economy

This year, a lot of farms, workteams and sub-workteams have produced high yields by raising a strong wind of scientific farming in rural areas across the DPRK.

South Phyongan Province planted 80 percent of its paddy fields with nutrient cold-bed rice seedlings.

Having proven through last year’s farming that the cultivating of nutrient cold-bed rice seedlings is a superior method for high yielding which is highly profitable in many ways, officials of the province dynamically pushed ahead with it this year.

As a result, the province finished rice-transplanting qualitatively in the best season despite unfavourable weather conditions while saving a lot of labour and materials for making seedbeds.

A large number of farms, workteams, sub-workteams and farmers that became high-yielding ones in the province this year say in unison that their successes are unthinkable apart from the introduction of nutrient cold-bed rice seedlings.

All other regions of the country raised rice seedlings on a large scale in the greenhouses for growing rice seedlings to guarantee increased grain production from the stage of rice-transplanting.

Kangnam County built a double-slope inter-connected glass greenhouse covering over 4 600 square metres and arch-style vinyl greenhouses covering 1 400 square metres in a short span of time to put the growing of rice seedlings on a scientific, modern and IT basis, thus reducing seedbed area to 1/54 and labour force to 1/17 as compared to previously.

This year most of cities and counties across the country have introduced this method to increase the per-hectare paddy rice yields.

Several farms including the Tokjang Farm in Jongju City of North Phyongan Province have increased the grain output by introducing electrical pulse water treatment devices.

The farms benefited greatly from using the water treated with the devices, which reportedly helped hasten the growth period of paddy rice, markedly increase the number of productive tillers, prevent damage from blight and harmful insects and bring about good harvests unthinkable in the past.

Scientific farming methods resulted in high yields in wheat farming, too.

Mangyongdae District, Pyongyang, introduced the Korean-style new method of wheat transplanting, thus harvesting over 6 tons of wheat per hectare on average and overfulfilling its wheat production plan by 95 percent.

All the farms in the district were honoured with the title of high-yielding farm, the number of high-yielding workteams and sub-workteams increased 1.8 and 1.6 times respectively as compared with last year and that of high-yielding farmers nearly three times.

The groups for promoting scientific farming have intensified their activities.

In the first half of the year, members of the groups working in all parts of the country took a number of sci-tech measures to improve crop growth in wheat and barley fields so as to produce high yields and solved the sci-tech problems arising in sowing rice and maize seeds and manuring and cultivating them in a scientific way and in finishing rice-transplanting qualitatively in the right season.

Proactive efforts were made to produce high and stable yields by manuring and cultivating crops in the latter half of their growth and conducting the work to thoroughly cope with disastrous abnormal weather in a scientific way.

Members of the scientific farming promotion groups dispatched to South Hwanghae Province directed efforts to manuring and cultivating rice seedlings in a scientific way on the basis of the surveys of their growth and intensified sci-tech guidance to make sure that fertilizer was applied according to varieties, the types of rice seedlings and the number of bunches per phyong in keeping with their growth and weather conditions.

Those of similar groups sent to South Hamgyong Province conducted research to comprehensively find out the effect of treating wheat and barley seeds with the seed-coating material "Phungnyonmo-1" and phytosine, a bioactive substance, and the characteristics of seed cultivation technology and to properly distribute varieties for early-ripening crops farming next year and solved the sci-tech problems arising in introducing mud snail-based organic farming in large areas of paddy fields.