Episode 12: Tractor
"We now bring you today's weather forecast. Today will be mostly clear nationwide, but there will be a large daily temperature range. You should also take care against strong ultraviolet rays. Let's connect with our weather caster for a detailed look at the forecast."
I was eating breakfast while watching TV, and my eyes naturally drifted to the weather segment.
When I lived in the city, I only checked if rain was coming when the sky was overcast, or checked the fine dust concentration when the air looked hazy. But ever since I started farming, I've become much more sensitive to the weather.
Thinking back, I used to love rainy weekends in middle school. Father used to say that in the countryside, rainy days are rest days, so when it rained I would stay home all day watching TV.
I checked the weather and was about to clear the table when I got a call from Mandeok.
"Hey, Mandeok."
"Yeah, call me whatever you want from now on."
"Sorry. I'm all ready."
"Okay, I'm heading up to your paddy field now, so get ready and come out."
I hung up with a laugh. It seemed he had finally given up correcting me since I kept calling him Mandeok.
I had agreed to let him use my paddy field in exchange for him teaching me rice farming, and today I was going to learn how to use the rotary tiller.
I changed into work clothes, went outside, and put on my rubber boots, and soon after, Mandeok's tractor appeared with a deafening noise.
Vrooooom.
It rumbled past like a tank, and a butterfly—startled, perhaps—hid under the veranda.
Mandeok stopped the tractor in our yard, killed the engine, and climbed down.
"You're up early?"
"Since you said we'd start working in the morning, I woke up and was waiting."
"So, did you think about the sweet potatoes?"
Mandeok asked me about the sweet potatoes. After worrying over it for days, I had decided to plant them in the upper field.
"Yeah, I'm going to plant sweet potatoes in that upper field."
"Really? So you've decided to go all in on sweet potato farming?"
"Sangho-hyung, from what you've told me, sweet potatoes seem like a good crop. But I'm not joining the cooperative."
I had decided to do it because I wanted to eat sweet potatoes I grew with my own hands. But I had no intention of joining the cooperative that Sangho-hyung ran.
I didn't really plan to go large-scale with sweet potatoes to make money. I was just growing them because I wanted to.
But if I pointlessly joined the cooperative, I'd have to help others with their work and all sorts of stressful things would likely happen.
So I planned to maintain only my friendship with Sangho-hyung, learn sweet potato farming from him, and just farm on a small scale.
"If you don't join the cooperative, it'll be hard to find buyers, so selling sweet potatoes will be difficult..."
Mandeok said worriedly.
"I'm thinking of keeping some to eat and selling the rest by the field lot."
Field lot means selling field crops whole, just as they are. Last year, when Father suddenly passed away, I had sold the cabbages in our field by the field lot.
"You can't make any money selling by the field lot."
Because a middleman takes a cut, as Mandeok said, you can't make much. But it reduces the stress of retail selling, so it's perfect for me.
"It's fine. I have some money saved from my office job, so this year I'm going to try this and that to gain farming experience..."
"Come to think of it, you didn't take out a farming fund loan either? You must have saved up quite a bit?"
Mandeok asked, and the realization hit me.
My friend was borrowing other people's land and farming it to earn every penny he could, yet here I was planning to work half-heartedly. I probably came across like a selfish jerk.
"Ah, actually, I think Father had saved some money as a marriage fund for me. I don't want to rush into things carelessly and waste that precious money, so I'm trying to learn farming slowly."
"I see. Come to think of it, your father used to borrow paddy fields and dry fields from the village next to ours too. I guess he was saving up for your marriage fund."
It was the first time I had heard of this.
Actually, thinking back, it had been a bit strange. Father had paid all my college tuition and given me plenty of spending money until graduation.
But once I came down here, I saw that the amount of paddy fields and dry fields we owned wasn't enough to make money.
Probably, just as Mandeok said, he had farmed borrowed land to earn more money.
Having tried it myself, tending even a small vegetable patch wasn't easy. Growing that many crops, he must have suffered a lot alone.
Thinking that made me emotional for no reason, so I quickly changed the subject.
"What are you going to do? Are you farming sweet potatoes?"
"I think I'll have to pass this year too. To grow sweet potatoes you need land, but our house only has paddy fields. I'm going to save some money and try next year."
He seemed to have a lot on his mind too, but had apparently decided to aim for next year.
Well, having farmed rice all this time, suddenly switching to a different crop was harder than one might think.
Mandeok, finished worrying about sweet potatoes, began teaching me rice farming in earnest.
"I gave you a rough explanation last time, right?"
"Yeah. Make seedling beds, sow seeds, harrow the paddy, then transplant seedlings. That's it."
I had heard a rough explanation from Mandeok last time, but every evening I studied on my own online.
"Today I'll show you the dry paddy rotary tilling before we harrow."
Rotary tilling is breaking up the soil finely with the attachment on the back of the tractor. Mandeok said he does a total of three passes.
The first pass is plowing the hardened land after harvesting the rice or barley with a plow-rotary. The second pass is running the rotary again to break up the dry paddy more finely.
And finally, you fill the paddy with water and rotary till; this is usually called harrowing.
Harrowing levels the land before transplanting seedlings, and it's best done a few days before planting the rice.
Mandeok finished explaining and climbed onto his tractor.
"You come up too."
"Me too?"
As far as I knew tractors were single-seaters, but Mandeok sat in his seat and reached out his hand.
When I climbed up, there was a small auxiliary seat next to Mandeok's. It was cramped, but a person could definitely sit there.
"Oh, they have these too?"
"This is the full option package."
"Tractors have options?"
"Of course. I'll explain how the functions work one by one while I drive."
****
"It's not as hard as you thought, right?"
"Yeah, it's similar to driving."
"I'll show you harrowing next time."
"Got it. Thanks for today."
Mandeok, having shown me how to rotary till the paddy, rode his tractor down to the village.
I had thought it would be difficult, but broadly speaking it was similar to driving.
If I just mastered the machine operations and how to till the land, it didn't seem like it would be that hard.
But thinking it over, it wasn't so simple either.
Because we didn't have a tractor at home to practice with.
"Should I buy a tractor?"
Mandeok had tilled my vegetable patch last time too. Considering the sweet potato and rice farming I had ahead of me, I began to feel that a tractor was absolutely essential equipment.
I asked Mandeok roughly about the prices. He said cheap ones cost tens of millions of won, while expensive ones ran into the hundreds of millions.
I lay down on the veranda and took out my phone.
I opened the bank app and saw two accounts.
One was the account I had used as my salary account; it held money I had saved and money Father had saved.
The other account held my lottery winnings. It displayed a figure of 8.6 billion won.
"Even if I bought the most expensive tractor, I'd still have 8.5 billion left."
I had heard that when people win the lottery, many of them buy houses, cars, and buildings.
If I had won about a billion won, I might have bought a building too. Living comfortably off monthly rent didn't sound like a bad life.
But actually winning close to 10 billion in the lottery, that kind of thinking vanished.
After winning the lottery, I had calculated the bank deposit interest. Almost 150 million won is deposited as pure interest.
I used to think a yearly salary of 50 million won would be great when I was working. In an instant, I had become a man with a salary of 150 million won.
Moreover, this was pure profit that came in even after taxes.
Money came in without the complicated process of becoming a landlord, signing contracts with tenants, collecting rent, and paying taxes.
I had thought "money makes money" was just a rumor floating around the internet, but now it had become my future.
But looking at it calmly, I felt I should spend some of it.
Even if I spent 100 million a year, the money would still pile up.
If I lived another 50 years, I'd probably have to spend at least 200 million a year to use it all up before I died.
"Yeah, let's start by buying a car."
****
After lunch I went outside, and just as I had heard on the morning weather forecast, the sun's UV rays were beating down.
I went to the vegetable patch. In the scorching sunlight, the lettuce seemed to be spreading their leaves and screaming.
"Wait just a bit, I'll water you soon."
I got a hose from the well with the water pump and set it up to water the vegetable patch.
When I pressed the sprayer handle, cool water began gushing out, and I started spraying it slowly.
Water droplets formed on the leaves of lettuce, perilla, peppers, and tomatoes—crops that had looked wilted from the sunlight—and they immediately seemed to revive.
Shaaaaah.
Water droplets shot into the sky fell and struck the leaves, making a pleasant sound.
"It's just like ASMR."
In the city, I had suffered from insomnia and couldn't sleep well.
On those nights I would search for sleep-inducing music on YouTube; I especially liked the sound of dripping water.
Drip, drip, drip.
It was a video of water dripping from eaves. Taking medicine and listening to that sound, I could at least get some sleep.
I thought I wanted to record the sound of my watering.
I got my phone, pressed the record button, and started filming myself watering.
After going around the vegetable patch once, I checked; the sound wasn't as loud as I had expected.
It seemed I would need professional equipment for it to sound like ASMR, but I decided to be satisfied with this since I figured it would be fine with earphones.
While checking the video, suddenly a commotion began coming from above the house.
Curious about what was happening, I went up the road still wearing my rubber boots and saw a white sedan parked there.
Looking around, I saw people who had gotten out of the car walking up along the road. By the looks of them, they didn't seem to be from the village.
I started following them up the path.
They were three middle-aged women, walking quickly along the road.
"Did they come to sightsee in the mountains?"
If you go further up, the road ends and walking becomes difficult. On the other hand, the natural scenery is good, so I had heard that people occasionally come here for walks.
Since it was the weekend, I thought they might have come sightseeing. But suddenly the women changed direction and began walking into our field.
And they went straight across the field. Curious about who these women were entering someone else's field, I shouted.
"Excuse me!"