Kim Jong Un, president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, visited the farm machine exhibition Farm Machine Industry Development-2023 last January, which was the beginning of his field guidance in 2024.
On display at the venue of the exhibition were over hundreds of kinds of farm machines including tractors, rice-seedling transplanters, unmanned helicopters for agriculture, wheat and barley planters and mobile combined maize threshers, which the Agricultural Commission and relevant fields designed and manufactured in cooperation.
Noting that to bring about a radical improvement in the farm machine industry sector at present is an important guarantee for implementing the programme for the rural revolution in the new era, Kim Jong Un clarified the tasks for correctly formulating the strategy for developing farm machines and accelerating the modernization of the sector and the creation of its production capacity.
The ruling Workers’ Party of Korea had already set decisively increasing the country’s agricultural output as one of the main goals in 2022, which would open a prelude to a new victory and a new era of the rural revolution, and ensured that South Hwanghae Province, a major granary of the country, stood in the vanguard of the struggle.
To this end, the state sent 5 500 farm machines including newly-manufactured mobile combined rice threshers, small-size rice harvesters, combined maize threshers and combined soil preparation machines to the farms in the province in September 2022, thus providing a guarantee for consolidating the material and technical foundations of the rural areas and radically increasing agricultural production in the province.
The Seventh Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK held in 2023 stressed that the machine-building sector and agricultural sector should produce in large numbers the new, high-performance farm machines which are most urgent and effective in making agricultural production modern and progressive and send them to the countryside, and continuously push ahead with the work for renovating the farm machine sector.
In September last year tens of thousands of mobile rice and maize threshers, wheat and barley planters and other efficient farm machines were supplied to the farms in various parts of the country, and the agricultural sector overfulfilled its grain production plan for the year.
Looking round the exhibition, Kim Jong Un said that it is most important to make a correct assessment of the existing technical capability for building farm machines and, on this basis, work out a scientific long-term development plan with the view that quality is more important than quantity in attaining the goal of mechanization of agricultural work set forth by the programme for the rural revolution in the new era.
His first field guidance in 2024 serves as an important occasion in correctly defining the orientation of development of the country’s farm machine industry.