In newly industrialised countries in Asia, programmes to support the establishment of young farmers are still emerging. This in particularly true in Thailand, despite the declared importance of supporting young farmers in national development strategies. The aim of the present study was to analyse policy tools to help young people start farming in Thailand. First, we reviewed existing policy tools in Thailand and in other countries. Based on this review, a series of workshops were held with young rural people and young farmers in Thailand to assess the most promising policy tools. During the workshops, participants discussed a set of 22 policy tools designed to support access to land, capital and markets, capacity-building and making farming a more attractive profession. The workshop participants thought almost all the proposed policy tools would be useful but gave priority to subsidies to start farming and to secure land leases. Reversing the current, very rapid decrease in the number of young farmers in Thailand will require ambitious programmes, which could not only focus on helping young people who are already interested in farming but also appeal to a broader public by making farming more attractive.

Studies of young people's willingness to farm usually analyse their plans based on the resources available to them, or their hopes if they had access to more resources, but rarely study the two jointly. However, in newly industrialized countries in Asia, such joint assessments are needed to disentangle the extent to which young people's limited involvement in farming is due to lack of interest or to the fact that they see no way to get round the obstacles to starting the kind of farming they want to practice. This study analysed the vision of 86 young rural people in Prachinburi Province, Thailand, concerning farming, their plan to farm under prevailing conditions and their willingness to become a farmer if more opportunities to start farming were available. More than two-thirds of the interviewees were not farming at the time of the interview, but half planned to start farming, either part or full time, in the coming decade. One-third of the interviewees said that if they had better opportunities to start farming, they would reconsider their current plans to work in non-agricultural sectors and instead become full-time farmers. Public policies aimed at increasing the number of young people who become farmers should consequently not take the prevailing lack of engagement in farming by many young rural people as a given. Such policies should not only support young people who already plan to farm, but also those who would be willing to farm if they had better opportunities to do so.

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Many countries have programmes to help young people start farming. However, some of the programmes have been criticized for not providing enough support, particularly because they do not adequately account for the diverse profiles of young farmers. The present study analyses the profiles of young farmers in Thailand and to what extent they benefit from support programmes. Eighty-four farmers under the age of 40 were interviewed in Chiang Mai and Prachinburi Provinces, along with 15 staff members of support programmes for young farmers. Five types of young farmers were identified, who differed in their motivation, farming systems and engagement in farming. Some farmers focused on economic profitability, while others considered environmentally sustainable farming practices to be important or were actively engaged in other activities at domestic or village level. This wide range of goals and situations entailed varying constraints during the first years of farming. The support programmes helped farmers overcome their lack of farming knowledge and helped them integrate into rural communities, but the support they provided in accessing land and capital was sometimes limited, and often non-existent. To improve support for young farmers in Thailand, the diversity of young farmers’ profiles should be accounted for not only in capacity-building activities but also to help them access other types of resources.

Farms in Asian newly industrialised economies are increasingly faced with operational and structural challenges (e.g. small farm size, ageing of farmers). Public policies have generally focused little on several of these structural challenges or on links between the challenges facing farms. The future of these farms looks uncertain. However, in Thailand, multi-stakeholder dialogue on this future has been limited. This article analyses possible farm futures that actors of a rural territory in Thailand identified and the changes they were willing to support to address interrelated challenges facing the farms. These farm futures resulted from a participatory planning process, which mostly involved farmers and staff from local administrations and public agencies. Participants designed future farm scenarios that took the main operational and structural challenges facing the farms into account. The pathway designed by participants to achieve their preferred scenario involved intervention of various dimensions, e.g. water management, value chains, and farm structure. Actors expressed their readiness for several farming system transformations. They proposed actions to enhance land tenure security and youth engagement in farming, which were two topics relatively overlooked in prevailing public policies. Supporting discussions between actors of rural territories could help identify ambitious innovative pathways to address challenges to farm sustainability in Asian newly industrialised economies.