SPOTLIGHT 26/07/21 Korea's eco-friendly Catholic farmers battle climate crisis

[성기화 요셉]

A demographic decline has made labor an urgent issue like the weather for rural farming communities

South Korean Catholic farmer Rose Choi Seong-sun is seen on her farm in Uijeongbu city in South Korea's Gyeonggi province. (Photo: Catholic Times of Korea)

By UCA News reporter

Published: July 21, 2026 07:14 AM GMT

Updated: July 21, 2026 07:15 AM GMT

Each morning, Rose Choi Seong-sun rises at five, works her fields until noon, then takes a rest to avoid the extreme midday heat before returning to tend her crops at around 4:00 pm.

The routine may sound ordinary for a farmer, but for Choi, it has become a strategy for surviving a climate that feels increasingly hostile.

“It's not like it was ten years ago,” said Choi, 63, who has run Antre Farm at Yeoncheon in South Korea's Gyeonggi province for 39 years.

“The ultraviolet rays have only gotten so strong in the last two or three years. The sun isn't just hot; it stings. It feels like my skin is burning,” she said.

Even at dawn, she said, the temperature often feels well above 25 degrees Celsius.

“When tropical nights continue, the heat built up overnight lingers until morning,” she said.

Choi's experience reflects a wider anxiety in rural parts of South Korea. A 2024 survey by the Korea Rural Economic Institute found that farmers across the country cited extreme weather events and changing cultivation conditions caused by climate change as the greatest threat to their livelihoods.

On Choi's farm, those changes show up in small, unsettling ways. Mini pumpkins that should grow to the size of an adult's fist are now reaching the size of a child's face. Butternut squash that once reliably bore fruit from spring to autumn now follow schedules she can no longer predict.

“It has become difficult to gauge how long they will continue to bear fruit,” she said.

Such unpredictability reduces marketability and erodes income, even when yields appear healthy on the surface.

After nearly four decades of farming, experience that once served as a reliable guide now offers diminishing assurance.

A mission that outlasts the difficulties

Choi cultivates roughly 20 types of vegetables — including chili peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, cabbage, lettuce and radishes — across about 3,000 pyeong (9,917 square meters) of farmland.

Ten years ago, after joining the Catholic Farmers' Association, she gave up pesticides entirely. Founded in 1994, the association promotes eco-friendly farming practices among Catholic farmers.

The decision made an already demanding occupation considerably harder. Without herbicides, weeds must be pulled by hand. Without pesticides, insects must be caught one by one. As temperatures rise and humidity increases, both spread faster.

“Of course, I've wanted to return to traditional farming methods,” she admitted.

“However, there needs to be people practicing pesticide-free and eco-friendly agriculture to supply the consumers who want it. I am continuing with this sense of mission.”

Her produce reaches consumers through the local food section of a nearby Hanaro Mart, contracted vendors, the Nanumteo living community of the diocese's Rural Revitalization Movement Headquarters, and the Myeongdong Boreumjang direct sales market in Seoul.

On July 19, a special farmers' market was held there to mark Farmers' Sunday, celebrated in Korea on the third Sunday of July.

Filling gaps in rural communities 

The market channels that keep Choi's farm connected to consumers also point to a deeper strain in rural communities.

Climate is not the only pressure farms like Choi’s endure. In the surrounding villages, most farmers are in their seventies and eighties. At 63, Choi is considered young by local standards.

That demographic decline has made labor an urgent issue like the weather. Decades of rural depopulation and aging have turned foreign seasonal workers from a supplement into a necessity.

According to the latest official data, the nation’s farming population stands at roughly 2 million people or 974,000 households in an estimated population of 51.6 million. About 55 percent of the farming population is aged 65 and older.

At Antre Farm, that shift is visible in the people working the fields. Workers from Vietnam and Nepal now fill roles the local community can no longer supply.

A Vietnamese worker identified only as Yang has started working this year. Wearing a battery-powered fan vest, he cuts grass with a sickle through the summer heat, under a sky that Choi says has grown harsher with each passing season.

Seen from her fields, the crisis of farming is therefore not hers alone to carry.

Choi called on consumers to choose domestic, eco-friendly produce even if it means spending slightly less on other items — a quiet argument that the relationship between urban consumers and rural farmers carries moral weight.

Church must remember farmers

That appeal also resonated beyond the farm. Father Joseph Park In-soo, head of the Uijeongbu Diocese Rural Revitalization Movement, echoed it as the Church marked its 31st Farmers' Sunday.

“Farmers gain great strength and comfort in gatherings where urban consumers visit farms to help with work, listen to the farmers' difficulties, and share meals,” he said.

He hopes “the Church remembers farmers and expresses the sentiment that ‘we are with them.’”

“If we reflect on the fact that the meals we have every day comes from the sweat of farmers and the land of life, we will naturally come to realize the severity of the climate crisis and the preciousness of agriculture,” the priest said.

For Choi, such words return to the practical rhythm of the farm. The fields will be waiting again at five tomorrow morning — and the morning after that.

She is firm in continuing the standards of her farm.

“I will not sell anything I wouldn’t eat myself,” she said.

*This feature is brought to you in partnership with Catholic Times of Korea