Day 1 in Korea

March 13, 2010

The I-LEAD class’s ag adventure is in Korea underway, and we saw many slices of life Seoul on day 1:

1. Did you know:

* South Korea has lots of people and not much land. With 38,502 square miles, South Korea is slightly larger than Indiana.

* Cultivated land comprises 17% of South Korea’s land.

* The population of Seoul is 10 million.

* South Korea’s population density is the 3rd largest in the world. South Korea’s population density is 1,269 people per square mile. Seoul’s is 44, 776 people per square mile. Compare this to Iowa, at 52.4 people per square mile, on average.

* Our first stop: the Agricultural Exhibition Hall. This impressive museum tells the story through the eyes of the Korea’s Rural Development Agency. The Hall covered everything from high-density fruit culture to natural antibiotics for livestock from bee venom to chemical fertilizer reduction technology.

* Next we headed to the Korean Folk Village, which features historic homes (complete with thatched roofs) that showed how the Korean people used to live years ago. We also had an authentic Korean lunch here, and most of us were succesfulwith our chopsticks!

* The final stop of the day took us to a beef cattle farm about 2 hours from Seoul. We saw how DDGs were used in the ration and learned that this farm has carved out a niche with total mixed rations (TMR), even selling TMRs to other beef cattle producers. We calculated that each animal was worth $8,500 each.

On the way home, we also got to experience the amazing spectacle of a South Korean traffic–makes rural Iowa look even better!