Community Rice Mill (2) : How we do the business?

We run the business in an informal way of working. It opens everyday from morning until around 6 p.m. However, on important holidays such as Songkran Festival, New Year Days or important Buddist holy days like Buddhist Lent day, we will close so our employees have time to be with family and make merits. To decide how many relaxing days they will have based on agreement.

As the mill is just next to the house, actually we can open 24 hours (lol). It's true that sometimes at night (of course, not more than midnight time) customers will drop by because they just come back from going outside and call us to buy some bags of husk.

During day time, our 2 employees will take care of everything but sometimes if many customers come, my mom or I will go to help them.

Our workers are waiting for outcoming milled rice from the machine

Visitors are classified into 4 groups;
1. Rice consumers
2. Farmers
3. Rice traders
4. Others

Our products are;
1. Milled rice
2. Broken-milled rice
3. Husk

Rough Husk - For free! Soft husk - For sale



Paddy rice - For sale Broken-milled rice - For sale

The whole picture of business is that we buy rice from farmers and suppliers. The difference is that we buy a big lot from suppliers while buy few bags of rice from farmers.

If it's the big lot (around more than 20 bags of rice), we will give them higher price. At this time, it's around 112 Baht per Tang (local measurement of rice, 1 Tang = 14 Kgs.) and this price is for only sticky rice. The buying price of paddy rice is much more higher (more than 2 times) as there's low supply here. Most people here eats sticky rice.

Our big buyer's worker is loading bags of rice on the truck - we give him whole sales price

The buying and selling price of rice is so sensitive and variable. It can change everyday so it's neccessary to maintain a good connection with other rice mills and suppliers in order to lower the price competition. The central policy from government also affects harshly. There're various uncontrolable factors in rice trading. We have to keep ourselves up-to-date with news to prepare for unexpected situation.

After the rice is undergone the mill process, we will get following things; milled rice, broken-milled rice, rough husk and soft husk.

We sell the first three but the last one is for free. Anyone can take that.

Next time, I'm going to talk about the types of rice traded here.

Culture Tips

• In countryside areas, we do self-sufficiency business. We do not think about profit and loss that much but we care about how our business is related and interdependent with one another.
  
• Our local social network is not strong enough to protect our interest. The price structure and policy are mainly based on centralization and the big rice suppliers who have close relationship with the central authority.
  
• The local feel smaller than government. This is derived from the past uneven toughts of hirachy of power - old system thinking. From my point of view, I would say that it's the root of all Thai cultures.