Free Probiotics = Rice Water + Milk

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.

August's meeting — the eighth in this year's series — covered Protectors, the specialized microbes KNF brings in to handle a specific job, made here as lactobacillus serum from fermented rice wash water and milk. Drake opened with a "good microbe, bad microbe, neutral microbe" framework before walking the room through the whole process live on the table: catching lactobacillus out of the air in starchy rice water, purifying it by feeding it into pasteurized milk, then straining the resulting curds from the whey to get a pure serum. He passed the finished, slightly sour whey around for tasting, and Laura shared how a quarter teaspoon of the sugar-preserved version in her flower vase water has been keeping her arrangements fresh for two to three weeks instead of one. Prem and Laura, who help run the space and the livestock side of the foundation, both got a shoutout for keeping these meetings going. The evening closed with a long list of real-world uses — soil drench, cleaning, livestock gut health, and even human digestion.

TL;DR: Protectors = lactobacillus serum, made by fermenting rice wash water for one to two days to catch airborne lactobacillus, then mixing that starchy water into pasteurized milk at roughly 1:10 (starch water to milk). Let it sit three to five days until it separates into curds and whey — the whey is your lactobacillus serum. Strain the curds out through a fine cloth, and you're left with a tan, slightly sour liquid that's basically pure lactobacillus. To make it shelf-stable, mix in an equal volume of sugar and store loosely capped (not sealed — it can build up gas and pop). Use it for soil drenches, as a cleaner and deodorizer, mixed into livestock water for digestion, or diluted for household cleaning at roughly 1:10 to 1:1000 depending on how bad the mess is.

Good, Bad, and Mostly Neutral

Drake framed the whole topic around a simple ratio. Of all the microbes in a given environment, 60 to 70% are neutral — not helping, not hurting, just going with the flow. Of the remaining 30%, if 16% skew bad, the whole neutral majority tips bad with them, and you end up with 86% bad microbes and only 14% good. Flip that so 16% of the remaining 30% is good, and suddenly 86% of everything is good. "We're not trying to change every microbe. We're trying to affect that small majority of the good versus the bad, and that's a very small percentage compared to all the microbes that are in the environment." Protectors are how you nudge that small percentage — you don't need to out-populate the whole microbial world, just tip the scale.

The Police Analogy

Drake described protector microbes as the police, the National Guard, or emergency room staff — specialists you call in for a specific problem, not a standing occupying force. The room brainstormed the upside together: they keep peace, respond fast, restore order after a disaster. And the downside: they're expensive, they can go rogue, they can get corrupt, they can favor their own, they can even attack the very system they're meant to protect. "Having the right amount at the right time in the right place" is the whole game. If everything's already in balance, you don't need fifty cops standing around — and overusing protectors just means they're consuming resources the indigenous microbes would otherwise get.

Concrete scenarios where Drake said to call them in: powdery mildew or other fungal outbreaks, a soil disturbance like tilling (which he compared to a microbial hurricane or earthquake), chemical spills or over-spraying, cleaning up livestock waste or a stinky chicken coop, and fast early-stage leaf growth, where lactobacillus applied early keeps fungus and mold from getting a foothold before the plant's own biology can establish. The key mechanism Drake kept coming back to: protectors mostly aren't attacking the bad organism directly — they're eating what the bad organism eats faster, starving it out.

Why They're "Expensive"

Whatever environment you spray lactobacillus into, it eats before the indigenous microbes get a turn. That's the cost of calling them in. Drake's fix: pair a protector application with food — Food, Cleanser, Medicine, and Structure — so the protectors aren't stealing resources straight from your indigenous population. Give them a paycheck, not a blank check, and ease off once the specific problem is under control.

The Recipe: Rice Water to Milk Serum

Drake demonstrated the process step by step at the table, and noted you can shortcut most of it — but walked through the full version for a broader, hardier family of lactobacillus.

Step 1 — Catch it from the air. Wash white rice as normal and save the cloudy first-wash water — a low-nutrition, starchy "landing pad." Pour it into a shallow dish and set it somewhere with airflow, out of direct sun, not sealed in a cupboard. Every airborne bacteria lands in it, but lactobacillus out-competes the rest and takes over within a day or two. You'll know it's working when it smells like sweet mochi turning sourdough. Rice bran water works the same way, and in Korea it's fed straight to pigs at this stage to inoculate their gut. This stage alone is usable — good for about four or five days — but it's the least stable version.
Step 2 — Purify it in milk. Pour the starchy rice water into pasteurized milk at roughly 1:10 (starch water to milk). Every other bacteria that landed in your rice water has nothing to eat in the milk — only lactobacillus can metabolize milk sugars — so the culture narrows down to close to pure lactobacillus. Any mammal milk works; don't use nut milk. Fresher milk is better, since older milk already carries competing cultures. Raw milk works too, but tends to separate more like yogurt than the clean curd-and-whey split you get from pasteurized.
Step 3 — Separate and strain. After three to five days, the milk splits into curds (the fats — essentially farmer's cheese, edible) and whey (the lactobacillus serum you're after). Strain through a fine cloth to get all the curd out, or leftover solids will float, sour, and stink. What drains through is a tan, slightly sour liquid — that's your finished lactobacillus serum, good in the fridge as-is.

Making It Shelf-Stable

Straight serum is powerful but short-lived, since it's still living biology in liquid form. To store it long-term, mix in an equal volume of sugar — the sugar ties up the water molecules and puts the microbes to rest so they stop changing. Store it out of direct sunlight, capped loosely rather than sealed, since active fermentation can build up enough gas to blow a sealed lid. Drake said he's had jars detonate in his laundry room from being capped too tight. Properly preserved and refrigerated, it holds for three to six months; unrefrigerated, closer to three months. As with everything in KNF, sooner is better — "the quicker you use it, the more potent it's going to be."

Around the Farm and House

Soil drench: add to a barrel of water and drench an area to jump-start microbial recovery, especially after tilling or a chemical mishap.
Cleaning: diluted roughly 1:10 to 1:20 for general cleaning, up to 1:500 or 1:1000 for lighter use. Unlike bleach, which stops working once the water evaporates, lactobacillus keeps eating contamination — including Salmonella and E. coli — as long as it's active, and it out-competes mold by eating the mold's food supply.
Odor control: sprayed directly on manure or waste, it eats the smell-causing particles within five to ten minutes. Also works in laundry — a splash on gym clothes and even forgotten wet laundry comes out without stink.
Livestock: mixed into drinking water, it inoculates gut biology and helps digestion, echoing Prem's work with the foundation's livestock.

For the Body — and for a Vase of Flowers

Drake shared that his teacher, Dr. Park, had 80% of his stomach removed during the Korean War and struggled with liquid stool for years. Taking about an ounce of lactobacillus serum in water while eating turned that around. Drake's broader claim, stated carefully and without medical pretense: lactobacillus improves the digestibility of whatever you're eating, and can help with food poisoning — he described giving someone a shot of it and having them feel better within fifteen minutes.

Laura, who arranges flowers weekly at a local addiction treatment center, shared her own experiment: adding a quarter teaspoon of the sugar-preserved serum to each flower vase. Arrangements that used to last a week are now lasting two to three, and the vase water barely smells when she changes it. She and her mother once looked at untreated flower water under a microscope and saw it thick with small motile organisms; with lactobacillus added, those were sharply reduced. Drake tied it back to the same mechanism as everything else that night — the lactobacillus isn't necessarily attacking the problem directly, it's out-competing it for food.

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: September 8, 2026 — Indigenous Microorganisms (IMO)