In Surin, a flat, dusty province about 450 kilometres from Bangkok, a peculiar sound drifts across the elephant grazing grounds: the quiet crunching of dirt. The domesticated elephants here are eating soil — not because they are hungry, but because their bodies are desperate for minerals their usual diet cannot provide.
For generations, these elephants lived alongside mahouts, the traditional keepers who raise them for cultural festivals and tourism. But unlike wild elephants who roam forests and find natural salt licks, Surin's elephants rely entirely on their keepers for food. They eat sugarcane, banana stems, and grass — enough for energy, but short on the sodium, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus their bones, muscles, and nerves need to function properly.
That is where a 17-year-old from Bangkok stepped in. Nathakorn Pongsak, a Year 12 student at Shrewsbury International School Bangkok Riverside, has created a herbal mineral block that solves the problem using plants Thai farmers already know.
An adult Asian elephant eats around 150 kilograms of food every single day. Providing that much food costs money, and supplementing it with proper minerals costs even more. Mahout families — many of them poor — have been buying generic mineral blocks made for cattle and pigs, imported from outside the region. These products are not designed for elephants. They do not work well, and they are too expensive for families to use consistently. So the elephants keep eating dirt, which causes bloating, diarrhoea, and constant discomfort.
Working with the AKAYA Polyclinic Thai Traditional Medical Council and local agricultural researchers, Pongsak spent months developing a formula using nine ingredients native to Thailand. Each 1.5-kilogram block combines tamarind for calcium and digestion support, rice bran for fibre and anti-inflammatory benefits, sea salt for direct sodium replacement, moringa leaf powder — one of the most calcium-dense plants on Earth — black sesame for magnesium, nut grass to treat gut inflammation, Tinospora crispa as a natural anti-inflammatory, turmeric to reduce swelling, and ripe banana mixed with honey to bind everything together and make it taste good.
The idea was to make something cheap enough for mahout families to produce themselves, using herbs they could grow on their own land. No expensive imports. No foreign factories. Just Thai soil and Thai knowledge, applied with modern science.
So far, the blocks have reached 200 elephants across Surin province. With only one specialist elephant veterinarian responsible for all of them, the mineral deficiency problem had been largely ignored. Pongsak's project offers a practical, affordable answer that keepers can use every day without waiting for a vet to arrive.
The next step is broader testing and finding ways to scale production so every mahout family in Surin can make the blocks independently. For an animal that has been side by side with Thai culture for two thousand years, this small herbal brick might be exactly what the doctor — and the mahout — ordered.