Wiwat Salyakamthorn (Ajarn Yak)

Wiwat Salyakamthorn, known throughout Thailand as Ajarn Yak, is an educator, farmer and former deputy minister who has spent his life promoting self-reliance, the sufficiency economy, organic agriculture and traditional medicine.

He was born into a farming family in Chachoengsao province and grew up in a household that valued herbal knowledge and sustainable practice. Traditional agriculture and medicine were part of daily life from an early age, and so was the philosophy of sufficiency economy taught by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, King Rama IX, which would shape the rest of his work.

Ajarn Yak spent sixteen years at the Office of the Royal Development Projects Board, working on programmes that helped farmers become more self-reliant. He advised on mixed cropping, homemade organic fertilisers and ways to reduce dependence on chemical inputs, and worked in support of the King's rural development initiatives, helping carry the sufficiency economy philosophy into rural communities.

In 1996 he left his government post to return to his own land, this time in Chon Buri, and set out to prove the philosophy in practice. He rehabilitated degraded ground, planted more than three hundred perennial trees and built a mixed farm of around forty rai. The farm grew into a learning centre, the Mab Ueang Agri-Nature Learning Center, known affectionately as the "Pigsty College," where generations of farmers have come to learn sustainable agriculture, herb cultivation and self-sufficient living.

Traditional medicine runs alongside the farming. Coming from a family of practitioners, Ajarn Yak has worked to revive Thai herbal medicine as an accessible, preventive form of care. During the COVID-19 pandemic he helped coordinate the distribution of locally grown herbal remedies to vulnerable communities, insisting on chemical-free cultivation and local self-reliance.

In 2017 he was invited to serve as Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives. In office he pressed for organic farming, food safety and reduced use of hazardous farm chemicals. Much of his practical work has centred on the Khok Nong Na model and New Theory agriculture, an approach that combines land and water management with organic farming and community-led projects and overlaps closely with permaculture design, and which farmers across the country have adopted to strengthen food security and resilience.

His teaching is hands-on and collaborative, built to leave farmers with confidence, self-sufficiency and the ability to solve their own problems rather than a set of instructions to follow.

Today Ajarn Yak holds a number of leading positions in Thailand's sustainability movement. He is founder and president of the Agri-Nature Foundation, president of the World Soil Association and president of the Institute of Sufficiency Economy, as well as a former deputy minister of agriculture and cooperatives. He is also among the Thai practitioners taking part in IPC16, the International Permaculture Convergence, which comes to Thailand in 2026. Across all of it the message is the one he learned as a boy in Chachoengsao: that a good life, and a resilient country, begin with a household that can stand on its own.