A rare green sight in teeming Bangkok

KNEE-DEEP in one of three riceberry paddies, Sompot Tubcharoen, 60, plows the watery fields of his farm with a handheld machine he calls “the field crusher.”

Lined with hundreds of melon trees, the farm planted with the cross-breed rice variety presents a rare green sight in the teeming Thai capital where developers are quick to snap up land if the price is right.

Housing estates, office buildings and traffic-clogged roads are fast encroaching in the area surrounding the farm, located 30 kilometers northeast of central Bangkok.

A former university researcher who traded lecture halls for boots and a straw hat to run his family’s farm four years ago, Sompot says he regularly turns down developers who want to buy the land. The farm covers 8 hectares.

“Just recently I was asked if I’d sell for 33 million baht (US$1.01 million),” he said.

Many others have succumbed to offers to part with their land in Bangkok, where city central land prices jumped a record 30 percent in 2017, according to commercial real estate firm CBRE Group, a reflection in part of the growing scarcity of available space.

Earlier this year, Britain’s Foreign Office sold its 4-hectare embassy compound in the city center, which it had retained for 96 years, for 420 million pounds (US$544.32 million), the biggest land sale in Thai history.