Once mecca for organic farming practices, Canaan continues to influence nation

Kim Pyung-il, president of Canaan Farmers’ School / Korea Times

By Kang Hyun-kyung

YANGPYEONG, Gyeonggi Province — Massive rural-urban migration occurred between the 1960s and the 1980s owing to a policy priority on exports that helped the economy grow and that helped create manufacturing jobs in the cities.

The rural population has shrunk since industrialization, but the Canaan Farmers’ School, which was established in 1962 to train farmers how to achieve higher crop productivity in order to end chronic poverty, remains.

Located in Yangpeyong County, 30 kilometers southeast of Seoul, the school is still popular, drawing thousands of people from diverse backgrounds, including North Korean freedom seekers, or defectors, all year round.

“Politicians come here in times of crisis,” Kim Pyung-il, the school’s president, said on May 30 at his office.

President Park Geun-hye went there in the mid-2000s when she led the Saenuri Party as chairwoman. The party was in deep trouble for the slush fund scandal that tainted the image of the party and its members. Park and her fellow lawmakers strove to get some ideas about turning the crisis into an opportunity.

President Park Chung-hee was the first head of state to visit the school. / Korea Times

Last year, Kim said, Rep. Moon Jae-in and some 130 lawmakers of the main opposition party attended a two-day training session at the farmers’ school. “Around that time, the party was mired in a crisis stemming from the protracted feuds among its members. In a lecture, I encouraged them to become conscientious and accountable politicians,” he said.

Kim, 74, is the third son of the school’s founder, Kim Yong-ki, who died of cancer at 79 in 1988. The elder Kim was a farmer who pioneered scientific farming and taught the concept to his poor fellow farmers to help them become self-sufficient.

The elder Kim was the icon of revolutionary farming practices. His family used solar-powered heating in the 1960s to save energy and utility fees. Unlike other farmers of his time, he also diversified crop production to hedge against poor rice yields, touting the benefits of the method to fellow farmers. In addition, he purchased wasteland because it was cheap and turned it into a fertile agricultural area in one or two years later using excrement as a natural fertilizer.

The late Kim’s pioneering spirit led him to establish the Canaan school on his 5-hectare farm in Gwangju County with the aim of sharing his expertise about organic farming with other farmers. With the help of his wife and five children, he turned the farmland into a farmers’ school, renovating the pens for pigs, cows, rabbits and hens into classrooms, lecture halls and dormitories for the students, as well as a house for his family. Canaan was relocated to Yangpyeong County 10 years ago.

The elder Kim ran the school like a military boot camp. He would ring the bell at 4 am to signal the commencement of the day for his students. In the wintertime, he rang the bell at 5 am. Students were required to run 10 kilometers before breakfast. Lectures were held in the morning until lunch and in the afternoon before dinner. After completing the hectic program, which used to last 15 days, the students became entirely new people. They became more confident and empowered with innovative ideas.

“Technical assistance and mental toughness were the two main focuses of the Canaan program in the early days,” the younger Kim said. The Kim family members taught the students. “My oldest brother is an expert about fruit cultivation, and he taught the students how to grow fruit. My next older brother showed them how to raise cattle. My mother’s areas of specialization were healthy dietary habits and nutrition, so she lectured them on those topics.”

The family-run program became an instant success. People from all across the country flocked to the school, bringing bags of rice and cabbages as their tuition payment. “At that time, all Koreans were so poor that many of our students couldn’t afford the tuition for their 15-day session, even though it was already very cheap. So they brought crops they raised and gave them to us for their tuition,” the younger Kim said.

There is no accurate data about the ratio of farmers to the entire population in the 1960s. However, it would have been much higher than 30 percent, considering that the figure stood at 29 percent in 1980, nearly two decades after the rural-to-urban labor migration occurred following industrialization. As of 2010, the rural population had fallen to 6 percent.

Because of its innovative ideas and advanced farming practices, Canaan has become a must-visit for presidential hopefuls, other ambitious politicians and business leaders. Several presidents have paid visits to the farming school while they were in office. The first head of state to visit the school was the military general-turned-President Park Chung-hee in February 1962. He visited again in 1966.

The idea for Saemaul Undong or the New Villlage Movement, an initiative to modernize the rural areas and narrow the income gap between rural and urban dwellers, was born during Park’s first meeting with the school’s founder.

During the meeting, the founder asked the president and military strongman a bold question — Why was he determined to overthrow the previous democratically elected Chang Myeon government, given that doing so was not the job of a military general?

“President Park said he wanted to feed the hungry people, and his single-minded focus on this goal caused him to launch the military coup,” the younger Kim quoted the late Park as saying. Park’s predecessor, Chang, was portrayed as the icon of incompetence because his government’s one-year rule after the popular April 19 uprising did not improve the lives of the poor people. In the early 1960s, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. “President Park said after seizing power through a coup in 1961, he realized that he didn’t know what to do to feed the hungry people, and this brought him to the Canaan school to ask for my father’s help,” the younger Kim said.

The elder Kim’s tireless efforts to eradicate poverty earned him much deserved recognition at home and abroad. He is the first farmer to have received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1966.

In the course of six decades since the establishment of the school, the younger Kim said, the school’s focus has changed. Unification has been the school’s priority since the 1980s when the first group of North Koreans came to Korea in search of freedom. The total number of North Korean freedom seekers in South Korea in the 1980s was fewer than 100, but the figure has soared since the mid-1990s when the North was hit by famine. Today, nearly 30,000 people from the North are living in the South.

Every year, the Canaan school hosts a New Year festival for the freedom seekers. Last year, the school also sponsored a North Korean troupe’s tour to the United States. The younger Kim said the North Korean freedom seekers are agents of change who will facilitate the unification of the two Koreas and the smoother integration of the people from the two countries post-unification.

“I know that some South Korean employers complain about North Korean workers and accuse them of being lazy and not being motivated. North Koreans have a hard time adjusting to the capitalist South Korean society because they were born and raised in the communist country,” he said. “I think we need to be patient because there is certainly a role they can play once the two Koreas are unified. They can serve as a buffer that can ease the culture shock the people of the two Koreas will surely feel about each other.”