High Times Profiles Edun's Korean Natural Farming Grow in Colorado

What High Times published, and what we could verify

High Times Magazine published a profile on Oct. 9, 2026 linking a Colorado operation called Edun to Korean Natural Farming and living-soil cultivation. The piece is titled "Inside Edun: Korean Natural Farming and Living Soil Cannabis in Colorado."

Here's our methodology disclosure, because a reviews desk owes you one. Test rig: none. Sample size: one document, and we saw only its headline, date and outlet metadata in a syndicated feed. We didn't visit the facility, haven't seen a certificate of analysis, and ran no soil assays. No controls, no comparison grow.

That makes this a map of the claim, not a review of the flower. The headline doesn't give Edun's canopy size, genetics, ownership or yields, so we won't guess at them.

What Korean Natural Farming and living soil mean in practice

Korean Natural Farming, developed by Cho Han-kyu, builds fertility from homemade fermented and microbial inputs, and it pairs naturally with no-till living soil. The standard toolkit includes indigenous microorganisms (IMO) collected from local ground, fermented plant juice, fish amino acid, lactic acid bacteria serum and oriental herbal nutrient. Those are the method's general components. We haven't seen Edun's specific recipe.

Living soil is the other half. Growers reuse beds across cycles, amend with compost and cover crops, and rely on microbial communities, including mycorrhizae, to cycle nutrients instead of feeding the plant bottled salts. The pitch is lower input spend and less runoff. Growers often say it also brings richer terpene expression, including compounds like myrcene.

That last claim is the shakiest. It's common in grower circles, and we treat it as a hypothesis until someone publishes matched-batch lab data.

A living-soil claim is only as strong as the paperwork behind it: input logs, soil assays and lab results across more than one harvest.

Not yet. That's where the evidence stands for most craft cultivation claims, Edun's included, at least from what we can see.

Why Colorado is a fair test, and what to ask Edun

Colorado's mature, Marijuana Enforcement Division-regulated market, open to adult-use sales since 2014, rewards operators who can cut costs without losing potency, which makes input claims testable. After more than a decade of competition, a grower can't hide behind novelty for long. Section 280E, wherever it still applies, limits deductions for plant-touching businesses to cost of goods sold, so every dollar of input savings counts twice.

So the questions are concrete. What does per-gram input cost look like against a conventional salt-based run? What are THCA and total terpene numbers on batch-level COAs across several harvests, not one showpiece cycle? How does the operation manage pathogen pressure when beds are reused, and how does it handle compliance testing on a fermented-input program?

Marketing a grow method is easy. Proving it takes spreadsheets. If Edun can publish that data, the profile becomes a case study instead of a brand story.

For full background on the method and its evidence base, see the CannIntel topic hub on living soil cannabis cultivation.

Verdict: an interesting method with an unverified result. The next signal to watch is whether Edun releases batch-level COAs and input-cost figures from its next harvest, and whether other Colorado growers publish side-by-side comparisons.