We couldn't start without land

After moving to Jeju, we hit a problem we hadn't expected: we didn't know how to start farming. You might think "can't you just start?", but once we tried, it was nothing like that.

A year of preparing to farm

We spent about a year preparing before moving to farm, filled with studying theory, visiting farms and preparing for financial support. At the time we'd taken 158 hours of agricultural training, and later took more than 400 hours. "Farming means there's always more to learn, no matter how much you learn."

Visiting farms across the country

Thinking training alone couldn't teach us the field, the two of us visited farms across the country. When we got in touch after reading articles about them, everyone gladly invited us over, and many senior farmers made time to show us around. Because of that memory, we still try to share as much as we can when younger farmers reach out to us.

The 2023 young successor farmer program

We submitted a business plan to the young successor farmer program (the government's settlement support program for young farmers). We thought we could start farming as soon as we moved to Jeju, but reality was different.

But we had no land

We learned that unless your parents farmed, land to farm doesn't just appear. We didn't know anyone in the village, and we couldn't just buy land on a whim. So we did what we could — we found day jobs on farms through Danggeun Market, like planting kabocha seedlings and harvesting radishes. Those were days of heading out at 4 a.m., riding in a van and repeating the same task all day. We also went to the agricultural technology center, but the answer was "without land, there's not really a way to start farming." Finally we went to the village office to meet the village head, but it was a busy season, and it took months before we could meet.

Looking back now — what we lived through then, that "without land you can't start anything," leads into the next story (We were handed an orchard with weeds up to our knees).