Continued…
Cutting corn is a critical activity. According to the source, a single ox can help many people
farm their own private pockets of land, and oxen are frequently rented out for the purpose. Rent an ox for a day and you can garner 10kg of corn from your own land. Not
only that; they can carry the load, too.
There is one more incentive for the ambitious farm manager.
That is, cow dung. One ox produces
enough fertilizer for around 40 pyeong
of individual plots. Cow dung is the property of the farm manager, and by taking
good care of the precious oxen, the land of the farm manager will thrive.
Horseshoes to protect ox hooves are crucial to all these processes. On each cooperative farm there is a blacksmith
whose role it is to produce tools for use by the work unit, and it is here that
the horseshoes are produced. However, “The iron to make them is not given out
by the state, so now you have to go out to the markets to buy it. The cost to
process horseshoes for one ox is the equivalent of 4kg of corn,” the source
said.
Unsurprisingly given their importance, when an ox gets sick the cooperative farm worries
greatly, and the farm management committee will immediately deploy a vet and animal
husbandry specialist trained in agricultural college. Until the 1980s there was
medicine distributed for animal husbandry and such, but since the 1990s this
kind of thing has been obtained privately.
Sometimes oxen do die, however. If an ox, which is state
property, dies then the news goes up to the cooperative farm management
committee, and can even reach as far as the provincial Party committee. Then
the provincial animal husbandry head has to come and confirm whether or not the
ox in question died of disease, or in some other way.
Oxen that die of contagious disease are immediately burned
on a woodpile as a health risk. However, if the cause of death involves trivial
disease, malnutrition or injury then they are sent to slaughter. The meat of
the dead cow is mostly consumed by members of the Chosun People’s Army and cadres at the provincial,
city and county level.
So how do the oxen themselves get distributed? If an ox dies
will another one be sent down? The
source said, “Since the 1990s, this has been dealt with between farms under the
pretext of ‘working under your own efforts’.”
Remote mountain farms have more feed for their oxen than
those who farm on the flat, and specimens breed better as a result. Therefore,
the sale of oxen by mountain farms to lowland farms has become the custom. When
an ox is traded between farms in this way it must be registered with the local management
committee on both sides. These days a single specimen has a market
value of around 200kg of rice. If an ox has to be bought on the open market, end-of-year profits for farm unit
workers drop considerably because the cost of the cow is taken from dividends.
It is estimated that the smuggling of oxen began in earnest
during the 1990s. “While a cow at a market in China would sell for a minimum of
10,000 yuan, the price of a North Korean cow from a Chinese smuggler is
2500-3500 yuan,” the source revealed. “This price differential leads to demand
for North Korean cows by Chinese farmers.”
It is in reality, of course, impossibly to smuggle a cow
without the assistance of the soldiers on border patrol. There have even been
instances of soldiers selling oxen to Chinese smugglers then following them
into China, stealing the oxen back and returning with them to North Korea.
