Being a farmer in South Korea is definitely not a lucrative business and very dependent on subsidies according to this report:
I ask people around me how much money I earn from farming in Korea on average per year. It usually refers to about 30 million won to 60 million won. Maybe it’s because there’s an amount of money I heard from somewhere. That’s roughly correct, as farm household income averaged 46.1 million won in 2022.
However, among them, the actual agricultural income earned from farming is only 9.5 million won. It’s about a fifth. The rest are non-agricultural income (19.2 million won), transfer income (15.2 million won), and non-ordinary income (2.2 million won). In other words, money earned from business or government direct payments or subsidies accounts for 80% of farm income.
Maeil Kyeongchae
You can read more at the link.
As much as I don’t like Kim Jong-un I don’t think it is fair to blame him for a parasite epidemic when it wasn’t too long ago when South Koreans were doing the same thing and having the same problems:
The hermit nation’s leader issued an instruction to farmers in 2014 telling them to use human faeces with animal waste and organic compost on their fields. With a lack of livestock to provide animal fertilizer, agriculturists poured the human excrement, also known as “night soil”, on their fields.
Kim’s pronouncement further precipitated the falsehood in North Korea that human waste was the best fertilizer for crops despite the dangerous parasites and worms found within in it, Reuters reported.
The nutrition and widespread health problems that blight North Korea have been highlighted by one North Korean soldier who has recently defected to the south. The army sergeant was found to have dozens of flesh colored parasites in his digestive tract, one of which measured 10.6 inches in length. [Newsweek]
You can read the rest at the link, but I can remember about 20 years ago I was out near the Imjim River in South Korea during a military training exercise. From my Bradley Fight Vehicle we could see this old Korean woman in the distance walk into a rice paddy pull her pants down, squat, and take a dump right there in the field. And no she did not wipe afterwards. Seeing that made me laugh nearly as hard as when I was flashed by a Korean transvestite while driving in a HMMWV in Dongducheon.
Soldiers from the 35th Infantry Division help old farmers harvest onions at fields in Imsil, 300 kilometers south of Seoul, on June 28, 2016. Many rural areas in the country are suffering from severe labor shortages as youths there leave their hometowns to find jobs in cities. Imsil County provided this photo. (Yonhap)
In this photo provided by the Yangyang county government, farmer Kim Kwang-seop sprays agricultural pesticides by using a drone on his paddies in the eastern county on June 8, 2015. Kim said he has completed the work in just five minutes with the drone, compared with more than 20 minutes with manual labor. The utilization of drones is on a gradual increase in the country’s agricultural sector. (Yonhap)
Foreigners plants rice in a paddy at Changdeok Palace in Seoul on June 1, 2016. The event was arranged so they could experience a Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) ritual, in which kings plant rice to see how the annual rice farming fared. (Yonhap)
North Korean residents use machines to transplant rice seedlings for the first time this year at a collective farm, southwest of the country’s capital Pyongyang, in this photo released on May 13, 2016, by the Rodong Simmun, the organ of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
