Paek On is the manager of the Naejung Farm in Yomju County, North Phyongan Province.

The people in the farm call him “our deputy to the Supreme People’s Assembly” and “our manager.”

In his middle school days, he had a dream of becoming a teacher.

However, he enrolled at the then Sinuiju University of Agriculture, true to the request of his parents who did farming all their life.

After graduation, he was appointed to the county people’s committee. But he decided to go to his home village as desired by his parents.

With an ideal and dream to turn his village into a paradise good to live in, he worked assiduously.

In the course of this, he acquired rich farming experiences, and was promoted to a technical consultant of a workteam and then a staff member in charge of agricultural production at the then farm management board.

From January Juche 86 (1997), he has worked as chairman of the management board of the then Naejung Cooperative Farm.

An important duty for farming of the farm weighed on him. He spent most of his time on the fields all year round and put his energy into farming. But crop yields were the same as ever.

Based on the knowledge he had learned from farmers while working with them on the field, he has made painstaking efforts to find out scientific farming system and methods suited to the reality of his farm.

Though he was exhausted for his daily work of guiding the farming, he read the latest documents on farming in the evenings to find out advanced farming methods. And in the daytime he listened to the opinions of the farmers.

At last he succeeded in introducing a mud snail-based organic farming which made it possible to intensify the activity of the roots of rice and increase the organic contents of soil so as to exert favourable influence upon the growth of rice.

Many workteams of the farm competitively raised many mud snails scientifically and technically and released them in paddy fields.

It produced excellent results.

The effectiveness of rooting out weeds in paddy fields was over 98% and this led to markedly increased yields than before.

The farm has boosted per-hectare grain yields by breeding hundreds of thousands of mud snails every year, with the result that it won the first place in the nationwide estimation of high-yielding farms in 2017.

In appreciation of his faithful dedication to farming, true to his duty as a farmer responsible for the supply of grain to the country, the state put him forward as a Deputy to the Supreme People’s Assembly and awarded him the title of Labour Hero, and invited him to national conferences and other celebrations several times.

On the morning of New Year 2022, he had a souvenir photograph taken with the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un .

That day, he wrote in his diary as follows: “I’ll serve as manure and soil in cultivating this land all my life!”

Ko Chol Hwa