After Recovering Health, a Return to Farming and a Son's New Challenge

Kim Chang-geun has held to the principle that the basics of farming are the body and sincerity over the past 30 years. In farming, there are no shortcuts, so the body and sincerity are a farmer's greatest assets.

He has kept up rural life with the belief that you must work for 30 years to earn your meals. Every morning, he proves the fact that the land returns as much as the sweat you pour into it.

Peaches are a finicky fruit, since each tree ripens at its own pace. For each variety, the golden harvest window is only about two weeks.

If you don't pick them one by one at the right time, a full year's work comes to nothing. Constant focus is required to avoid missing the optimal harvest moment.

The excessive workload required repeatedly raising his arms, and he suffered a rotator cuff tear that required surgery.

When it comes to moving baskets of peaches weighing over 20 kg, the father recalls skillfully moving more than a hundred boxes, while the son says he finds it hard to handle more than 100 a day.

Even in the harvesting stage, the father quickly and accurately picks out the best peaches, while the son is still slow and unfamiliar, making the gap in skill stand out.

Kim Jun-seong worked for a Japanese farm-equipment company for about seven years before leaving after being diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and thyroid cancer.

He then returned home to recover his health and began helping with his father's farm, hoping to start a new life while healing in nature.

Jun-seong checks the sweetness of peaches with a refractometer, while his father Kim Chang-geun predicts sweetness just by looking at the color and the thread-like pattern on the skin.

Drawing on decades of experience, Kim Chang-geun shows the veteran's skill of picking out highly sweet peaches without any machine, passing on a farmer's seasoned instincts to his son.

In particular, he identified that auction prices for famous varieties are high in the central region's markets, where many young people live, and he outlined plans to actively target them.

He added that an influx of young people would also contribute to revitalizing the rural economy, with the effect of bringing life back to the cities.

By using these programs, he hopes to lay the groundwork for young farmers to settle down stably.

Kim Jun-seong, who is opening sales channels by supplying peach desserts to local cafés, recently unveiled a peach Greek yogurt and a thread-style shaved ice.

He envisions a win-win model that opens new sales channels by supplying peach desserts to local cafés and promotes consumption of local farm produce.

He personally demonstrated the peach Greek yogurt and thread-style shaved ice to show their market potential.

The father worried that his son would struggle with the physical work of farming, but the son said that he had to accept the work of farming.

Although there was conflict over differences in farming methods between the generations, they reconciled as the son came to understand each other's positions and accepted life as a farmer, showing the solid bond of the family.