A gift from Korea Sam Kang was a rail traffic controller when he first came to Canada, but farming cabbage and producing kimchi have him and his wife, Grace, on the right track today. Peter Kuitenbrouwer, National Post Published: Monday, April 17, 2006 ANSNORVELDT, King Township - Sam Kang is standing in a big chilled room on his farm, next to where crates of Korean cabbage, grown in Florida, are stacked 10-high along a wall. It is here that Sam and Grace Kang, and a staff of five part-timers, produce a condiment that has turned the Kangs from struggling farmers into successful businesspeople: kimchi. It is hard work. "To make kimchi," Mr. Kang says, "is not easy to do." Kimchi is a pickled cabbage dish that Ben Chin, the television personality who now works for Premier Dalton McGuinty, describes as, "a skanky sauerkraut with cayenne and garlic and ginger and tons of tabasco sauce." The average Korean eats about 20 kilograms of kimchi per year. Outside the Korean community, kimchi -- incredibly spicy -- is a bit of an acquired taste. Still, kimchi's popularity is growing around the world. Koreans believe kimchi explains why severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), while ravishing China and Hong Kong, skipped their country entirely. "Many wonder what is keeping SARS from taking over Korea," the Seoul Times wrote in an article published on April 13. "And kimchi could be an answer." Kimchi is big business; last year Korea exported $90-million worth of the stuff. Increasingly, Koreans in Canada are eating local kimchi, much of it from Mr. Kang's Kimchi Canada Farm, about 60 kilometres northwest of Toronto near Newmarket. Mr. Kang, who grew up in Korea, said he first noticed Canada while poring over flight maps while training with the U.S. Air Force. "Canada looks like a very interesting country because it has lots of land," Mr. Kang explains. Mr. Kang immigrated to Canada in 1968 at age 29, hoping to land a job as an air traffic controller. Owing to his lack of French, he became a train traffic controller for Canadian National Railways, a job he held for 15 years. It was stressful work, he says. "On a wet day or a snowy day the engineer can't see five metres. I got problems with my stomach. That job is a very nervous job." In the meantime, he and his brother, Shinhack, began looking for land. They settled on the Holland Marsh. About 100 years ago, farmers from Holland moved to this flat, swampy area at the south end of Lake Simcoe and began hacking at the bush to clear it, using axes, picks and saws. Long before earth moving equipment, they dug the Holland Canal around the circumference of the swamp to drain the excess water from the soil. The result is some of Ontario's richest farmland, source for most of the province's onions and carrots. "One hundred years ago they didn't have any bulldozers," Mr. Kang says. "All they had was axes and shovels. As an immigrant, I think about who they were, and what they did. It's top-class farm land." The Kangs bought this 35-acre farm in 1974 and discovered they could not make money growing vegetables. They struck gold, as it were, in 1983, when they began to make kimchi. "Farming itself doesn't make money," Mr. Kang says, in the chilled room where Korean-Canadian women sit bent over big steel bowls, chopping the stems off horseradish plants. "Processing makes money." 1 2 next page