"Managing 40,000 Strawberry Seedlings Remotely" Pocheon Strawberry Healing Farm CEO An Haeseong

[Sejong=Asia Economy Reporter Kim Hyunjung] "You need to approach it not simply as farming but as a ‘startup.’ The era of farming in rural areas just because there is nothing to do in the city is over."

Ahn Haesung, CEO of Strawberry Healing Farm, quit her job at a large corporation and moved to the countryside. She attended various agricultural education programs and received on-site training. She also visited a strawberry farm in Nonsan and learned strawberry cultivation through an apprenticeship system by working on the farm.

To secure funding for the ‘Pocheon Strawberry Healing Farm’ facilities, she actively utilized various contests and support programs for young farmers. As a result, CEO Ahn received several awards, including the Young Farmer Grand Prize at the Return-to-Farming and Return-to-Village Expo, and was selected as a beneficiary of support projects.

The ‘Pocheon Strawberry Healing Farm’ operated by CEO Ahn is a smart farm where fertilizer mixtures absorbed by crops, greenhouse environment, and pot height can be remotely controlled. Currently, she operates an advanced smart farm equipped with a 1,400-pyeong cloud-based ICT environment integrated control system that she personally designed and constructed. Since the winter of 2021, they have been actively exporting domestically grown Seolhyang strawberries, recognized for their excellent taste, to Macau, Hong Kong, and other markets.

A smart farm is a farm that integrates information and communication technology (ICT) into vinyl greenhouses, glass greenhouses, and livestock barns to remotely and automatically maintain and manage the optimal growth environment for crops and livestock. It accumulates data on crop growth information and creates the optimal growth environment based on this data, enabling routine farm management, except for harvesting, to be conducted remotely.

She is careful to ensure that even the disposal of a single piece of trash does not become an issue. She also runs a YouTube channel to share her experiences and difficulties preparing for farming with other return-to-farming individuals in similar situations, putting a lot of effort into this.

Due to the ICT-based nature of the smart farm, there is significant interest from young people in their 20s and 30s who are familiar with related technologies. CEO Ahn said, "I am proposing to the education office to use ICT-based facilities to provide coding education for students at the farm," and added, "We also plan to use the farm as a strawberry experience farm favored by tourists from Southeast Asia." She also explained, "We are preparing to develop a CO2 cube platform service for carbon neutrality," and "We plan to expand into carbon emission trading-related businesses in the future."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.