An Extraordinary Cooperative Head

The Cooperative Head put down his A-frame carrying a loudspeaker and picked up the microphone.

The villagers could not understand why this “educated man stirring up the people” was going around the village with a loudspeaker in his A-frame. What magical secret was there to growing barley? Thinking I may as well listen to what he had to say, I paid attention. The Cooperative Head first explained how to enrich the soil and recommended that we sow barley ten days later than people do on land, given the village’s location on a warm southern island. The villagers were doubtful at first but once they followed his advice the yield doubled. Then everyone reclaimed farmlands to sow barley, increasing barley yield by eight times, more than half of which could be traded for sale on land.

The Dream of a Young Man in Colonial Korea

Park Jong-An, the Cooperative Head, attended an agricultural high school in Japan when the Pacific War was at its peak. It was his ambition to make his hometown village rich that enabled him to withstand the contempt and discrimination of the Japanese. Returning to his hometown in 1955, he immediately set out to research and investigate. He measured daily temperatures to identify annual temperature changes and repeated experiments to find out the right kinds of agricultural species and their farming methods for his village. The first fruit of those efforts was increasing barley production.

He also succeeded in cultivating various indigenous products utilizing the geographical characteristics of the village surrounded by mountains and sea. Even in the early 1970s when the SU movement was gradually picking up momentum on land, Dongjeong Village had already become a “well-living” village and was known as an exemplary example of the movement.

The Most Advance Saemaul (New Village) in Korea

In the early years, the villagers laughed at Park and called him a lunatic for planting the seedlings of 25 varieties of tangerines to test their cold tolerance. When they saw beautifully ripe tangerines growing on the trees, however, the villagers accepted him as a trustworthy leader of their village. He passed on tangerine seedlings and cultivation techniques to the villagers who then created a large-scale tangerine farm..

Not long ago, the villagers blamed the infertility of their soils. Their minds changed, however, as they watched their farming leader, unafraid of challenges, closely study the environmental traits of their village. Once they became aware of the importance of embracing challenges and taking action, they began to see the mountains, the fields and the sea surrounding their village as precious assets.

When a dock was built in Dongjeong Village over a two-year period, 10,000 villagers volunteered to move stones and raise a bank. An isolated power plant was built, supplying electricity to each home while water supply facilities using stream water were installed. Such Saemaul projects modernized an underdeveloped fishing village and brought its community closer together. The cooperative spirit of the villagers and the dedication of their leader Park Jong-An set an example for Saemaul projects in other villages throughout the nation.