Seeds Always Sprout: Kobori Natsuka, Vegetable Buyer

Kobori Natsuka is a vegetable buyer who's trusted by farmers all across Japan. She's unearthed value in overlooked varieties and put out a stream of hit products, including the now-popular Anno sweet potato. In Ishikawa Prefecture, she finds a 350-year-old heritage variety of burdock root once given to the shogun as tribute. In the winter of 2020, she set a sales target of 1 ton for an entirely new vegetable. But then the fields were hit by major snowfall. What action did Kobori take?