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Thai livestock

Why Thailand has a buffalo day, and the bank that lends buffalo

Thai Buffalo Conservation Day on 14 May recalls the first royal directive on the buffalo bank. How tillers cut herd numbers and how the bank lends animals.

Beginner9 min read

On this page
  1. Chapter 1: a buffalo in the paddy
  2. Chapter 2: the tractor years
  3. Chapter 3: a bank that lends buffalo
  4. Chapter 4: the numbers hit bottom, and a day is named
  5. Chapter 5: breeding a better buffalo
  6. What 14 May means for a farmer today

Every year on 14 May, Thailand marks Thai Buffalo Conservation Day (วันอนุรักษ์ควายไทย). The date is not random. It remembers the day in 1980 when King Bhumibol Adulyadej first gave a royal directive (พระราชกระแสรับสั่ง) about the cattle-buffalo bank project (ONEP, 2026).

To see why a country would set aside a day for an animal it has kept for a very long time, it helps to tell the story in order. It starts in the rice fields, moves through the years when small tractors arrived, and ends with a bank that lends buffalo instead of money. Every number below links to the source it came from. Where I did the arithmetic myself, I say so.

A swamp buffalo standing in tall grass and water plants in Sukhothai, Thailand
Photo: Bernard DUPONT, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 1: a buffalo in the paddy

There are two kinds of domestic water buffalo. River buffalo have 50 chromosomes and swamp buffalo have 48 (Pineda et al. 2021). Thailand's buffalo are mostly the swamp type (ONEP, 2021). In Southeast Asia, smallholders have kept swamp buffalo mainly for their draft power, with milk, meat, hide and horn as extra income (Pineda et al. 2021).

An FAO leaflet from 2000 lists what made the buffalo so useful on a rice farm (FAO, 2000):

  • It works well in wet, waterlogged fields like muddy paddies, and it can pull a cart with heavier loads than cattle.
  • An adult produces 4 to 6 tonnes of wet manure a year, which goes back onto the land as fertiliser.
  • It can live on low-quality feed such as rice straw and crop leftovers better than cattle can.
  • It works as savings: a family can sell an animal when it needs cash for school fees, a wedding or a bad harvest.

How much did farms depend on it? A study of Northeast Thailand cites village research published in 1971 in which about 70% of households in the studied villages owned and managed buffalo and land cultivation "depended almost entirely on buffalo power" (Simaraks et al. 2003). That is one region and one period, but it gives a sense of the scale.

Chapter 2: the tractor years

The same study tracks what happened next. In the Northeast, buffalo numbers fell from 3.6 million head in 1976 to 2.3 million in 1997 (Simaraks et al. 2003), a drop of about 36% by my own arithmetic. The authors say it is hard to separate causes from effects, but they describe a chain of changes:

  • Forests were cleared and replaced by cash crops such as kenaf and cassava.
  • Livestock prices were not attractive enough to keep farmers raising animals.
  • Loan policies of the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives encouraged farmers to replace livestock with small hand tractors.
  • Workers migrated in large numbers to the big cities, so fewer family members were left to look after animals, which pushed farms towards machines even more.
Same field, two kinds of power: the buffalo ploughs part of the row, then a small tiller takes over and finishes faster.

Buffalo jobs on the farm, such as preparing paddy and upland fields, weeding and threshing, did not disappear, but they "greatly declined" and were largely taken over by small tractors, herbicides and mobile threshing machines (Simaraks et al. 2003). The authors also weigh the trade-off. When labour is short, machines help farmers finish the work faster and on time, but they run on mostly imported fuel, their repairs usually need service from outside the community, and, unlike livestock, they can't be bred and raised on the farm.

A swamp buffalo standing in a green rice paddy in Yasothon while two farmers work the field with diesel tillers
Photo: Pawyilee, public domain, Wikimedia Commons

The FAO leaflet adds more reasons for Thailand as a whole (FAO, 2000). Government programmes had promoted machinery, especially two-wheeled tractors, through subsidies and credit for more than two decades. Tractors were seen as a sign of status, while buffalo were seen as old-fashioned. Demand for buffalo meat grew, but there were not enough replacement animals for the ones slaughtered. Chemical fertiliser replaced manure, and families got smaller. The leaflet's table shows Thailand's buffalo falling from 5,708,000 in 1988 to 1,951,000 in 1998, a decline the leaflet calls a sharp contrast with its neighbours (most of the other countries in the table changed far less). The 1998 figure was an estimate from the Department of Livestock Development (กรมปศุสัตว์, DLD).

Good to know: the FAO leaflet warned that what happened in Thailand could happen next in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines as their small farms mechanise (FAO, 2000).

Chapter 3: a bank that lends buffalo

Thailand's response to farmers who had no draft animals of their own was an unusual kind of bank. According to ONEP, King Bhumibol first gave a royal directive about the cattle-buffalo bank project (ธนาคารโค-กระบือ) on 14 May 1980 (B.E. 2523) (ONEP, 2026). The DLD runs it. A Ministry of Agriculture document from the Cooperative Promotion Department explains the purpose: to help poor farmers across the country own cattle or buffalo for farm work and to raise their farm output (Cooperative Promotion Department).

The same document says the project is run by a committee chaired by the DLD Director-General, under a 2013 (B.E. 2556) DLD regulation, and offers five kinds of service:

Service How it works (as the document describes it)
Lend for production (ให้ยืมเพื่อการผลิต) The farmer borrows a female and returns her first calf at 18 months. That calf is lent to another farmer, or sold and the money returned. After the 5-year contract, the mother and any later calves become the farmer's.
Hire purchase (ให้เช่าซื้อ) Beef cattle or buffalo are paid off over 3 years: 40% in year one, 30% in year two, the rest in year three.
Lend a breeding male A bull is lent to a village with at least 50 of the project's females, looked after by one farmer for the whole village.
Rent for work A male animal for farm work, for 300 baht per animal per year.
Other services Other help the provincial livestock office and the project agree on.

There is one more rule for the loan: if the farmer has had the female for 3 years and there is still no first calf to return, the project takes her back to lend to someone else. If she turns out to have a reproductive problem, she is replaced instead (Cooperative Promotion Department).

The loan-and-return cycle: a cow goes out to a farm, her first calf comes back to the bank for the next family, and the cow stays.

What I like about this design is that the bank grows its own stock. Each loan, if it works, sends a young animal back to be lent again. The FAO leaflet named the "Buffalo Banks" scheme as one way to improve small farmers' access to buffalo (FAO, 2000).

The document I'm quoting is not dated, and rules like these can change. If you are interested in joining, your provincial livestock office (สำนักงานปศุสัตว์จังหวัด) can tell you the current terms.

Chapter 4: the numbers hit bottom, and a day is named

The Office of Agricultural Economics (สำนักงานเศรษฐกิจการเกษตร, OAE) publishes a national buffalo count as of 1 January each year (OAE dataset on data.go.th). A few points from that series:

Year (1 Jan) Buffalo in Thailand
1993 (B.E. 2536) 4,753,697
2001 (B.E. 2544) 1,523,627
2016 (B.E. 2559) 908,546
2020 (B.E. 2563) 1,283,359
2023 (B.E. 2566) 1,665,837

By my arithmetic, that is a fall of about 81% from 1993 to the lowest point in 2016, then a rise of about 83% by 2023. Different agencies count in different ways, so the OAE figures don't match the FAO table above exactly.

In 2017, the cabinet agreed to make 14 May of every year Thai Buffalo Conservation Day. ONEP gives the date of that cabinet meeting as 7 March 2017 (B.E. 2560) and says the proposal came from the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (ONEP, 2021). The reasons ONEP gives are simple. Buffalo numbers kept falling, buffalo played a smaller part in farming, and people kept fewer of them (ONEP, 2026). The date links the new day to the cattle-buffalo bank.

The OAE series shows numbers rising again from 2017 onwards. The data doesn't say why, so I won't guess.

Chapter 5: breeding a better buffalo

Keeping more buffalo is one thing. Keeping better ones is another. Genetic improvement for buffalo in Thailand started in 1979 through the DLD, and selection of superior swamp buffalo has used estimated breeding values (EBVs) (Pineda et al. 2021). The same review lists BREEDPLAN, an analysis system developed in Australia, as one of the tools used for Thai swamp buffalo.

A swamp buffalo with long curved horns grazing on dry ground in Thailand
Photo: Da, CC BY 2.5, Wikimedia Commons

Today the DLD lists eight animal research and breeding centres for buffalo production. Seven of them work with Thai swamp buffalo (กระบือปลักไทย): Chanthaburi, Surin (the Buffalo Research and Development Center), Nakhon Phanom, Phayao, Phitsanulok, Uthai Thani and Nakhon Si Thammarat. The eighth, in Buriram, works with river buffalo (the list names Mehsana and Murrah), the type kept mainly for milk (FAO, 2000) (DLD centre list on data.go.th).

The reason for breeding has changed too. As farms mechanise, the main purpose of swamp buffalo across Southeast Asia is moving from draft power towards meat and milk (Pineda et al. 2021).

What 14 May means for a farmer today

The sources above present the day as a commemoration and a reminder to conserve buffalo, and none of them ties a new programme to it. Still, the story points to a few things that are useful to know:

  1. You are not alone in keeping buffalo. DLD data count 300,933 buffalo farmers and 1,805,535 buffalo across the 77 provinces in 2025 (B.E. 2568), up from 266,753 farmers and 1,521,014 buffalo in 2021 (DLD buffalo and buffalo farmer datasets; sums of the provinces are my own arithmetic).
  2. The bank still lends. Ask your provincial livestock office whether the cattle-buffalo bank has animals in your area and what the current terms are.
  3. Good breeding stock comes from somewhere. The DLD centres listed above work on improving and multiplying swamp buffalo, and their contact details are in the same dataset.
  4. Watch the market. The OAE publishes weekly farm-gate prices for buffalo, which is a better guide than one trader's word when you plan to sell.
  5. Write things down. If buffalo are now raised more for meat than for work, a weight and a birth date for every animal are worth more than ever.

The buffalo didn't come back to Thai fields as a plough animal. If it stays, it will be as a meat animal, a source of manure and savings, and part of the country's farming culture. The bank and the day are two ways the government has tried to keep it there.

Sources

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