Listening to Buffalo Herders: What a Thai Village Can Teach Us About One Health

Not as a diagram with humans, animals and environments connected by arrows. Not as a policy phrase either. In Ban Huay Phan, a Lua village in Nan Province, northern Thailand, One Health looks more like rice fields, forest paths, muddy salt licks, animal tracks, village rituals, and long conversations with people who have watched buffaloes for decades.

The village has around 180 inhabitants and roughly 300 buffaloes. Out of 52 households, 47 keep buffaloes, which means buffalo farming is not a side activity. It is part of the village’s history, livelihood, landscape and daily rhythm. The Lua community did not always live there. Many families were displaced from the mountains near the Lao border during the political unrest of the 1970s, and when they came to Ban Huay Phan, they brought their buffaloes with them. That small fact says a lot: buffaloes were not just livestock; they were part of continuity.

This is where the BufFarm project began: with buffaloes moving between village, rice fields and forest, and with herders whose knowledge had been built through long, patient observation.

Read more : https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/do/10.5555/blog-buffalo-herders-thai-village-one-health

By Nicolas Lainé