On the 23rd of last month, Kim Jong-jin, head of the farming machinery training team at the Rural Development Administration, recalled the moment he was first deployed to the restoration site in April.
The large forest fire, deemed 'the worst ever,' which began at the end of March, devastated 100,000 hectares of land in Gyeongbuk. This is 1.6 times the area of Seoul. Over 3,400 people were displaced, and 27 lost their lives. The farms and orchards that were left in ruins were so desolate that even the term 'restarting farming' felt unfamiliar.
On the ridges surrounding Danchon-myeon, trees stripped of their leaves stood starkly like thorns. At the edge of the fields, five plowing tractors melted in the fire were tangled together, and blackened fertilizer bags lay scattered on the ground like ashes. However, in the midst of this, the furrows were neatly aligned, and pepper seedlings were growing at regular intervals on the ridges.
"When we tilled the fields and made the furrows, the farmers' faces changed. From that moment, we felt that farming had begun again." As the recovery team, gathered from across the country, started to break the ground and operate the machines, vitality began to return to the once stagnant fields.
◇ 188 'Avengers' lay the groundwork for 222 farms to resume livelihoods
In four regions designated as special disaster areas due to the forest fire, including Andong, Uiseong, Cheongsong, and Yeongyang, 'Agricultural Machinery Avengers' gathered from across the country initiated restoration work. Their official name is the 'Agricultural Machinery Emergency Recovery Team,' but they earned the nickname 'Avengers' on-site for swiftly being deployed and cultivating the barren fields like superheroes from a movie.
The site saw the deployment of 188 safety experts from the Rural Development Administration and various provincial agricultural technology institutes and city-county agricultural technology centers, along with a total of 162 pieces of equipment, including tractors, cultivators, rotary tillers, and mulchers. The scope of work covered 222 farms across five city-counties, 484 plots, totaling 117.6 hectares. Additionally, 54 machinery repairs were carried out.
Support continued from April 7 to 25. Agricultural work was conducted in the order of tilling the fields, forming ridges, covering them with plastic, and planting pepper seedlings. Work focused on Andong and Yeongyang for three days each, on Cheongsong for four days, and on Uiseong for five days. An average of 30 to 40 professionals stayed on-site daily to handle tasks such as preparing the fields for pepper planting, logging, crushing, and repairing agricultural machinery.
Ryu Si-guk (63), the village head of Gukye-ri, said, “We have to plant the peppers by the end of April or the beginning of May, and they came just in time to help us,” adding, “It wasn’t about the variety of seedlings; the urgent thing was to get them planted. If it weren't for those who helped, I would have given up on farming this year.”
The pepper seedlings spread across the fields varied in height, and the spacing of the rows and shape of the ridges differed from farm to farm. The seedlings were urgently procured from Hapcheon in Gyeongnam. Village head Ryu noted, “They are Hapcheon seedlings, and although they are small, the peppers are already bearing fruit. What’s important is that they were planted.” This area primarily cultivates peppers, which require relatively less effort due to the high average age of the farmers.
Some farmers requested modifications to the furrow spacing or ridge shapes several times, and the recovery team adjusted each time. Lee Cheong-hee, head of the agricultural machinery team at the Gyeongsangbuk-do Agricultural Technology Institute, said, “I’ve even had to redo the work up to five times. There are many elderly farmers, so we had to meet their requests as much as possible.”
The recovery team is rooted in the 'Agricultural Machinery Emergency Recovery Team' established during the forest fire damage in Gangwon Province in 2019. Since then, they have been deployed to restoration sites whenever natural disasters occur, including flooding in Geumsan and Namwon in Jeollanam-do (2020), a forest fire in Uljin, Gyeongbuk (2022), and flooding in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do (2024).
In response to this Gyeongbuk forest fire, a 'provincial mobile team' structure was established, allocating specialized personnel and consolidating equipment at each provincial level. The Rural Development Administration shared equipment operating methods and regional crop characteristics through pre-assembly training and dispatched repair support teams to prepare for potential equipment breakdowns during recovery.
◇ Seeding that took 13 hours finished in 2 hours… a transformed recovery site through mechanization
This recovery operation was also the first field demonstration stage for the agricultural machinery developed by the Rural Development Administration. Previously, seedlings had to be planted by hand one by one, but this time, a combined seeder for peppers and cabbages and a soil-lifting mulching machine were deployed.
The seeder is a machine that automatically plants delicate seedlings without damage. Previously, planting peppers took 12.8 hours for 10 ares (1,000㎡) and 13.9 hours for cabbages; now it has been reduced to under 2 hours, saving labor by 6 to 7 times.
The soil-lifting mulching machine creates furrows, installs irrigation hoses, and simultaneously handles a process known as 'mulching,' where plastic is laid over the fields. Mulching is the process of covering the fields with plastic to suppress weed growth and prevent moisture evaporation.
The Rural Development Administration plans to expand the field demonstrations and workshops for these machines, focusing on pepper and cabbage major production areas this year, along with the distribution of related materials such as seedling trays to promote the use of the seeder. Jo Yong-bin, head of the Department of Agricultural Engineering at the Rural Development Administration, said, "Mechanization is a key strategy for maintaining sustainability, beyond just addressing labor shortages in rural areas," and added, "It's necessary to transition to an integrated package combining technology, personnel, and cultivation systems, rather than simply distributing equipment."
The Rural Development Administration provided 1.17 million pepper seedlings, along with 21 tons of seeds for crops such as rice, beans, sesame, and millet, free of charge to the areas affected by the Gyeongbuk forest fire and is also reviewing support for fruit tree seedlings. Kwon Jae-han, head of the Rural Development Administration, stated, "Creating conditions for farmers to focus on farming again is the role of the Rural Development Administration," and affirmed, "We will continue to enhance the support system so that technology, equipment, and specialized personnel can move quickly in the field."