Living Soil = Cooked Rice + Forest Floor

The Hilo KNF Monthly Meeting is a free, community-driven gathering held on the second Tuesday of every month at the Komohana Research and Extension Center. Each session focuses on one of Master Cho's nine core solutions of Korean Natural Farming, with hands-on demonstrations, tastings, and potluck dinner.

September's meeting was the group's tenth session, and it closed out the full run of Master Cho's nine solutions with Indigenous Microorganisms — IMO for short. Drake framed IMO as Cho's capstone teaching, the piece that ties food, cleanser, medicine, structure, fuel, minerals, reproduction, and protectors together into one living system, even though most teachers present it first. He passed around several jars at different stages of the process — a dry IMO dust, a finished microbial paste that smelled like miso, and even a jar collected straight off his pig pen floor — and walked through the full multi-week path from collecting wild microbes in the forest to training them specifically to a grower's own soil. Jesse asked about inoculating a wood chip pile, which opened up a long thread on scaling seed IMO into bulk substrate using mature horse feed. The evening closed with talk of getting the Master Gardeners involved in a hands-on workshop, since this recipe is the trickiest of the nine to get right without someone there to teach you what it should smell like.

TL;DR: IMO starts by collecting wild, fungus-dominant microbes on a box of hard-cooked rice buried at the edge of a healthy forest for five to seven days, then preserving whatever grows with an equal weight of dry sugar. That preserved "seed IMO" gets bulked up by mixing it into a fresh, fat-and-oil-rich substrate like mature horse feed and letting the pile heat up for about a week (kept under 120°F) — this is Drake's "propagated IMO," equivalent to Master Cho's IMO3. A second week mixing that propagated IMO with red dirt (mineral-rich, low-fertility) and soil from your own field trains the microbes specifically to your land — "foundation IMO," equivalent to IMO4. The finished dust gets spread at about 3 pounds per 100 square feet (roughly 1,200 pounds per acre) and watered in with the same soil formula — food, cleanser, medicine, structure, protectors, and minerals — that's carried the group through the whole year.

Inviting Friends Instead of Cooking Food

Drake opened with a simple frame for why IMO is different from everything the group has made so far this year. "There's two ways to get to things. You can invite a lot of friends, or you can cook a lot of good food." Every other solution — food, cleanser, medicine, structure, fuel, minerals, reproduction, protectors — has been the second approach: cook something good and whoever's already in your soil shows up and eats better for it. IMO flips that. It's about going out, finding your best possible microbial friends, and bringing them home. He also pointed out a quirk in his own handouts: the materials say "nine core solutions" but only list eight recipe columns, because IMO isn't a standalone application on its own schedule — it gets added into any of the other eight recipes whenever a grower needs it.

Fungus, Not Just Microbes

The real target of IMO collection isn't microbes in general — it's beneficial fungus specifically. Fungus governs how fast nutrients get released into soil. High-fungus environments release nutrients slowly, which is why forests — running on a long, patient timescale — are fungal-dominant. Disturbed land runs the opposite way: tilling, ripping, and other disturbance knocks fungal mass down and hands the advantage to fast bacterial growth, which is exactly the environment weeds are built for. Drake's fix is what he called a biological skin graft: collect fungus-heavy microbiology from an undisturbed forest, bring it to a plot you've just disturbed, and water it in. The land gets tricked into behaving like it's still forest, weeds lose their edge, and the crop you actually planted gets the advantage instead.

Collecting Seed IMO

Cook the rice hard. Instead of a normal 1:1 ratio, Drake cooks with about 80% as much water so the rice stays firm and dry rather than mushy — too much moisture is the single biggest cause of a bad batch.
Pack a box and take it to healthy forest. Drake uses lauhala boxes, though a vinegar-soaked thrift-store Easter basket or a microwaved cardboard box (to kill off contaminating biology) will work too. Fill it with the rice, dig into the forest soil a little, set the box in, top it with the dug-out dirt, and scatter leaf litter around it.
Shelter it from rain, not from air. Drake covers the box with an upside-down basket and a piece of roofing to keep most rain off without sealing out airflow. Skip collecting during a storm — go during normal weather.
Wait five to seven days. A good batch blooms into a fluffy, cotton-candy-white fungal growth. A batch that comes out tie-dyed and multicolored usually means the rice was too wet or wasn't cooled before it went in the box — still usable to compost, just not as inoculum. Drake's rule of thumb: if about 80% of a batch looks like the good white growth, keep the whole thing.

Any starchy substrate works in place of rice — Drake mentioned breadfruit or taro, chopped small and parboiled to a rice-like consistency. Different collection spots (forest, bamboo patch, banana patch) each carry a slightly different beneficial microbiome, and Drake keeps a dozen or so jars going at once, grabbing from different ones when he wants more diversity in a batch.

Preserving the Seed

Once collected, the moldy rice gets mixed with an equal weight of dry sugar — turbinado is Drake's preference, since it's unrefined but still dry. Molasses is too wet for this step. The sugar pulls water out of the biology and puts it to rest without killing it, the same preservation logic as the lactobacillus serum the group made back in August. Stored at room temperature, Drake's oldest jar on hand dated back to January 2022. He was asked about freezing it and said he wasn't confident it's safe — the biology could rupture from the cold — but the fridge is fine.

Scaling Up: Propagated and Foundation IMO

Jesse's question about inoculating a wood chip pile led into how Drake actually scales seed IMO up to farm quantities.

Propagated IMO (Master Cho's IMO3): Mix seed IMO into a fresh substrate that still has its fats, oils, and carbohydrates intact — Drake uses mature horse feed from Tractor Supply, 50 to 75 pounds at a time, because it's ready to use without needing to be chopped or blended. Mac nut husk, shell, and leftover butter waste work well too, as does shredded sweet potato vine and tuber. The substrate has to be fresh — already-decomposed material like finished compost or spent brewery grain won't work, since the fats and carbs the microbes need to build new microbial mass are already gone. The pile heats up over about a week; Drake keeps turning it to hold the temperature under 120°F. Done right, it should smell like a bakery or a rich forest floor. A sour, fresh-asphalt-after-rain smell means something went wrong and it's better to start over than try to fix it.
Foundation IMO (Master Cho's IMO4): Take that propagated IMO and mix in red dirt — mineral-rich, low-fertility material like old decayed granite, or in Hāmākua's case the local red clay — plus soil from your own field, which carries your own indigenous biology and higher-order life like nematodes. Drake's ratio for a 100-pound batch is 50 pounds propagated IMO to 25 pounds red dirt to 25 pounds field soil, run for another week.

Drake offered a scale metaphor for why the extra week matters: a week of time for us is roughly 10,000 years to a microbe. Two weeks of propagation is 20,000 years of the microbes training specifically on your soil's chemistry — by the time you spread the finished foundation IMO, they're already experts at working with your exact land, not somebody else's.

Spreading It and Watching Soil Wake Up

The finished dust goes down at about 3 pounds per 100 square feet — roughly 1,200 pounds per acre — as a light dusting, not clumps. It then gets watered in with the same soil formula recipe the group has built all year: food, cleanser, medicine, structure, protectors, and minerals. On dead, compacted soil, Drake described the timeline: nothing at week zero, the top quarter inch coming alive by week one, and the top three-quarters of an inch turning soft, dark, and workable by week three or four — no mulch required, though it helps. He described his own Hāmākua clay going from hard enough to resist a shovel to dark, clumped, earthworm-rich soil through repeated dusting and watering.

Pigs, Chickens, and the Deep Litter System

Drake passed around a jar collected straight from his pig pen floor and admitted it may be the best material in the room. His pigs live on a deep litter system that's already inoculated with IMO, so their daily rooting and manure continuously ferments the bedding into high-quality microbial material — the protein structure is broken down enough that the pigs are really eating the microorganisms, not their own waste. His half-joking summary: "Get chickens or pigs, start feeding them the microbes, and then their bedding will actually be the world's best microbes you could ever have. You can be out there and turn the thing, or you can get the pig to have it turn it for you." He also described burying himself in a heating 100-pound propagation pile as an informal sauna — the heat mimics a fever and, in his telling, can help "purge" things that don't survive higher temperatures, joking he could charge $200 for it.

Crop-Specific IMO and Odds and Ends

Asked whether IMO can be tuned to a specific crop, Drake said yes — set your collection box near your healthiest example of that plant instead of a generic forest spot, and the microbiome you collect, propagate, and reapply will be tuned to that crop. He also fielded a question about ʻōhiʻa rapid ʻōhiʻa death, saying he's heard anecdotal reports of trees that looked dead putting out new shoots after IMO was applied to the soil around them, though he was careful to frame it as secondhand, not a study. On dosage, Drake said he isn't aware of anyone overdoing IMO the way you can overdo other KNF solutions — good times to reapply are after any soil disturbance or when disease pressure shows up. He closed by saying the two-week process is complex enough, and failure-prone enough on smell alone, that he wants to run a hands-on session — possibly through the Master Gardeners — before sending people home to try it solo.

The Hilo KNF monthly meetings are held at the Komohana Research and Extension Center, 875 Komohana St, Hilo. All are welcome — bring a dish to share.

Next Month: October 13, 2026 — Hands-On IMO Workshop with the Master Gardeners