🇰🇷 The cattle breeds of South Korea

Cattle hold a modest place in South Korean farming, a sector where rice dominates and two thirds of the land is mountain or hill. Beef and milk are their main products, and most of the beef the country eats is imported. No land is kept purely for pasture, so the animals share small mixed farms.

• In 1957 no land in South Korea was used purely as livestock pasture.
• Over 60% of the beef eaten in the country is imported.
• About 20% of the milk comes from abroad.
• Only about 22% of South Korea's land can be farmed.
• An agricultural college at Suwon ran an animal-care station from around 1920.

Cattle in South Korea

South Korean farming is built around rice, grown on small family holdings in a land where two thirds of the terrain is mountain or hill and only about a fifth can be ploughed. Within that system cattle are a minor thread. The country keeps no open rangeland: in 1957 not a patch of farmland was put down purely to grazing, so cattle fit into mixed holdings alongside rice paddies and vegetable plots. Beef and milk are the products asked of them, yet both fall well short of home demand, and imports fill the gap. Farming as a whole has shrunk to a sliver of the economy as cities and factories have grown, and the people left working the land are fewer and older each year.

Milk, butter and beef

The products tied to cattle in South Korea are beef and milk, and neither meets home demand. Over three fifths of the beef eaten is brought in from abroad, and about a fifth of the milk. Fish and shellfish share that reliance on imports, while rice and potatoes are largely grown at home and eggs and sugar are the only foods the country fully supplies itself. Beyond these staples, some 85% of foodstuffs come from overseas, a very low rate of feeding itself.

Today

Cattle farming sits inside a sector that has shrunk fast. Agriculture's slice of the economy was down to 2.9% by 2005, and farm workers fell from half the population in 1970 to 7% in 2008, an ageing workforce on small plots. Beef especially must be imported, and milk partly so, since so little of the land can be farmed.