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 →
17 parts on “nutritive cycle”
Cho opens the advanced seminar with questions, not recipes: what is nature, who are you, what is the biggest farming. He argues that health comes from healthy food, so the farmer is the foundation of the world, and that farming by your own judgment or a professor's theory makes 'smart fools'. He ends on the chain soil welfare, crop welfare, animal welfare, human welfare, written on the flip chart.
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.
Taught Korean saying: the field has to be good to bear healthy children.
Cho walks through how a child goes plump, slim and plump again with age, and says young paprika, tomato, papaya, pigs and chicks should be raised plump too. Miss the balance at the changeover and the crop gets sick, so he has had his stage-by-stage chart translated for this level-3 seminar. Then fermentation heat (an IMO 4 pile runs 60-70 °C), a seminar notice, and an open Q&A: seawater 1:30 for all crops, salt blocks, no seawater nearby, and 'the crop is the professor'.
Taught People go plump at 2-4, slim at 5-6, plump at 10-13, slim at 14-16, plump then thin at 19-21.
Joe McGinn opens the afternoon by asking everyone where their grandparents are from, then walks through Cho's principles of natural farming in slides, read through a Hawaiian lens. He ends on a simple point: every solution rests on brown sugar or on rice vinegar, so anyone can start, beginning with Food (FPJ).
Drake Weinert brings back what soil scientists said at the Hawaii Farmers Union state convention and maps it onto Cho's solutions: Microbes (IMO) as biodiversity, Food (FPJ) as concentrated root exudates, fungi that build soil aggregates. Then questions: why FPJ is like an exudate, fixing deficiencies, the fungus-to-bacteria ratio, sprayers, and spraying a mixed garden where crops sit at different stages.
Taught Microbes (IMO) = biodiversity; tell a scientist that and you're speaking their language
With twenty minutes to dinner, Cho tells how he came to natural farming: elementary school only, 4-H, top of a 90-to-1 exam for the Gyeonggi livestock school, a vet license he gave up to prevent disease rather than cure it, Japan, and high school at 26. He names his three Japanese teachers, says Ōinoue first created the nutritive cycle, and calls Jesus his greatest teacher: 1 Corinthians 3:6 became the growing method and the name of his rice. Then the kimchi maker and a roofless church in Tanzania.
Taught Cho went only as far as elementary school, then worked in 4-H as a young man
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 cuts open a dry tangerine from breakfast and explains why it failed: fruit that bears once a year is conceived the summer before, between June 30 and July 5, so water-soluble calcium phosphate (Structure) goes on June 24 with Medicine (OHN). He writes the dates on the flip chart, then turns to the breakfast papaya, nitrogen and taste, and a long parable of mother's milk against cow's milk.
Taught Plump fruit is conceived June 30 to July 5; that is when you hit the 'home run'
Cho opens with plans: next time he wants to walk farms and diagnose crops, and he wants Hawaiʻi visitors to eat on natural farms. Then he cuts open the mangosteen a participant gave him. It's nearly empty, because the tree was overfed when young and lacked calcium phosphate the July before. His fix is IMO4 mixed 1:1 with vinegar-moistened bone char, spread in a ring at the drip line ahead of flowering; the room's questions settle what the 1:1 means.
Taught IMO5 = IMO4 mixed 1:1 with bone char moistened with brown rice vinegar
Cho writes the Eightfold Path on the flip chart: see rightly, think rightly, speak rightly, live rightly, first alone and then with others. The eye sees only half, and farming by the outward shape is what made the mangosteen rotten inside. Then religion, a plan to record his farm visits, his fee (a tenth of the extra profit) and one last IMO5 question.
Cho opens with the rice chart on the screen and says upland rice would grow here on mountain moisture. Then he holds up a damaged citrus fruit: it didn't crack, a bee stung it, because too much nitrogen made the skin thin. The fix is a weekly fine-mist spray of Structure (WCP), Reproduction (WCA) and seawater, given before the plant's mid-week dip, which he writes on the flip chart for a quarter acre.
Taught Mountain humidity here is about 70%, enough to grow upland rice; IMO No. 4 holds 80% moisture
Cho uses a person's ages as the picture for a crop: from 1 to 15 the body is being built, so the young crop gets Food (FPJ) of mugwort and water dropwort for iron and manganese; from about 15 to 25 it gets Food (FFJ) of ripe fruit and opened flowers, once a week each. Dr. Park sorts out which plant carries which mineral. Then Cho tells farmers to run comparison plots, remembers the 78-year-old grandmother who taught him, and says the old farmers farmed with wisdom.
Taught Like a child of 1 to 15, a young crop gets Food (FPJ) of mugwort and water dropwort
With the rice chart back on the screen, Cho says every crop has a life, and rice's starts with sprouting on February 12. After a stretch break he credits the nutritive cycle to Ōinoue Yasushi, who bred the Kyoho grape, tells his own story of Ōinoue's persecution and death, of learning from the widow and son, and of refusing to be the successor. The chart itself is Cho's, and he asks Hawaiʻi to fit its own crops into it, with Joe McGinn leading.
Cho walks the first stages of the rice chart: sprouting February 12, weaning March 12. A seed grows on its own seed milk, so base fertilizer is like raising a baby on cow's milk; raise seedlings in poor soil. When the milk runs out, start feeding, beginning with Fuel (FAA). Then he puts up the prescription handout and the seed soak and Type 2 columns are read out, with two errors in the English copy caught; Dr. Park ends on the Mineral products and clay jars.
Taught Rice: sown and sprouting February 12; young seedling and weaning March 12, a month later
Rice goes to the field on May 5. Cho's dowry story: like a father sending a daughter off with money, give extra at the end of Type 2 so the transplant roots in and fruits. He says Natural Farming is a work in progress that Hawaiʻi must build for its own weather, then walks the rice chart by date and leaf count, calls rice a 180-day crop, warns against overfeeding, and reads the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium needs of each stage.
Back at the projected prescription table, Cho goes over the first two columns again: a corn cover crop with Microbes (IMO4) under it, laid down as no-till mulch, and the seedling soak. Then he leaves the table for his picture of a Natural Farming farm in Hawaiʻi that visitors come to: something blooming or fruiting in every season, a guesthouse, good food, and a place to learn.
Taught At about two months, cut the corn and lay it flat; the layer is about 7 cm
Told he has two minutes, Cho asks what matters most in farming (the soil), then runs through the whole season on the projected table: cover crops, the seedling soak with the leaves kept dry, Type 2, the changeover and next year's fruit, Mineral D as water drawn from rock, Type 3 and ripening. He closes with his hopes for Hawaiʻi: classes on the islands, a CGNF Hawaiʻi quality mark, and starting small.
