Combining a thousand-year tradition and technology... Hadong County leaps forward as the "Silicon Valley of K-tea"

(Hadong=Yonhap News) Reporter Park Jeong-heon = Hadong County in Gyeongnam Province is embarking on the "K-Tea industrialization" based on data and mechanization, inheriting the tradition of wild tea with a thousand-year history. The ambition is to become an "engine of the tea industry" that supplies key raw materials to the global beverage market, going beyond simple specialty product production. According to Hadong County on the 5th, the region currently has 1,600 farms producing approximately 1,260 tons of tea annually across an area of 729 hectares. To respond to the irregular weather changes of Jirisan, the county has recently introduced advanced smart monitoring and disaster prevention systems to the field. This goes beyond merely using machines to pick tea leaves, employing ultra-precise cultivation methods where sensors detect frost or drought in real-time and operate "smart frost fans" and "automatic irrigation devices." Tea leaves produced in this "Hadong-style smart ...