What Master Cho taught

The cycle on one page

Master Cho handed out one sheet, "Natural Farming prescriptions by the nutritive cycle," and walked the room through it twice, on Saturday morning and again on Saturday afternoon. The rates below are the printed sheet. Where Cho said something different out loud, it's in the right-hand column. 1:500 means one part in 500 of water.

Timing: feed before the need

Cho's rule is to give each stage's prescription ahead of the stage, because the plant needs time to absorb it. He said it two ways. Five days ahead, once. A week ahead, on Friday and again on Saturday. If you miss the window, give it anyway.

• June 24 for next year's fruit. A tree that fruits once a year makes next spring's flower the summer before. Conception falls between June 30 and July 5, so Structure goes on June 24, and after that "it's an error." Use the water-soluble form. Solid calcium phosphate would need 22 days. Papaya and other repeat bearers follow their own cycle.
• A month before the flower forms. For the skin spray, Cho said one month before the flower forms, then corrected himself: forms, not blooms.
• The IMO5 ring goes down in May, so it's in the soil when the flowers form.
• Rice by date and leaf count. The chart reads February 12, March 12, May 5, then June 12–15 and June 27–July 2. Transplant at 5–6 leaves, second stage at 10–11, third at 15. Seed to harvest is 180 days. Hold the chart against the crop and you can tell if you're late or early.
• Weekly. Spray Structure, Reproduction and seawater once a week, before the plant's mid-week dip. The weekly Food goes on the same rhythm.
• Time of day. Spray about two hours before sunset, when uptake is fastest. Never in hot sun: the droplets act as lenses and burn the skin.
• Rainy year. Clouds cut photosynthesis and fewer flowers form, so give about double the calcium phosphate.
• Read the leaf. Long and narrow is Type 2, a triangle is Type 3, round is the fall leaf. He drew all three. Many long leaves at harvest mean too much nitrogen.

Making the solutions

Cleanser (vinegar)

Don't insist on brown rice. Carbohydrate plus nuruk makes liquor. Acetic acid bacteria from the air turn the liquor to vinegar in 3 to 5 days, depending on temperature. For brown rice's power in banana vinegar, add a little cooked brown rice when making the liquor. Coconut: take the juice of an old coconut and add koji or yeast. Kim Chang, the interpreter, added her own rule: at least 4–5% acidity.

Reproduction (WCA) and Structure (WCP)

Eggshell is alkali and vinegar is acid. They react, and the shells rise and fall as the calcium dissolves. Cow bone must be burned first, because protein, carbohydrate and fat block the vinegar. No ratios were given on tape.

Microbes (IMO) 1 to 4

1. IMO1: firm cooked rice in a box under bamboo. Microbes crowd there because bamboo root runs sweet for 15 minutes when chewed.
2. IMO2: IMO1 with an equal amount of sugar.
3. IMO3: IMO2 diluted 1,000 times to wet rice bran. The interpreter added 5 gallons of water per 60 lb for 65–70% moisture, and turning the pile at 110–120.
4. IMO4: mix in half soil from your own field, so the field's microbes meet relatives, not strangers.

IMO5, the ring. Char cow or pig bone and pour brown rice vinegar over it until it's just slightly moist. Mix it 1 to 1 with IMO4. Asked what the 1:1 meant, Cho said "It's the char you made." Spread it in a ring at the drip line, on papaya, banana, coffee and every fruit tree.

Minerals (seawater)

Seawater is 3% salt and a plant's green blood is 0.1%, so the dilution is 1:30, "the same for all crops." Seawater is not a Mineral product: "seawater is seawater, and mineral is mineral."

Seed soak and the first feeding

A seedling lives on its own seed milk. Fertilizing then is like raising a baby on cow's milk. When the milk runs out, at weaning, start with Fuel (FAA). Raise seedlings in poor soil.

Soil and planting

• No deep hole. JICA's trees in Tanzania went into holes 60 to 70 cm deep. Water pools, the roots turn upward, the dug soil sinks, and the fertilizer at the bottom rots into carbon dioxide. Cho didn't water. He set five lumps of hardwood charcoal on top and scattered IMO4 over them. Microbes live at 70% moisture, and the charcoal holds it. Charcoal goes in once, at first planting.
• Lava to soil. In Kona, corn on charcoal and IMO4 stalled at about 30 cm. A Type 2 feed took it to 1 m 20 in a week. He knocked the corn down and sowed again. Six months later there were 3 cm of soil, against 200 years per cm in nature.
• Corn mulch. Plant corn within 20 cm each way, cut it at about 1 m and lay it down. 6–7 cm of cover stops grass. Cho's example: corn on March 20, tomatoes about May 10. Then "don't till."
• IMO4 at 150 kg per 300 pyeong (about a quarter acre). It forms a white film that weeds can't push through. Outdoors, mulch over it.
• Till shallow. "Till deep and the roots go shallow." Roots go as deep as the plant is tall.

Livestock

• Chicks. Brown rice first. The yolk in the belly is 3 days of food. After that, egg yolk with bamboo leaves, then greens.
• Feed plot. Corn reaches 1 m 10 cm in two months. Chop it whole with IMO4, LAB and yeast and ferment. For yeast, cover burst grapes 7 to 8 hours. A grown hen eats 200 g a day. On the board, one pyeong (1.8 m square) at 20 cm held 900 plants and 1,800 kg, enough for 9,000 hens. Someone in the audience did the arithmetic: 9 by 9 is 81 plants. At 2 kg a plant that's 162 kg, and even 1,800 kg is one day's feed for 9,000 birds. Cho didn't take it back.
• The layer house. A skylight puts sun on the whole floor once a day. Openings sit at 36 cm, the height of a hen's nose. Partitions are 36 cm; at 30 cm they fight. Rice straw on a soil floor breaks the droppings down by evening. Prepare everything first: with proper housing, of 100 chicks not one dies.
• The no-clean pen. Logs, then sawdust, then IMO4. One housewife keeps 300 pigs, fed once a day, and the dung comes out "not once in 3 years." Pig dung with IMO4 ferments into feed in 5 to 10 hours.
• Breeding. For sows that won't come into heat, shake WCA and WCP into the drinking water, and they come into heat. Add OHN and it works very fast.

What the room didn't hear

Fifteen farming moments where the English lost or changed what Cho said.

One more: the two hours before sunset first reached the room as "before sunrise".

Where the record argues with itself

Spoken against printed

• Skin spray: WCP 700 to 800 times, settled at 1:800 on the board. The sheet says 1:1,000.
• Ripening: "a week before harvest" against the sheet's 10–15 days. Three sprays a week apart don't fit in one week, so the sheet fits the series better.
• Seawater: 1:30 for all crops on Thursday, but 1:25 "instead of 1:30" for the skin spray, and 1:20–25 in three columns of the sheet. The 1:25 is in the interpreter's English only.

Numbers that don't agree

• Moisture: microbes at 70% on Thursday, IMO4 at 80% on Saturday.
• Corn cover: 6–7 cm stops grass; the interpreter said the layer is about 10 cm; Saturday, about 7 cm.
• IMO4 can be up to 50% of animal feed here. In Hawaiʻi in 2018 he said 30%.
• The feed plot: 900 plants or 81. His April 2017 poultry course gives 81 plants and 162 kg.
• Seed soak: the interpreter's 20–30 minutes and Cho's 12 hours or more for fruit trees are far longer than his 2003 book (15 seconds for seedlings, 4–8 hours for seeds).

Cho against his books

• The livestock course was six months. His own timeline says nine.
• No manure out of the pig pen "not once in 3 years." In Hawaiʻi in 2016 he said seven years. His book says the bed comes out only for field use.
• Ōinoue Yasushi, the man whose theory the cycle is, "died in prison" as a thought criminal. The Japanese record shows a scientist pushed aside who died on 23 September 1952. No arrest has been found.

Guest talks

• Joe McGinn said Cho learned from five masters in Japan. Cho named three.
• Drake Weinert said deficiencies are fixed by feeding the biology. Cho prescribes for specific shortages.

Still open

A Korean listener, or the original slides, could settle these:

• Which day of the week to spray. The interpreter said day 5, then day 3. Cho pointed at the board.
• IMO5: Cho first described a vinegar extract mixed 1:1, then said it was the char. We follow the char.
• The third item in the weekly spray, probably OHN.
• When to switch from mugwort Food to fruit Food: the interpreter said at a third of the plant's height, while Cho seems to count leaves.
• Whether 1–15 and 15–25 on the board are ages or days.
• What "root power" is, and what 활성 1호 and 2호 on the sheet are.
• Why FAA sits in parentheses on the sheet.
• New land: three IMO applications six months apart, or within six months.
• How to shift June 24 to Hawaiʻi. Cho gave Korean dates and asked Hawaiʻi to build its own chart.
• The rice chart prints "4/20 changeover treatment P, Ca." Nobody explained it on tape.

How this was made

Seven sessions, October 19–21, 2017, in Makapala, filmed on one iPad; Thursday evening wasn't recorded. Each session was transcribed twice: once in English, and once in short pieces so each piece could be heard in its own language. Checkers went line by line. They translated Cho's Korean again and checked it against the English of the interpreter, Kim Chang. They read the board, slides and sheets off the video. Words in [brackets] in the transcript are our best reconstruction. Cho's remarks on human health stay in the transcript as he said them, and we don't repeat them as advice. The solutions assist. The plants and animals do the work.