Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Coreæ, orate pro nobis.

Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Sunday, May 14, 2006

Something About Uljin
Yesterday, I posted about my visit to that county. I cannot get over how well maintained the land and villages were compared to the rest of rural Korea, including the surrounding counties, which all too often looks like a slum with plants. I'm not sure if the county's being the host of the Eco-Agriculture/Organic Food Expo Korea, 2005 has any relation to what I saw.

Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky wrote extensively on healthy farms in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, perhaps the most reactionary and radical book I've ever read. Here's a bit of what Mr. Berry says about healthy farms, from page 181:
    The health of a farm is as apparent to the eye as the health of a person. To look at a farm in full health gives the same complex pleasure as looking at a fully healthy person or animal. It will give the same impression of abounding life. What grows on it will be thriving. It will will seem to belong where it is; the form will be a considerate response to the nature of its place; it will not have the look of an abstract idea of a farm imposed upon an area somewhere or other. It will look cared for--groomed, so to speak--like a healthy person or animal; it will look lived in by people who care where they live. It will show no gullies or galls or other signs of erosion. The waterways and field edges and areas around buildings will be grassed, something that becomes more necessary the steeper the ground is.
That is precisely what I saw in Uljin. Most of the farms I saw there were either hillside farms or very small plots, unfarmable under "agribusiness" standards. If I had gone beyond my high school horticultural vocational training and realized my membership in Future Farmers of America, I might be in a position to evaluate in greater detail the farms that intrigued me so. However, I can say that they were thriving.