The Chestnut Hills: How Korea's Autumn Nut Lost Its Biggest Buyer

On 23 September, chestnut growers gathered at the Sagok co-operative's buying station in Gongju to protest. The co-op's board had set this year's purchase prices: ₩3,300 for the top grade, ₩2,600 for large, ₩1,900 for medium and ₩800 for small. The top grade had fetched ₩4,200 a year earlier, so this was a 22 percent cut. The growers, from the Sagok chestnut growers' group, the Gongju branch of the Korea Chestnut Growers Association and the city's farmers' association, asked for last year's price and a say in setting it. The co-op, which buys the nuts outright, said it had followed the prices of the nearby Jeongan and Buyeo co-ops, Korea Agricultural Policy Newspaper reported.

Gongju is the centre of Korean chestnut country. It grew 8,380 tonnes in 2024, nearly a quarter of the national harvest of 37,010 tonnes by Ag Digest's arithmetic, with Buyeo at 6,655 and Cheongyang at 4,649.

The argument at the buying station is about more than one autumn. Korea grew about 72,000 tonnes of chestnuts in 2002, 43,220 in 2022 and 37,010 in 2024. In 1990 it sold almost all its exports to Japan; last year Japan bought 31 tonnes. By weight, Korea now buys about three times as many chestnuts from abroad as it sells. With the old buyer gone, a grower's income is decided after the nut falls: at the sorting table, on the co-op's price list and by the stock left over from last year.

The buyer who left

For a decade and more Japan was almost the whole market. In 1990 it took 17,091 of the 17,356 tonnes Korea exported. In 1994, the best year in the records, it paid $131.1 million of $134.8 million.

Then the trade went quickly. Japan bought 11,489 tonnes in 2001 and 2,432 in 2004. KREI's researchers listed the causes that year: exports of peeled chestnuts to Japan were shrinking, frozen chestnuts from China were coming into Korea, and China, Korea's competitor in the world market, had been growing its harvest fast since the mid-1990s and had just joined the World Trade Organization.

Korea kept exporting for a while, mostly to China: 13,230 of 15,857 tonnes in 2005. That trade has shrunk as well. Last year Korea exported 3,188 tonnes of fresh and dried chestnuts worth $8.58 million. China took 2,868 tonnes in the shell, the United States 283 and Japan 31 tonnes of shelled nuts.

Gongju is looking for new buyers. The city says it sold more than 140 tonnes to five countries last year, and that sales to the United States rose from 2.6 tonnes in 2024 to 25, helped by a roasted-chestnut festival in American supermarkets, Korea Agricultural Policy Newspaper reported in July.

Meanwhile chestnuts come in. KREI's monthly tables add up to 11,253 tonnes imported in 2025, most of them frozen or prepared, against 3,528 tonnes exported, by Ag Digest's sum. In the first nine months of this year Korea exported $1.94 million of chestnuts and imported $27.71 million. KREI expects imports to keep rising because domestic processors want more frozen and prepared chestnuts.

This autumn's price

This year's harvest is not obviously small. The growers at Sagok expected drought and heat to cut it, and a Gongju forestry official told the newspaper he expected a smaller crop. KREI's sample survey in mid-September found otherwise in the centre: early-variety yields up 5.7 percent in Gongju and 4.3 percent in Buyeo, and up 3.0 percent nationally, with only the southern counties down, by 4.1 percent. It expects mid- and late-season varieties to be up as well. For how heat is redrawing Korea's fruit map, see The Orchard Moves North.

Prices fell anyway. KREI puts it down to last year's crop, about 39,000 tonnes and 5.9 percent more than in 2024, which left more chestnuts in store as sales slowed. In September the average wholesale price of good-grade chestnuts at Seoul's Garak market was ₩5,061 a kilogram, 17.1 percent below a year earlier. In the south, KREI reports, some growers did not harvest at all because the purchase price was too low.

On our reading, both sides at Sagok are describing the same squeeze. A co-op that buys outright carries last year's unsold stock into this year's price; a grower who sells to it carries the cut. The buyer that once took the surplus is gone.

Field note: what to watch this winter

• 4 December. KREI's next chestnut outlook, with its first estimate of this year's harvest.
• October and November exports. In 2025, 2,041 tonnes of fresh chestnuts left in October alone, more than in the other eleven months together.
• The co-op price. The Sagok growers want a seat where the purchase price is set; the co-op says it follows Jeongan and Buyeo.
• The expo. The governor wants it to win state support for replacing old trees, improving soil and training successors.

The question for the next decade is whether a crop that lost its export market can be priced by the people who grow it, or only by the stock in the store.