Farmers in Thailand were losing crops to hungry elephants, so they began replacing sugar cane and bananas with coffee — a crop the herds largely leave alone, allowing farmers to protect their income without fencing the animals out

A sugar cane field, to a hungry elephant, is a vending machine with the glass already broken.

Free calories, no queue, nothing standing in the way. Bananas are better still, and pineapple better than that. For decades, smallholders along Thailand’s forest edges have planted precisely the crops a three-tonne herbivore would order off a menu, then spent their nights trying to talk it out of eating them. Fireworks, slingshots, shouting, spotlights. Those tricks work until they stop working, and elephants learn fast.

A few farming communities in Kanchanaburi province have gone the other way and started growing something the herds find boring.

Coffee instead of cane

Since 2023, the Zoological Society of London has worked with the Thai NGO Eco-exist Society to help smallholders on the western forest margins swap bananas and sugar cane for coffee. ZSL’s reasoning is unglamorous: coffee holds far less appeal for an elephant than something sweet, soft and dense with sugar. Coffee also does well in shade, so plots can go in under existing native trees rather than replacing them, and the shrubs are planted beside marigolds, chilli bushes and beehives, which big herbivores would rather walk around than through.

Robusta was picked for unromantic reasons. The Darwin Initiative, which part-funds the work, reports that soil surveys, farm mapping and focus groups across seventeen conflict-hit communities, covering 375 households, identified robusta agroforestry as the model with the best shot at beating existing cash crops on income in a stable domestic market. The same records put crop damage in those villages at more than one million baht, roughly £30,000, over five years.

Why the herds come out at all

Elephant numbers explain only part of this. ZSL puts the national wild population at somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000. A paper in Scientific Reports traced crop raiding in the Eastern Economic Corridor back to land use, with industrial estates and farmland taking over the low, flat ground elephants prefer and leaving behind a patchwork of forest fragments and plantations that works as a kind of substitute habitat. In parts of the east, the study notes, the wild population has been climbing at about eight per cent a year inside that mosaic. Water shortages in the forest push animals outwards as well. An elephant wandering into a banana plot is less a raider than a commuter on a route that predates the plot.

The cooperative doing the selling

Growing the stuff is the easy half. ZSL and Eco-exist have set up a farmer-led cooperative called Chiang Yim, or “smiling elephant”, to handle processing, marketing and long-term purchase agreements with buyers, with more than forty farmers signed up so far and a target of 1,000 hectares of elephant-friendly farmland by 2030. In project updates from Kanchanaburi, the team describes a first model farm at Huai Kayeng now carrying more than twenty species, from coffee and coconut to mangosteen, avocado, pepper and rosewood, with two further sites co-designed with farmers at Tha Manao and Chalae.

Diversity there is partly insurance. If coffee prices slump, the pepper still sells.

Why the stakes run past crop losses

Crop damage is the mild end of this. Reporting by the Heinrich Böll Foundation put the toll at around 150 people killed and more than 133 injured in encounters with wild elephants over six years, alongside more than ninety elephants dead, some of them electrocuted by wires strung around orchards by farmers trying to save their trees. A decade-long survey published in Animals logged 341 conflict incidents across 34 of Thailand’s 77 provinces between 2014 and 2023, clustered in the east and in the July to October rains, and occurring mostly on farmland where elephants had come looking for a feed. That is one dataset from one team, not a settled body of literature, though the shape of it is hard to miss.

Elephants also like coffee

That heading is borrowed from a paper, and the paper reads as a caution. Researchers writing in Environmental Management studied Kodagu in India’s Western Ghats, a district that grows about two per cent of the world’s coffee under dense agroforestry, and found elephants crossing the estates along established corridors, feeding opportunistically as they went. Dung analysis showed some animals had been selecting ripe coffee berries, which the authors flagged as the first record of the behaviour anywhere. Less appealing is not the same as inedible, and a habit that spreads through a population is a habit farmers eventually inherit.

The wait

Coffee has one catch, and it is a substantial one. A newly planted bush yields nothing for three or four years, which is a long stretch to ask of a household used to cutting cane and getting paid in the same season. Marigolds and chilli fill a little of the gap. Beehives do a bit better, and honey sells well in Thailand.

Everyone involved is waiting on the same slow bet, which is that a bitter bean can out-earn sugar across a decade.

The herds are under no obligation to wait with them.