Survey data of a traditional communal water irrigation system in Northern Thailand

This data article contains a description of a dataset collected by a survey on a traditional communal water irrigation system. This is the Muang fai, a 700-years old communal irrigation system in Northern Thailand. The Muang fai is managed through a series of regulations that are close to Ostrom's principles of effective common property resources (Ostrom, 1990). The survival of this long-standing practice, including its knowledge of the water-flow characteristics of the watershed, is under threat as new technologies, such as groundwater pumping, become increasingly accessible. The target population of the survey was the group of Longan farmers who are located within the 12 villages that are engaged in Muang fai Sop Rong in Chiang Mai Province, Northern Thailand. Information was specifically collected about irrigation practices, farmland characteristics and socio-economic variables from 570 longan (their main crop) farmer households. Roughly half of these sampled farmers practise Muang fai, the other half practise underground pumping irrigation. The irrigation information collected includes type of irrigation (surface or underground), the quantity of water used, pumping methods (if pumps are used). Farming characteristics collected include volume and value of the harvests, land size, and distance to irrigation canal. Socioeconomic characteristics included among others: farmers’ income, expenditure, education, off-farm employment and Muang-fai membership. This dataset can be a source of baseline information for future research as well as help preserve the knowledge of this tradition.


a b s t r a c t
This data article contains a description of a dataset collected by a survey on a traditional communal water irrigation system. This is the Muang fai , a 700-years old communal irrigation system in Northern Thailand. The Muang fai is managed through a series of regulations that are close to Ostrom's principles of effective common property resources (Ostrom, 1990). The survival of this long-standing practice, including its knowledge of the water-flow characteristics of the watershed, is under threat as new technologies, such as groundwater pumping, become increasingly accessible. The target population of the survey was the group of Longan farmers who are located within the 12 villages that are engaged in Muang fai Sop Rong in Chiang Mai Province, Northern Thailand. Information was specifically collected about irrigation practices, farmland characteristics and socio-economic variables from 570 longan (their main crop) farmer households. Roughly half of these sampled farmers practise Muang fai , the other half practise underground pumping irrigation. The irrigation information collected includes type of irrigation (surface or underground), the quantity of water used, pumping methods (if pumps are used). Farming characteristics collected include volume and value of the harvests, land size, and distance to irrigation canal. Socioeconomic characteristics included among others: farmers' income, expenditure, education, off-farm employment and Muang-fai membership. This dataset can be a source of baseline information for future research as well as help preserve the knowledge of this tradition.
© 2022 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ) Table   Subject Agricultural economics Specific subject area Irrigation, farming and socio-economic characteristics of farmers practising Muang-fai , a traditional communal irrigation system in Northern Thailand. Type of data

Value of the Data
• These data contain comprehensive information about farming, irrigation, exact location and socio-economic characteristics of farmers belonging to a traditional communal irrigation system called Muang fai , practised for centuries in Northern Thailand. The Muang fai is governed by a set of pre-established rules which, to a large extent, resemble Ostrom's [1] well-known principles of effective common property resources (see [2] ). These data will be a useful addition to documentation of such practices. • These data can benefit researchers (agricultural scientists, economists, geographers, historians, or social scientists in general) who study various types of small-scale irrigation, particularly traditional ones. • These data can be used in further studies that compare various irrigation types. This includes comparing by scale of the system, by modern-vs-traditional, by country of location, or by rule or irrigation management. Additionally, any studies documenting longtraditions of irrigation may benefit from the public availability of these data. The exact geo-location of this dataset can also extend the benefit of this data to spatially-specific studies such as the effect of agglomeration or urbanization on the preservation of traditional irrigation management. • In terms of its local policy context, the dataset also has importance and relevance. This research region is known for its Ching Mai and Lumphun Longan cultivation. Drought is increasingly an annual occurrence in these two provinces due to two reasons. First, water consumption has been rising due to the increased population, agricultural areas, and tourism activities. Second, the area's geography does not lend itself to water storage. As confirmed by Mungsunti and Parton [2] the Muang-fai system has an advantage over its competing practice (groundwater) in terms of water use efficiency.

Data Description
The raw data in file mungfai.dta (Stata file) and mungfai.csv (Excel, comma-separated file) contain the answers from 570 farmers surveyed using the survey instrument/questionnaire (questionaire_EngThai_9_18.03.11.xlsx). The questionnaire contains general information (time of interview, location, including geo-coordinates), crop production, irrigation information, inputs used in farming, socio-economic and demographic conditions, status of Muang fai membership, and irrigation water usage. The questionnaire is available in both the local language (Thai) as well as in English [6] . The structure of the variables in the dataset is illustrated in Fig. 1 .
Below is the detailed description or the definition of each of the variables collected in the survey as illustrated in Fig. 1 .  (

1) Expenditure This information indicates how much a household spends every week on consumption (in Thai Baht/week). This comprises food and non-food expenses incurred by the household (farmers and family members) during the preceding week. (2) Electricity bills
This data records how much the household pays for the total electricity bills (in Thai Baht/month). The estimation of water efficiency is dependent on these variables.  Table 1 shows the summary of the variables listed above comparing members of the Muang fai irrigation and farmers who use underground water.
From Table 1 , we can highlight several observations. First, in general there is not much difference in characteristics between members and non-members of the Muang fai , except in the context of crop production and irrigation. For example, both Muang fai and non-Muang fai members have roughly the same average age (59.2 and 58.6 years old, respectively), have similar proportion of married farmers (88% and 87%, respectively), and have around 5% with college education. So, both seem to have similar socio-demographic characteristics.
Similarly, in terms of asset ownership, both show more similarities than differences. Among members of the Muang fai , for example, car ownership is 59.7% and among non-members it is 58.8%. Ownership of other types of assets also seemingly is quite similar.
The economic characteristics, particularly expenditure per capita per month, show little difference, where Muang fai members seem to have around a 15% smaller expenditure per capita than non-Muang fai members. Larger difference occurs in terms of electricity bills (almost 40% difference). However, this difference may be related to the use of electric pumps of underground water users.
Both groups ( Muang fai members and non-Muang fai members) have also similar use of fertilizers and employ roughly the same number of laborers. However, in terms of value-productivity and water use efficiency, they are notably different. For example, farmers who are members To illustrate more about the usefulness of the data, Fig. 2 (from [2] ) shows the location of the survey including the locations of the respondents overlayed with the network of the Muang fai irrigation system in the area.
The map including the information from the survey can also be combined with other maps such as satellite imagery that may include, among others, land use of the area, such as illustrated in Fig. 3 (also from [2] ).

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
This case study's research area is in Thailand's northern region. It is situated at the northwest side of the province of Chiang Mai (as shown in Fig. 1 ). It is called the Muang fai Sop Rong, and is on the right bank of the Ping River in San Pa Tong District. For the local farmers who live in this region, the Muang fai Sop Rong is crucial. Covering about 937 ha of land, it is a significant source of water for the region's water needs, particularly for agricultural development. The system provides water through its main canal, which is 7.8 km long and runs through 12 villages in the San Pa Tong District [2 , 3] . The National Statistical Office [7] provides additional useful information on the region.
The Muang fai Song Rop was selected as the case study for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the ancient method of building irrigation systems, including some specific physical characteristics of traditional headwork construction from local materials like wood, logs, and stones, is still in use today. Second, a comparative analysis of this example is appropriate because many farmers in this region use ground water as an alternative irrigation method to Muang fai . The group of Longan farmers was chosen as the survey's target population. We conducted a survey of farmers practising Longan farming in the Muang fai Sop Rong. The Muang fai members group and the ground water irrigation users group were separated into two groups of comparable size. The sampling was then divided into villages. From each village, we randomly picked two groups of members and non-members of roughly equal size. 2 Prior to starting the survey, we had Focus Group Discussions (FGD) to help us refine the survey's questionnaire. We asked relevant parties, in particular neighborhood farmers, to help us improve the survey questionnaires. Additionally, some significant relevant informants were invited to take part in this FGD and to be interviewed. There were a number of informants who had first-hand experience of the study area, including the case study area's village chiefs, former Muang fai irrigation managers, regional irrigation specialists, and local administrative office workers. We began training the enumerators once we improved the questionnaire (who mostly were students from Chiang Mai University).
In order to reduce potential errors, we pre-tested the questionnaire before the survey. The survey was administered in the native Thai language. The pre-test survey was carried out by 14 students who were designated as enumerators using the draft survey questionnaire. In order to begin the pre-test survey, we gave each survey enumerator the task of interviewing 15 Longan farmers who lived nearby Muang fai Sop Rong. The actual survey was conducted in the months of March, April, and May 2011 after the pre-test survey was completed.
For this study, to measure the volume of irrigation water use, we used indirect methods, as described in [2] . In principle, the method records the frequency of irrigation from the interview as well as the capacity of the pump the farmers use. Using a smaller set of observations we established a statistical relationship between pump capacity and the volume of water irrigated to the farm land. We applied this relationships to all samples.

Ethics Statements
We, hereby, confirm that relevant informed consent was obtained from all respondents in the survey. The research and its survey has been reviewed and approved, in accordance with the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans, by Charles Sturt University (CSU) Human Research Ethics Committee, with issued protocol number 2011/033.

Declaration of Competing Interest
We declare that we have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability
Questionnaire