was not easy for her. Mean made trip after trip to these remote communities throughout her Ph.D. journey, some of those visits falling squarely in the COVID-19 pandemic period, when simply reaching a highland village meant navigating travel restrictions and strict health protocols. Over those rounds of fieldwork, she surveyed 252 households through stratified random sampling for a baseline, ran a separate technology-acceptance survey with a subsample of 120 farm households, and did a focused benefit-cost survey with 12 households that grew both traditional crops and newer alternatives. She also sat down for semi-structured interviews with input suppliers, processors, and buyers along the value chain, and organized community workshops to ground-truth her statistical findings.
On the analytical side, Mean deployed a suite of tools: descriptive statistics, bivariate analysis, several multivariate models (probit, tobit, ordinary least squares (OLS), and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR), and benefit-cost analysis. Qualitative insights from key informant interviews were handled through content analysis. For the CSA acceptance piece, she built on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) but extended it with constructs of her own design, capturing things such as the perceived effort of installing a solar-powered system, or the practical difficulty of producing or obtaining biochar for application.
Results show that most highland villagers notice that the climate is shifting. Some 62.3% reported sensing higher temperature, 61.5% pointed to worsening droughts, and 61.1% said the patterns of rainy days had changed. Individual traits, such as gender, age, and occupation, shaped these perceptions more than household-level factors. Interestingly, it was non-farmers who tended to pick up on big-picture phenomena such as drought and heat, whereas farmers narrowed in on more direct consequences: more pests, more crop diseases, and smaller harvests (Inkong et al., 2025).
When 236 farming households were asked to rank their agricultural problems, low output prices and water shortages stood out clearly at the top, with unpredictable input prices and pest damage not far behind. A tobit regression dug deeper: farmers who depended most on agriculture for their livelihood, earned less, bore more debt, and had not adopted organic practices turned out to be the ones most concerned about water scarcity.
On the technology front, there were encouraging observations: farmers were broadly open to adopting CSA. Yet, the drivers differed by technology. Keyline plowing was the only practice whose adoption intention connected to all four UTAUT dimensions (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions). Solar-powered irrigation was driven by three of the four (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence) though perceived difficulty of installation pushed back against adoption. Biochar application hinged on performance expectancy and effort expectancy alone, while for biochar production, social influence and facilitating conditions were what mattered. Across the board, household characteristics carried more weight than individual traits in explaining who was willing to adopt (Inkong et al., under review). The benefit–cost picture was a mixed bag. Through participatory workshops, six alternative crops were selected: avocado, cacao, pumpkin, lemongrass, peanut, and banana, which were stacked up against maize and rubber. When looking only at paid-out costs, lemongrass came out on top with a benefit-cost ratio of 4.60. Rubber followed at 2.37, then peanut at 1.88, and cacao at 1.75. Avocado (0.85), maize (0.84), banana (0.16), and pumpkin (0.04) all fell short of breaking even. The sobering result is that once family labor and other implicit costs were accounted for, every single crop fell below the sustainable BCR of 1.00. This finding makes a strong case for subsidies, better market channels, and value-chain support for the crop diversification to work in practice.
What are the takeaways for policymakers? For one, bringing down the upfront cost of CSA technologies, especially solar-powered irrigation, through subsidies or financing schemes would go a long way. Farmers also need more hands-on training and functioning demonstration sites, particularly for practices such as keyline plowing and biochar that many have never seen in action. On the crop side, practical support matters: seedlings, guidance on processing to add value, and reliable market connections. In addition, weaving organic or low-input approaches into the CSA package would open doors to higher-value markets for highland produce while easing pressure on the local environment.
Research publications from Mean’s dissertation:
Inkong, N., Tsusaka, T. W., Sasaki, N., & Anal, A. K. (2025). Understanding the Attributes Related to Climate Change Perceptions among Rural Households in Highlands: The Case of Northern Thailand. Polish Journal of Environmental Studies, 34(5), 5579–5588.
https://doi.org/10.15244/pjoes/191962
Inkong, N., Tsusaka, T. W., Anal, A. K., Yaseen, M., & Sasaki, N. Investigating the Acceptance of Climate-smart Agriculture Technologies in Highlands: The Case of Northern Thailand. Under Review
