The Bean Behind the Jang

Soybeans come in from Korean fields in autumn, and the old calendar says what happens next. “Women, the task you have left is making meju,” says a line in the eleventh-month verse of the Nongga wollyeongga, a nineteenth-century farming calendar in song: boil the beans soft, pound them, let the bricks ferment. In spring, the bricks go into brine; weeks later the liquid is drawn off as ganjang, soy sauce, and the solids are packed down as doenjang, soybean paste.

That sequence is now heritage twice over. Korea designated jang-making a National Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2018, and UNESCO inscribed it on its Representative List on December 3, 2024. The national heritage description lists the steps in order, and the first one is growing soybeans.

The beans in most jang are not grown in Korea. In 2024 the country’s jang makers used 61,652 tonnes of soybeans, and 8.1 percent were domestic, according to a survey for the agriculture ministry by aT, the state agro-food trade corporation. Meanwhile a payment meant to move rice paddies into soybeans has grown a domestic crop the market has not absorbed: by June 2026 the government had bought about 57,000 tonnes of the 156,000-tonne 2025 harvest. This feature follows the bean from the paddy to the jar using official statistics, statutes, and published reporting; it does not report a farm visit or an interview.

Where the beans come from

Korea once grew nearly all the soybeans it ate. The agriculture ministry’s food self-sufficiency rate for soybeans, which leaves out feed, was 92.3 percent in 1970, 28.2 percent in 2000, and 22.0 percent at its low in 2017. In the 2024 grain year, November 2023 to October 2024, it was 37.4 percent, provisionally: 141,000 tonnes of domestic beans against 378,000 tonnes of demand other than feed. The ministry’s 2022 food-security plan aims for 43.5 percent by 2027.

Imports fill the rest, through a gate in a high wall. Soybeans carry a bound tariff of 487 percent under the WTO, but quota volumes enter at 5 percent, and most food soybeans under the quota arrive by state trading through aT: 95,231 of the 130,613 tonnes imported from January to May 2026, the Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) reported. In the 2024 grain year Korea imported 1.2 million tonnes of soybeans, 292,000 tonnes for food and 909,000 tonnes classed as feed.

Price decides which bean a factory buys. On October 2, 2026, KAMIS quoted top-grade domestic white soybeans at 228,600 won for 40 kilograms at wholesale, and medium-grade imported white soybeans at 126,800 won for 35 kilograms: about 5,715 won and 3,623 won a kilogram, by Ag Digest’s arithmetic, for grades that are not the same. Across the whole food industry, 6.0 percent of the soybeans used in 2024 were domestic. For jang makers the figure was 8.1 percent, down from 17.7 percent a year earlier in the same sample survey, so one year should be read with care.

A label tells a buyer which bean is in the jar. Origin rules for processed food require the origin of the main ingredients, ranked by how much of each is used, so the soybeans in a doenjang normally carry an origin on the label. The difference is worth cheating for. In a 2021 crackdown, inspectors found 60 businesses breaking origin rules on meju and other soybean products; one had sold 30.6 tonnes of doenjang made from imported soybeans online as domestic, for about 650 million won.

Soybeans in the rice paddies

The domestic crop is being reshaped by rice. Since 2023 the strategic crop direct payment has paid farmers to grow other crops in paddy fields, to raise self-sufficiency and to take land out of surplus rice. Paddy soybeans earned 1 million won a hectare in 2023. From 2024 the rate was doubled to 2 million won and opened to all pulses, with another 1 million won when a winter crop such as wheat shares the field.

Farmers took it up. The area of pulses paid under the scheme rose from 18,600 hectares in 2023 to 24,300 in 2024 and 32,100 in 2025, and the ministry counted the summer crops on paid paddies as about 290,000 tonnes less rice. Paddy soybeans covered 26,242 hectares in 2025, more than a third of all soybean land, in the official figures KREI reports. Total output was 156,145 tonnes, up 0.8 percent on higher yields.

When the state is the buyer

A bigger crop did not find its own way into factories. In December 2025, citing the risk of oversupply as paddy soybean area grew, the ministry raised its reserve purchase of the 2025 crop to 60,000 tonnes. By June 2026 it had bought about 57,000 tonnes, KREI counted, and the beans left for the open market fell 20.5 percent. The domestic price for top-grade beans in June, 5,679 won a kilogram, was 1.4 percent below a year earlier.

Then the push eased. For 2026 the ministry limited payments for white soybeans, including sprouting beans, “where overproduction is a concern,” to farms paid for them the year before and to the same area. It added a payment for rice grown for supply control, which it said would lower the risk of further surpluses of soybeans and other crops. It plans to supply 65,000 tonnes of reserve soybeans this year, 21,000 tonnes of them to tofu and soy-milk makers to use alongside imported beans, and expects the sales to ease “the burden of government reserve stocks.” KREI expects soybean area to fall 7.3 percent in 2026, and paddy soybeans 14.3 percent, as fields return to rice and soybean profits fall.

One kind of bean ran short all the same. In July the government raised the low-tariff quota for sprouting soybeans from 17,450 to 27,450 tonnes, after the year’s quota was used up by the end of June.

Reading the jar

At the shelf, two words do most of the work. Hansik on the front says how a jang was made: from meju, the old way. The origin line on the back says where its soybeans grew. They are separate promises, and only the second one is about the field.

The open question for the next few years is who buys the Korean bean when the state buys less of it: food makers paid or persuaded to switch, households that still make their own jang, or nobody, in which case the paddies go back to rice. This autumn’s meju will be made with this year’s beans either way.