Makapala, North Kohala, Hawaiʻi Island · October 19–21, 2017
Three days in a Makapala hall with Master Cho Han-kyu: when to feed a crop, what to feed it, and why. All seven recorded sessions are here as they happened. His Korean is translated again and checked, so you can read what he said, not only what the room heard.
4 talks on “corn”
From the Korean saying 'a good field bears healthy children', Cho moves to pregnancy and morning sickness as his picture of a body asking for what it needs. Then he turns it on the farm: pigs, cows, chickens, papaya, mango and tomato have their own morning sickness and cycles, and corn bears its ears for its own young, not for us.
Found Korean saying: the field has to be good to bear healthy children.
Cho draws the deep planting hole JICA used in Tanzania, 60 to 70 cm with fertilizer at the bottom, the way Hawaiʻi is told to plant fruit trees, and shows four ways it kills the tree. His way: no water, five lumps of charcoal on top and IMO4 over them. Then raising seedlings in poor soil before rich, and the Kona lava field he turned to 3 cm of soil in six months with charcoal, IMO4, corn and the Type 2 feed. The session ends with a cheer and dinner.
Cho's results slides: conventional rice at harvest looks like orphanage children, natural-farming rice like children raised by both parents; the same seed gives 180–240 grains a panicle against 80–140, about 30% more yield at a 50% better price. Then the stories behind the photos (cooked rice, Amore cosmetics, a melon farmer caught using agrochemicals, Ehime lemon leaves at $1 each) and crops fed at each 'morning sickness': pepper, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, corn and strawberries. Lunch follows.
The livestock section starts. Cho shows his self-ventilating pen and skylit chicken house, then raises chicks: brown rice first, the 3-day yolk, egg yolk with bamboo leaves, then greens like a cow. Green corn chopped and fermented with IMO4, LAB and grape yeast becomes feed; his feed-plot arithmetic gets checked by the room. He ends on the layer house: openings at 36 cm, sun across the floor once a day, and a rice-straw floor with no flies and no smell.
Found Sun on a sheet-iron roof pulls fresh air through the pen