Panya Forest

Panya Forest is a permaculture/agroforestry sanctuary nestled on the outskirts of Shri Lanna National Park in Northern Thailand where a community of seed savers works to preserve plant diversity alongside the stories, songs, and ancestral knowledges carried within each seed. Founded by Gregory Pettys and his wife Ramphai Noikaew, longtime restorative agriculturalists and community builders, Panya Forest is the result of their decades long collaborations with indigenous hill tribes throughout their region. In addition to saving seeds and teaching how to build homes from natural materials, they seek to keep alive myth-based methods of education and other endangered pathways to eventual elderhood that are threatened by modernity, all of which are reliant on strong, intergenerational relations with a vibrant ecosystem. Panya Forest is more than a farm, it is a living classroom, a sanctuary, a bridge to the future and the past.