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.
Read the whole seminar in one page →
4 parts on “feed”
Seated now, Cho says a crop is a living being made of the same sun, air, water and soil as us, so farming starts with humility: 'natural farming is love'. He writes three chi and three heats on a fresh flip-chart page and says body heat is fermentation heat, because microbes digest our food and we absorb what they make. From there: collect microbes near you, and feed livestock what is made here, not shipped in.
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.
Taught A Hawaiʻi farmer with 15,000 chickens: IMO4 alone, no smell, no disease
It's past 9 pm and Cho keeps going through his poultry slides: soil floors and dust baths, Korea's pesticide eggs, the hen that roosts highest, broody cages, dark laying boxes and rice hulls. He shows home-made feed, pig feed from broiler litter, and how to test an egg: lift the yolk, look for three layers, pull it with a toothpick. Then blood spots, red paper against pecking, dissected birds and darker yolks from purple sweet potato.
Taught Korea's 2017 pesticide eggs: caged hens get mites, so pesticide went into the feed
Fifteen more minutes of slides, now pigs. Cho shows the wing-curved roof, houses 2 m apart with perilla between, and the floor bed of logs, sawdust and IMO4 that lets one housewife keep 300 pigs with no cleaning for 3 years. Then free sow pens, a Chinese pen at minus 40, a fermented feed box, food scraps and pig dung turned into feed, piglets on the first nipple, and a stress-hormone slide. The session ends: 'that is love', and the rest tomorrow.
Taught Space houses so the front one's shade never falls on the next: about 2 m
