Between the Forest and the Factory: Korea's Mushrooms Ask for a Law of Their Own

At the Yangyang auction on 4 October, 350 grams of first-grade pine mushroom sold for ₩1,711,700 a kilogram; four days earlier the top grade had fetched ₩1,623,700. The local press called each a record. The national tally suggests why. By the auction of 23 October the forestry cooperatives had sold 17,420 kilograms of pine mushroom this season, against 110,461 by the same date last year. By Ag Digest's arithmetic that is 15.8 percent of the volume, at nearly twice the average price per kilogram.

The fall was steepest in North Gyeongsang. Yeongdeok, the biggest seller in each of the past three seasons, sold 2,008 kilograms against 14,743 a year earlier and now ranks fourth. Cheongsong sold 221 against 6,597, and Bonghwa 111 against 3,354. In Gangwon, Yangyang was down about a third and Gangneung was up.

Pine mushroom is gathered, not grown. It lives on the roots of living pines, and the Forest Service, which looks after it, says the established method of starting it in a new forest takes eight years or more. Most mushrooms Koreans eat are the opposite: oyster, king oyster and enoki grown indoors on sawdust, rice bran and imported meals of cottonseed, soybean and corn germ. The agriculture ministry counts them as special crops: 152,671 tonnes from 2,053 farms in 2024.

Korean mushrooms have lived for decades between the forest and the farm, without a law of their own. Two bills before the National Assembly's agriculture committee would give them one; their texts describe a market of more than ₩1 trillion and domestic output of about ₩730 billion. The question this autumn is what an act can change, and what it cannot.

What the bills would change

The two bills overlap. Each tells the agriculture minister to draw up a basic plan, fund research and training, and set quality standards for substrate, the growing medium a mushroom feeds on. Each lets public catering favour local mushrooms: school meals in Kim Sun-kyo's bill, military units in Lee Byung-jin's. Kim's adds substrate testing for makers and importers, a ban on harmful substrate and the power to destroy contaminated batches.

Substrate is where growers feel the law most. Kim's bill opens by saying the Waste Control Act classes substrate, before and after harvest, as waste, loading farms with disposal costs; it also cites unclear origin labelling and farmland rules. Its articles, though, leave the definition of waste alone. Lee's changes it: spent substrate meeting the agriculture minister's harmful-substance standards would not count as waste, notwithstanding the Waste Control Act, and the state could help pay to turn it into compost, feed or fuel. Disposal costs about ₩200,000 a tonne, Korea Farmers & Fishermen Newspaper reported in January; we found no official figure.

Quality rules matter for an export crop. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked 36 Listeria infections in 17 states, in samples from November 2016 to December 2019, to enoki from one Korean company; four people died. Ambitions reach past the plate, too: Kim's bill cites vegan and alternative foods, and in September the Rural Development Administration agreed with Jangheung County's mushroom institute to industrialise mycelium packaging that could replace plastic foam.

None of this is new. The 2013 bill already said most substrate material was imported. Thirteen years on, growers make the same complaint.

What no law can grow back

Pine mushroom shows the limits of any bill. The March 2025 wildfires burned about 104,000 hectares across North and South Gyeongsang and Ulsan, by the Forest Service's provisional count, and Yeongdeok and Cheongsong became special recovery areas. Yet Yeongdeok sold 17,989 kilograms in the 2025 season, after the fire, more than the 15,931 of 2024. This year's collapse came with the summer; local reporting blames heat and drought that ran into autumn. The federation's tables record weights and prices, not causes.

Pine wilt is the slower threat. The Forest Service counted 1.77 million infected dead pines in 166 cities and counties in the year to May 2026, up from 1.49 million a year earlier and about 900,000 the year before that. There is no cure, and an infected tree dies.

The Forest Service's answer is in the soil. In April its research institute agreed with North Gyeongsang's forest research institute to mass-produce pine seedlings inoculated with the fungus for burned pine-mushroom hills, because the older method takes eight years or more from nursery to forest and few seedlings survive.

Field note: what to watch

• The subcommittee. Both bills sit there, and bills on one subject are often merged into a single committee bill.
• The word “waste”. Only Lee's bill exempts spent substrate. On our reading, that clause is where the environment ministry is likeliest to weigh in; the Waste Control Act is not the agriculture committee's law.
• Shiitake packs. The Forest Service promised variety labelling for shiitake this year.
• Next September's auctions. The federation posts daily sales by county; this year Gangwon held up and North Gyeongsang did not.

A law can define substrate, fund a plan and set a standard. It cannot put a living pine back on a burned hill. Can one act serve a crop grown in a room and a crop gathered under trees, or does Korea need to admit it has two mushroom industries?