Eight years after North Korea built what it claims is the world’s largest grazing area on Sepo tableland in Kangwon province, there are indications the pastureland is being poorly managed and may be reverting to wilderness.
Supply shortages from the pandemic-related border closure and livestock die-offs during foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks have undermined management and created operational difficulties for the stockbreeding zone.
Analysis of vegetation index images taken by an American polar-orbiting satellite found that growth of pasture planted with a Chinese fodder crop was uneven and fluctuated severely in the eight years since the stockbreeding zone was completed.
In 2025, the vegetation index—which expresses pasture growth status—was lower than the previous year. Combined with foreign media reports, there are apparent signs of land degradation.
Sepo ranch is a large stockbreeding zone covering around 50,000 hectares across three counties—Sepo, Ichon, and Pyonggang—in Kangwon province. That’s 50 times the size of Samyang ranch, the largest single ranch in South Korea. North Korea raises and butchers cattle, pigs, and sheep on the ranch and also processes meat there.
The name “Sepo” derives from three kinds of bad weather often witnessed in the area: rain, snow, and strong winds. That has long made the area synonymous with forbidding climate. Nevertheless, North Korea turned it into a massive ranch.
Work began on Sepo ranch—regarded as one of Kim Jong Un’s hallmark initiatives—on Sept. 22, 2012, and the ranch was completed in late October 2017.
The stockbreeding ranch has more than just grazing areas and barns. There are also facilities to meet livestock nutritional needs through hay cultivation and processing and feed production. Other factories handle dairy production and meat processing. On-site facilities include a veterinary clinic, disease control office, breeding center, research institute, and management building.
North Korea originally intended to link the stockbreeding zone with Masikryong Ski Resort and Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area, both nearby, to turn this part of Kangwon province into a tourist complex designed to earn foreign currency.
This ambitious scheme ran into trouble when funding and foreign tourists evaporated because of international sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, most ranch facilities have apparently struggled to stay afloat.
Crisis point after disease outbreaks
Between 2021 and 2023, livestock died in droves during outbreaks of diseases like acute pneumonia and foot-and-mouth disease, and disease control efforts grew lax. As a result, Sepo ranch operations have apparently reached a crisis point. But the ranch cannot simply be abandoned because of nationwide propaganda campaigns about how it was envisioned by Kim Il Sung during the Korean War and fully realized by Kim Jong Un.
The operational status of pastureland at Sepo ranch was examined using images taken by American polar-orbiting satellite Suomi NPP. Vegetation index images called “eVIIRS NDVI” were downloaded from the EarthExplorer website of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for analysis. The images were taken in mid-August, when crop growth is most evident.
The highest value from 10 days of images (taken Aug. 11–20) was compiled and merged by eliminating anomalies caused by clouds and shadows. Then mid-August data for eight years since the ranch was completed in 2017 (from August 2018 to August 2025) was collected for analysis.
Analysis of pasture growth over the past eight years found that the average vegetation index fell from 0.84 in 2018 to 0.78 in 2019 and then further to 0.60 in 2020.
The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)—a figure that quantifies vegetation health and density—has a value ranging from -1 to 1. The higher the index value (typically used to assess crop vitality), the more vigorous and healthy the vegetation is assumed to be.
The vegetation index at Sepo ranch dropped to 0.60 in 2020 presumably because ranch operations declined as supplies dwindled following North Korea’s border closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While conditions seemed to improve subsequently, foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks during three consecutive years (2021–2023) appear to have caused fluctuations in vegetation index values. The index fell to 0.77 in 2023 before apparently rebounding to 0.89 in 2024. But in 2025, the index decreased modestly to 0.81.
While there are no reports of foot-and-mouth disease occurring in North Korea in 2025, there are signs the pastureland at Sepo ranch is growing desolate because of continuing poor management.
Signs of land degradation
For several years, Radio Free Asia (RFA) has raised concerns that Sepo ranch—which North Korea claims is the world’s largest grazing land—was devolving into a wilderness of weeds due to shoddy management. Since the pastureland was developed, weeds with strong pesticide resistance have taken root, suggesting the pastureland could eventually be entirely overrun.
There have also been reports that the ranch has struggled to provide feed for livestock because of troubled cultivation of an improved sugarcane variety brought from China that North Korea dubbed aegukpul (“patriotic grass”). This fodder crop is vulnerable to cold weather and droughts, so it needs to be cultivated in paddies normally reserved for rice.
Because of strong winds in the area, Sepo ranch is regarded as an inappropriate environment for aegukpul, which must be grown to at least two meters in height using high-density farming. The failure of this fodder cultivation has raised serious questions about the viability of ranch operations.
“In addition to strict cultivation requirements, another reason aegukpul was doomed to failure was that the harvest process was not mechanized and therefore required large numbers of workers. In the end, aegukpul is not the right fodder crop for conditions in North Korea,” RFA reported.
RFA added that aegukpul was avoided by other ranches because the fodder is not easy to maintain, store, or process.
Based on these foreign media reports and the satellite imagery analysis presented above, pasture growth and management at Sepo ranch were undermined by inappropriate choice of fodder crop and unforeseen issues including the pandemic and foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks, suggesting the ranch may revert to wilderness.
January 15, 2026 at 06:50PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)