From 2015 Young Pioneer Tours had adopted Chilgol Cooperative farm and held three farming volunteer programs. This program was initiated to both aid the farmers with a day’s work in the fields and to help raise funds for machinery maintenance, fertilizer and fuel.
A volunteer from our program assisting locals with transplanting rice
Chilgol farm is located in the far outskirts of Pyongyang. This farm is operated by over one hundred different Korean families capable of growing cabbage, rice, strawberries, plums, tobacco, sesame seeds, potatoes, corn, cucumbers and chilies.
On previous visits, we asked our guests to be prepared to get down and dirty with the farmers as we combined teamwork to complete the daily tasks such as transplanting rice by hand and other odd jobs around the field. This was the best possible way for foreigners to have an exclusive insight and experience with organic farming in North Korea.
We
had farmers from the US , Australia and Germany join us to lend the North
Koreans their experience but to also learn an old trade forgotten over the
decades, organic farming, which is a skill that the North Koreans are renowned
for. We also had an engineer from the former Soviet Union join and provide
assistance with upkeeping the tractors operating at the farm.
Everyone was welcomed to join our program whether that had experience or not.
The farmers family’s would prepare a local lunch for our group as we met the families who have been operating on this farm for generations.
All the money previously raised from this program was donated to the farmers making this a complete non-profit program.
We’ve currently put this program on hiatus as we are currently researching new ways to make this program even better.
