Coming soonSpecialty Crops
Sixty Days in the Wind
Korea's dried persimmons are made in late-autumn wind, not in the orchard: an astringent variety, a drying shed, and a winter that is getting wetter.
Credit: ally j, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Magazine
Original, visual features on Korean agriculture — regions, seasons, markets, and the people behind the harvest.
FeaturedPine mushrooms still come only from living pine forests, and this autumn's auctions sold a sixth of last year's volume. Most Korean mushrooms grow indoors on sawdust and bran, and the law calls what is left of that substrate waste. Two bills would give the industry an act of its own. What would it change?
Every autumn the hills around Gongju and Buyeo drop their burrs, and the nuts are sorted by size and sold to a co-op at a price the growers did not set. Behind every bag is a harvest about half what it was at the start of the century, orchards and growers that have aged together, and an export trade to Japan that has all but gone.
Every autumn wild ducks and swans fly south to Korea, and poultry farms go on alert. Behind each tray of eggs is a layer flock that has been culled and rebuilt before, a compensation rule that pays for caution, and a price the government watches week by week.
Sesame oil and perilla oil carry Korean flavour in a bottle. Korea imports about nine of every ten sesame seeds it uses and grows most of its perilla, and since 2025 a paddy payment has been trying to grow both.
Jeju's open-field tangerine harvest is starting. Every box that leaves the island has passed a rule about size and sugar, and that rule has been moving from the first to the second.
Korea’s heritage definition of jang-making begins with growing soybeans. Factory jang is made overwhelmingly from imported beans, and the payment that moved soybeans into rice paddies has left the government buying more than a third of the domestic crop.
A Korean distillery pays for grain, casks, and warehouse space years before it can sell a bottle. The public record shows a market that has cooled, inputs that are mostly imported, a climate producers say works fast, and a tax that grows with every year in the cask.
Korea's finest green tea is picked by hand in a few spring weeks, on southern slopes machines can barely work. Those slopes made Boseong and Hadong famous. Now that buyers abroad want powdered tea by the tonne, they are also the problem.
A ginseng root holds its field for up to six years, under shade and through every summer, and then the land cannot grow ginseng again for a decade or more. That is why Korea's ginseng farms keep moving, and why the industry is now trying to make them stay.
The next original features in our reporting queue.
Coming soonKorea's dried persimmons are made in late-autumn wind, not in the orchard: an astringent variety, a drying shed, and a winter that is getting wetter.
Credit: ally j, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons