It was only 14 years ago that this wasteland was called the ‘wolf village’

In recent years, it was common to see people living in the city return to farming and fishing. As of 2017, the number of people who have settled in farming or fishing villages has exceeded 500,000. Interestingly, there is a village that had already succeeded in return-to-the-farm as early as the 1960s. It is a place called the “Return-to-the-farm Village” located in Hwasan-ri, Deoksan-myeon, Jincheon-gun, North Chungcheong Province, where 50 or so households left Seoul and settled down in 1961.

Originally, this place was known as the “Wolf Valley”, a wasteland where no one could live. City people who had never even held a hoe in their lives began reclaiming the land relying only on spades and mattocks. Putting one’s roots down in a farming village was as challenging back in those days as it is today, forcing countless people to give up and return to their city lives. Those who settled down in Hwasan-ri, however, persevered in the face of so many trials and errors for over a decade.

As a result, they succeeded in turning a wasteland covering 300,000 pyeong (1 million m2) into a farmland and rebuilt military tents used as temporary shelters into large tile-roofed houses. Not only that, they formed an independent village earning a stable income through vast orchards and mulberry fields, tobacco farming in greenhouses and breeding Korean cattle.

There was a government policy behind the creation of the Return-to-the-farm Village in Hwasan-ri. The Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, the highest national decision-making body at the time, carried out return-to-the-farm policies in 1961 as one of its national projects to provide relief for the unemployed in cities and to reclaim wastelands. Inviting some 1,300 households nationwide to return to farming, the Council allotted land in 24 regions and paid them wages for their reclamation work. /div>

In each day and age, however, different people did so for different reasons

From today’s standpoint, it is rather surprising that some chose to return to farming when industrialization was just beginning in Korea in the 1960s. Returning to farming, however, had existed much earlier in history, even in the Joseon dynasty. Of course, the meaning of return-to-the-farm in those days was quite different from that of today. At the time, the word “guinong (go back to farming)” was defined as “send a person back to engage in farming”, meaning that farmers who had been mobilized for public works or military training were temporarily sent back home.

There was even a policy of “guinongjeongsong,” according to which legal disputes were temporarily suspended during busy farming seasons and farmers were sent back home to work on the farms. Such policy was possible because it was a time when agriculture was the foundation of the whole nation.

During the Japanese colonial rule, return-to-the-farm was a “movement” in opposition to the exploitation and oppression of the Japanese. It was part of the peasant enlightenment activities whereby intellectuals returned to farming to help Korean people strengthen their capacity. Chae Young-Shin and Park Dong-Hyuk, two protagonists of Sim Hun’s novel “Sangnoksu”, were based on real-life characters at the time.

The idea of “return-to-the-farm” as we have today can be said to have begun in the 1960s. The return-to-the-farm village of Hwasan-ri is a perfect example. The Saemaul leaders training, income generation projects and living condition improvement projects were aimed at supporting the “Seoul chonnom (hillbillies)” to settle down.