Bonghwa Mushroom School Trainees Benchmark Advanced Farms and Smart Farms

Field Trip to Chungbuk and Gyeongbuk Regions
"Fostering Professional Farmers, Enhancing Competitiveness in the Mushroom Industry"

Bonghwa-gun in Gyeongbuk has taken concrete steps to foster the local mushroom industry and cultivate professional agricultural experts.

Bonghwa Mushroom School Trainees Benchmark Advanced Farms and Smart Farms

Field trip to advanced farms outside the region for mushroom school trainees in Bonghwa-gun, Gyeongbuk.

On June 6, Bonghwa-gun announced that, as part of the "2025 Bonghwa Mushroom School" curriculum, it conducted a field trip on June 4 for 25 trainees to advanced farms outside the region, including Jeungpyeong and Eumseong in Chungbuk and Mungyeong in Gyeongbuk.

This field trip aimed to help trainees acquire medicinal mushroom cultivation techniques and enhance their field-oriented problem-solving skills. For the first stop, the trainees visited Jeongui Farm in Jeungpyeong-gun, Chungbuk, where they toured a sanghwang mushroom cultivation site with annual sales of 100 million won and listened to an explanation from CEO Bae Myungin about cultivation techniques and commercialization strategies.

Sanghwang mushrooms are high-value-added medicinal mushrooms that parasitize mulberry or oak trees. They are known as a precious medicinal material, sometimes called "bullocho," and are recorded in the Donguibogam as "Sangmok-i (桑木耳)." With their outstanding anticancer properties, they have recently attracted attention in the health food market.

Next, the trainees visited the Ginseng and Special Crops Division of the National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science in Eumseong-gun, Chungbuk, where they toured an oyster mushroom smart farm model experimental facility.

This model, developed by the Rural Development Administration, uses information and communication technology (ICT) to automatically control temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration inside the cultivation facility. Actual application in farms has shown an average increase of 25% in both yield and income.

Finally, the trainees visited the Gaeun Shiitake Mushroom Farm in Mungyeong-si, Gyeongbuk, where they observed a shiitake mushroom cultivation facility using sawdust substrates. Compared to the traditional oak log cultivation method, this approach offers significant advantages in space efficiency and labor reduction, and enables year-round production. As a result, many farms have recently been adopting this method.

Jang Youngsook, head of the Agricultural Technology Division of Bonghwa-gun, stated, "Through this benchmarking activity, trainees were able to experience the latest technologies and successful cases firsthand, which provided substantial learning benefits. In the future, we plan to continue expanding educational programs to foster elite mushroom farmers, in connection with the Medicinal Mushroom Spawn Center."