The 9 KNF Solutions, Good vs Bad Microbes, IMO Indoor Collection
Recovering from a virus on Mother's Day, Drake plays a recorded talk instead of teaching live, covering the 9 KNF solutions: two microbe tools (IMO from soil, LAB "protectors" from air) plus food, cleanser, medicine, structure, fuel, reproduction, and minerals. He explains how plants trade root-exuded sugars with fungi and bacteria for trace minerals like copper, and how KNF sprays mimic a forest so monocrop soil behaves like a rich ecosystem.
He lays out the 7-stage formula table (soil, seed soak, maintenance, leaf, bloom, fruit, harvest) with dosing example: 8ml food, 8ml cleanser, 4ml medicine, 4ml structure per gallon. On his own farm he sprays a 40-gallon tractor tank weekly over two acres, using about a liter of concentrate a week and only twelve gallons a year, and drenches depleted sugarcane land through a 250-gallon tote of soil formula.
The core theory: soil microbes split roughly 25% good, 25% bad, 50% neutral, and neutrals always side with whichever group has the edge, so feeding the good guys by just 5% can flip 80% of the soil in your favor. He closes on raised "food taco" beds built for disabled veterans and on KNF's role in holding carbon and water to fight climate change.
Questions answered
- 6:55 How do you collect IMOs indoors in cold weather or a greenhouse? — Drake points to his companion video with Ray and Master Lee, shot indoors with forest leaf duff and collection boxes.
- 11:22 What is Natural Farming, and where do the 9 solutions come from? — Master Cho learned from three masters in Japan and synthesized their methods over 50-60 years into the 9 KNF tools Drake translated into plain English.
- 13:31 What do the 'protectors' (LAB/police) do against disease like banana bunchy top? — Sprayed into the canopy, the protectors eat out the disease so the plant grows through the bunchy top symptom-free, though the virus is still present.
- 30:14 How do root exudates and microbes work together to get minerals like copper? — The plant exudes sugars from its roots to feed specific fungi and bacteria, which fetch trace minerals like copper and trade them back for sugar.
- 46:08 How often should you spray the maintenance formula versus the others? — Drake sprays weekly with whichever formula matches his crops' current stage, right now the fruiting formula since his lychee are swelling.
- 47:45 Do you need more soil amendments early on when restoring old sugarcane land? — Yes, Drake drenches his worst field with soil formula through a 250-gallon tote until the ground recovers, needing less over time.
- 50:30 What are 'food tacos' and how do disabled veterans use them? — Raised beds bent from iron roofing and filled with soil, dosed from a premixed maintenance-solution jar with a spoonful per spray bottle.
- 51:52 What's the real difference between good, bad, and neutral soil microbes? — Soil splits roughly 25% good, 25% bad, 50% neutral, and the neutral majority always sides with whichever group is winning.
- 58:08 Should farmers fight bad microbes or focus on feeding the good ones? — Feed the good guys instead of fighting disease; shifting the balance by just 5% flips the neutral majority from bad to good.
- 1:01:03 How does KNF farming help with climate change? — Better soil microbes build structure that holds carbon and moisture, letting farmers stabilize climate through regenerative land practices.
KNF Office Hours is a free live Q&A every Sunday at 9 AM HST. Bring your question to pureknf.org/learn/questions or join live.
In this episode
- 0:00 Intro and Welcome
- 1:26 I Ching Reading: Gathering Together
- 4:09 Why Today's Format Is Different
- 6:55 How to Collect IMOs Indoors in Cold Weather
- 11:22 What Is Natural Farming? Master Cho's 9 Solutions
- 12:24 Overview of the 9 KNF Tools
- 13:31 Microbes and Protectors (LAB) vs Disease
- 15:08 Food, Cleanser, Medicine, Structure, Fuel, Reproduction, Minerals
- 16:58 Two Microbe Sets: Soil IMOs and Air LAB
- 21:04 Maintenance Solutions and Maslow's Hierarchy
- 23:14 Fuel, Reproduction, Minerals for Growth Stages
- 26:15 Why KNF Uses Intuitive Solution Names
- 30:18 Plant-Microbe Symbiosis and Root Exudates
- 36:00 Mimicking a Forest Ecosystem in Monoculture Soil
- 38:31 The 7-Stage Formula Table: Soil to Harvest
- 45:50 Dosing, Timelines, and Drenching Poor Soil
- 50:30 Food Tacos: Raised Beds for Veterans
- 52:10 Good vs Bad vs Neutral Soil Microbes
- 1:01:03 KNF and Climate Change: Carbon and Water
Transcript
Auto-transcribed with Whisper. Click any timestamp to play from there.
0:30 so hey um aloha welcome to office hours korean natural farming um for may 8th 2022 and it's um it's mother's day so special shout out to all the mamas i definitely wouldn't be here without my mom and uh i want to thank all you guys for tuning in
1:16 and um hoping you're having a great day and um i want to just start off here with a little bit of I Ching, and today is gathering together. To lead others towards good, one must purify one's own character. The I Ching teaches us that the world cannot move toward harmony and well-being unless human beings act in unison to further the good and the true. Our powers as individuals is multiplied when we gather together as families, groups, and communities with common goals. It is our collective strength that makes positive change possible in the world.
2:08 However, the tremendous power of human collectives must be directed by a qualified leader. The hexagram Tsui encourages you to develop your character into that of a leader. Before a person may gather others together to achieve good, he must first gather within himself proper principles. a leader who is not balanced and collected within himself will always be suspected by his followers and in the hour when he needs them most they will hesitate therefore the first task of the potential leader
2:57 is to accumulate in his own good character all that is good, true and correct in a very real sense the progress of the world depends upon your thoughts as an individual now concentrate then on examining and correcting your thoughts attitudes and actions improve yourself into the kind of person you would follow wholeheartedly without hesitation learn to accept the natural progress that occurs when you act in harmony with proper principles and seek no progress at the expense of those principles.
3:46 Train yourself to avoid misfortune by anticipating them in advance. By purifying your character in this way and by clinging steadfastly to higher things, you lead yourself and others toward well-being and good fortune. and yeah so i just want to maybe you guys can hear it in my voice but i got hammered hard this last week with some sickness and i'm still just recovering so kind of got a slightly different format for today still going to drop some nice knowledge on you but i'm going to use a uh something that i've recorded previously to to bring it together
4:32 and hopefully you guys can help each other in the chat answer some questions because I'm pretty exhausted right now and I definitely need to gather together within myself strength before I can be that proper leader for you guys today and so I got some some stuff I'll be here the whole time reading the chat and with you guys and all that but um but I just don't have the energy to be talking and going for a full hour. There's no way. I'm really, yeah. So it happens to all of us. I think I get hit by a virus, which I don't think there was much I could
5:19 have done with natural farming to evade it. I don't think LAB, I took a bunch of OHN, took a bunch of sugarcane juice, took a bunch of those things, but I don't think there was anything I could have done, but besides rest and getting to feel better. So anyway, I just want to encourage you guys as you learn this information, as you guys go to gather within yourself, to turn into leaders, to share this stuff with the world, because that's what we need. And it seems you guys are doing that. I just get these great emails. I just want to thank you. And also this past week,
5:56 I had no, I didn't even ship out the books and they're, they're, they're, they're ready to go. They're, they're going to go in the mail tomorrow, Monday, um, actually sold out of books though, which was nice. And, um, but that means more information's going out to the world. It means more people are getting this stuff. More people are able to share and get these things. Um, yeah. yeah so I just think yeah thank you guys for showing up too and um so a so anyway with with that kind of longer intro I just wanted to uh yeah let me see here I'm gonna switch over here
6:33 just real quick um to this scene here let's see hang on I'm just gonna prep this just one second transition over there maybe i'll get myself out of there let's see yeah i'm gonna get myself out of there okay so i i promised you guys last week um that i would drop a video on how to collect imo indoors um and this is just if you're in cold weather you're in a place where it rains too much you're in a place where animals attack your stuff this video I dropped here on on my youtube I promised you guys I would I and I think this
7:20 is one of the reasons I might have gotten sick I worked like all to my side for 12 hours working on this video cutting this together putting it together and how to collect IMOs indoors um but you know basically here it shows you know all this all this forest leaf duff and then setting the boxes in this whole video but if you want to search it's on the youtube channel It's how to collect IMO, indoor, cold weather, KNF, you know, smash that subscribe button and you'll get videos like this delivered to you. And if you've already hit it once, don't hit it again because you'll unsubscribe.
7:58 It's kind of a funny thing. But anyway, this was a video with Ray and Master Lee, who unfortunately passed away. and uh you know but just I wanted to share this with you because so many people ask me how do how do I do this it's cold weather you know what do I do well go get the leafed up bring it into you watch this video it goes over common questions of everyone that was there learning this was such a great opportunity to learn um and I'm just happy to share this video with you guys and hopefully you check it out and learn something.
8:37 And if you do, you know, they always say drop a comment or like it or share it. I don't know. I'm not really that into that kind of stuff. But if you do like it, then, you know, enjoy, share, be a leader. But cool. So let's see here. so I'm going to save myself a little bit here and uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop a video start to play it's probably going to run a little bit more than an hour and I'll be here drinking water hanging out thinking of healing myself healing everybody healing the earth
9:19 and all the beautiful microbes we have around so this video I'm about to drop here I'm going to transition this well you guys can't hear me anymore but i did so i did the online portion teaching online and then Bronson did the in-person class for this for the Farmers Union fan class so anyway I'm gonna drop this video on here I'm gonna just start playing it it's I saved you
10:07 through the introduction but uh yeah so anyway I'm gonna transition over drop this video on you guys and uh enjoy it's it's great the second part of it gets into more of the um like first part's kind of intro to KNF. So if you haven't heard it before, maybe heard it again. But the second part really gets into some 80-20 rule, some great microbial theory that's just great for politics and has huge, big implications on how we can change the world. So I hope you enjoy this. And I think I kind of sound like Lex Friedman. So this is my conversation with myself. Enjoy.
10:51 mobile because really um if you don't know what imos are it's these indigenous microbes that we collect and then you have to propagate them up to put them back in your field so that's that's primarily what I'll talk about here today. So, um, so what I want to get into is what is, what is natural farming? Like, um, and these are a collection of recipes created by master Cho. And he learned these things from three masters in Japan and then synthesize them
11:44 throughout the last 50 to 60 years to become a kind of comprehensive system that fits into everything. So I've taken what he's taught me about these solutions and I've translated them into English. And because I was an elementary school teacher, I decided to put these in language that even an elementary sixth grader can understand. So a lot of the language that you see here is designed to be intuitive. So what we do in natural farming primarily is we have these
12:29 nine tools. So just like a carpenter has a hammer and a level and a square and a saw, each of those tools being different that have different purposes, like potentially you could cut a board by just hitting it with your hammer and cutting it. But if you have a saw, it's going to be so much easier to cut that board. And so having your tool bag full with the right tools, it's what's going to enable you to go to your farm and say, you know, you have, you want to build this type of soil. You want to build this type of plant. These tools are what enables you
13:09 to target those, what you want that growth and then implement it. So if you look through these names and you look at just the bold names, um, and then this is also in your book, but I think it's actually been a little bit even further modified than this because I've been working on these presentations. But the basic idea is that the first two solutions up there are your microbes, which are your indigenous microbes from your area that you're going to gather. And what these guys are is there are the workers that go into your soil. And they're actually kind
13:46 of the leaders that go and motivate the other microorganisms into doing what they're supposed to. Um, the second one up there is what I, what I called it is actually the protectors, but it's also the police. The police aren't as, um, as hip these days, people, people kind of hate the police. So call them the protectors. Cause you know, it's a little bit better. No offense if you're a police person, but just call yourself a protector. You'll be, you'll be great. Cool. We need you in the society. Um, but these guys come in whenever there's a problem.
14:18 So number two, the police up there, say, say for instance, you have a mold or something or something weird, like you spill some sort of chemical or you got some sort of problem and you need something to come in and fix your situation. Like for instance, over here, right now we got a bunch of banana bunchy top, right? It comes in, it starts infecting this plant. Well, what I can do is I can make up a mixture of these police and I can spray it into the canopy at the very top of the bunchy top where it has it. And these guys go out and they eat out all that disease.
14:53 And my plant can actually grow through the bunchy top. So it's not to say that they got rid of the virus. My plant is still has the virus, but it becomes where it's not symptomatic. So my plant can grow through that. Next coming down, we got food because everything needs food to live. So we make this from plants. Then everything needs cleanser because once you've eaten, you need to get rid of that waste. So a cleanser to clean things out. Then we got a medicine. So if anything's sick, it has a medicine to help it, um, get, you know, just stay in optimal, um,
15:34 like peak, uh, health. Then next we have structure, just like you need a structure to live in. The plants also need that structure, but it's internal for them. So we spray this on and it helps them develop really strong, uh, like roots and, and everything. And then, um, then there's fuel. So if your plant's a little laggard and you want it to grow more leaves, put out more solar panels, you'd use this fuel. Then there's a reproduction, which when your plant is starting to put out fruit and you want it to transfer its energy from growing into reproducing, you use reproduction.
16:15 and the last is minerals so if for any you're deficient in any trace mineral of any sort you can use this solution and it'll help provide that to your plant so it's kind of a quick overview that as i was talking maybe you had a little bit of chance to read what was written there and it explains a little bit more of it but as i go through this presentation i'll kind of talk a little bit more in depth of how do I take these nine tools, these nine different things and put them into practice for myself so that we can have really great ecosystem
16:52 that lowers again, the stress so that everything then thrives. So to jump into a little bit of, to take those nine solutions. And I'm basically at this point going to break them into two groups because of all those nine, it may be slightly overwhelming to be given nine different tools all at once. So to break this down, the first two solutions, number one and number two, are the microorganisms. so if you're working in a living biological system primarily what you're cultivating is the plant microorganisms on the plant as well as the soil microorganisms and so what what these guys
17:46 do is they'll go out and they will find the nutrients that a plant needs the plant is growing and it exudes sugars out of its roots. And then those sugars feed the microorganisms, which will then, based on what sugars are coming out, will culture different microbes to reach out into the soil to find different things. So what often happens in farming is that we end up tilling the soil and we end up spraying different things and doing all kinds of different things that we do to help our plants grow. And usually that's the expense of our microorganisms.
18:34 So if our microorganisms are dying, then the whole system starts to collapse from there because it all starts with good, healthy soil. So what these two solutions enable you to do is to go out into an ecosystem and to collect your indigenous microorganisms from where they are, and then bring them back to where you are to bulk them up into trillions and trillions of organisms, and then to take those and to scatter them out into your field. So you can take, like, even if you're going to do high tillage or some sort of thing that is
19:23 damaging your microorganisms, you can fix that immediately by going and bringing new reinforcements. reinforcements. It's like bringing in fresh recruits of these new microbes into your land. And so that's what these two tools do. The indigenous microbes, number one, are from the soil. And number two, the police, the lactic acid bacteria, the protectors are from the air. So these are the two sets of microbes that we're dealing with. We're getting the soil microbes, bringing those in, putting them out, and then also collecting the microbes out of the air
20:09 through a starch collection for number two. So we're getting those two sets of microbes and then putting them back into an environment where we may have damaged it or we need them. Maybe they're in insufficient numbers so we can bring them in. So these two are like your workers, your people. So, and I didn't, the recipes are a little bit further in the presentation, but the general concept I want you to come away from this is that we, like the first number tools, number one and number two are like bringing good workers into your farm. Okay. So that's what both of these two tools do.
20:54 They get the good guys, they bring them in, in vast numbers. And once you have a lot of good workers, then you can start to get things done. The next solutions I'm going to talk about here are these four solutions. And so these build on the first two, that once you've gotten the good workers at your farm or at your place, now you need to feed those workers and you need to give them wages and make sure they stay clean and all these things because it's it's one thing to have the right people but then you need the
21:33 right resources for the right people so that's what these next four solutions do so in my farm what i do is i'll put in i'll put out the workers kind of once in the very beginning like right after I'm, when I'm starting to prep my soil, but then these solutions that are on the screen right now, these four solutions are used all the time as maintenance. So these kind of, um, fit the, the Maslow's laws of having, you know, you got to have food, you got to have a clean environment, you got to have a good house and you have to be healthy. And those are kind of
22:15 the basics. So all of the time I am taking these four solutions, which are food, cleanser, medicine, and structure. And these are all liquid solutions that I'm putting out to my farm on a weekly or every other week basis. And it, and it's, um, I'll, I'll get into the application after this. I'm just want to kind of get the tools out there. So all the time, my plants need to be, they need to eat food. They need to have the food that they've eaten be cleansed away. They need a little bit of medicine to keep their biostimulants up and they need that structure
22:57 inside. So all four of these help those workers that I put out there have the resources and tools they need to live. So you guys, you guys with me so far? Yeah, good. Okay. And then there's three more solutions here that are, that are not, that I don't use all the time. So like I said, I put the workers out once I do the maintenance on a weekly or every other week basis. And then these last three tools that I'm going to talk about are the fuel, the reproduction and the minerals. And these are ones that I use more in a, um, case by case basis. It's more based on,
23:44 okay, do I have a bunch of juvenile plants? And if I do have a bunch of young youthful plants, they're going to need a lot more fuel because when I want my plant, I want my plant to grow, put out solar panels, help it grow. It brings in amino acids, which help these, these plants to, reproduce more DNA and start to grow? Or are my plants where they're fruiting and I don't want it to go a vegetative route, I actually want it to go through the reproductive route. And so in that case, I'll add in some reproduction. So in my case here, where right now my lychee
24:28 tree is just throwing out lychee fruits and they're just starting to swell up, this is where I will take and add in to my maintenance solution, those four solutions I talked about on the previous slide, and I'll add in some reproduction to it. And when I do that, it's going to help my lychee translocate all those nutrients into the fruit. And then it's going to help that fruit swell and it's going to reproduction also helps and helps prevent splitting on my light cheese. So the, the calcium, it helps, um, it helps them, you know, the skin become more flexible.
25:08 Um, and then the minerals is something that, um, I'll, I'll add in, especially when I'm going into areas that are newer. So, so areas that I haven't been farming and haven't been doing this stuff as, as much I'm on pretty depleted cane soil, which all the minerals have been washed into the ocean over, over generations of mechanical tillage and all kinds of stuff. So it's really important for me to remineralize like my dead soil. So that's where I'll use the seawater. So see the minerals. So with, with all that hand waving and stuff, it's, it's,
25:50 it's really, um, an interesting idea because I can talk to you about these solutions at many different levels. I can go into like the chemistry level can go in, in, in what I try to explain it is just in the practical common sense level. And then, you know, and I, and I know all, all these different things. So, so, but just as a general overview, if you understand from those, those English titles, you know, um, like if you look at your plant and you can say, Hmm, this plant is a little hungry. So from these nine different solutions,
26:29 if I'm looking and I say, my, my plants a little hungry, what, which, which should I add? and most likely from this list without knowing all the chemical chemistry and all these details and all these things it's just it's almost intuitive that they probably need a bit of food right and then if you're looking at it it's it's kind of malnourished and you're like well maybe it also needs a bit of fuel to kick start to kick start my plant you know i want it to grow a little bit more leaves or your plant is wilting over and, you know, for some reason, all of a
27:08 sudden you're growing tomatoes and they all lean over. Well, maybe they need some structure. Right. And so I try to take these tools and name them in this intuitive way that empowers you as a farmer to go out in a level where almost an elementary school student can understand these solutions and can say to themselves, from these names, it's not some grand mystery of how things are. It's just looking at these tools and knowing, okay, these things are what I need. So that's the level I'm trying to communicate this to you guys is to make it so that from this,
27:52 these tools become intuitive and it helps you then understand how these tools fit and how you can fit them into a, as a farmer. And the reason, the reason I bring that up is that if you look at on this page, if you look at the, the, after the, the bold, where there's the, the little acronym, and then there's the word after it, that was the language that was given to me as a, as a natural, as somebody that's learning from master Cho, they would say, you know, water soluble calcium, or they would say, you know, fermented plant juice. And I found so many people when they learned
28:32 that way, when they learned with that vocabulary, they would get home and they would have these solutions, but then they would never put them into practice and use because it's like, well, when do I use BRV? And so, but instead, if I call BRV, if I call it cleanser and I say, oh, it's this cleanser, you can look at your plant and if you see, oh, like on citrus, you get that black sooty mold growing on your citrus. Well, heck, I got cleanser sitting right here and it immediately says to me, well, I should use that on here. I should spray that.
29:06 You know, and so by putting these into this kind of intuitive way of understanding natural farming with these intuitive names. That's the aspect that I'm trying to bring to this farming, that it's not some mystery. It's really these same tools that we use in our lives. We use food, medicine, cleanser, structure, fuel, all these things. We use them in our lives. That same intuitiveness that you already know how to use these things should be the same intuitiveness that you have towards your farm. Um, you know, so, so often if you're learning from other, other chemical farming, it's like,
29:43 you know, you have triple 16 or something and you're like, you know, or like some eight, five, whatever, you know, like these different levels. And it's, it's really hard to understand from my, my perspective, it's really hard for me to understand like when I should use something or when I should not and when to do things. But by naming these solutions with this type of vocabulary, I hope you can see how it makes these tools available so that you can be an intuitive farmer. So you guys with that? Nod, shake, yeah. Yeah, Drake, I got a question for you. Sure.
30:22 way back in the beginning i was wondering if you could kind of just go over that again really back in the beginning you said the the plants set send out sugars out of their roots and the microorganisms collect up those sugars and then they do what do you remember you telling Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what natural farming is, is mimicking the natural systems. So if you're going to a forest, there's nobody fertilizing that forest, right? But the plants are growing, they're thriving, they're doing amazing. the system that's working there is there's a symbiotic relationship between the plant
31:13 and the microorganisms and this is something that's evolved over thousands of years so the duty of the plant is the plant grows up it builds leaves those leaves are then able to use photosynthesis to take the sunlight they take and they take that energy which then makes a triple carbon bond, which the plant turns that sunlight into sugars. It's able to take that carbon, like building those carbon bonds, that energy that it's able to synthesize from that photosynthesis. And the way the plant grows is that it also needs earth minerals. So about 4%
32:00 of the plant's upper surface is earth minerals. So those are like your manganese and copper and those types of things, but they're very small parts of the plant. Majority of your plant is carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's mostly, you know, there's not very much of the rest of the elements, but the plant, copper is a vital element for plants. So how does the plant get it? Well, the plant has roots, right? And so common knowledge is those roots reach out into the soil and we'll find that copper and bring it back. But the reality is that the roots are not fine enough
32:40 to reach out into the soil to find enough copper. So what the plant does is it virtually extends its root system by connecting with certain types of microorganisms, such as different types of fungus and or bacterias. And it says to those fungus and bacteria, it doesn't actually say it, instead, what it does is it knows it'll put out a certain type of sugar. And when it puts out this type of sugar, that bacteria or that fungus that likes to get copper starts to grow and grows in immense numbers. And when that happens, those copper microorganisms from the root zone will
33:25 reach out and will find that copper. And then through their tubular structure, they'll bring it back to the root. And then the plant in exchange will give it some sugar. And so it's putting out what they call exudates. It's a technical term, but if you look up root exudates and those types of things, it's exactly what the plant is doing. So that's the way it's working. These plants are growing up above, they're grabbing sunlight, they're then making that energy and then putting the energy and sugars into the ground. And something like a banana tree
34:04 will take almost half of its energy and dump it into the soil as sugars. So the plants are actually injecting a ton of sugar into the soil, which then breeds the microorganisms, which then sequesters more carbon. So that's what leads to building humus and building these soil structures. And those are the microorganisms that are living off the plant roots and everything. So does that answer that question? Yeah. Yeah. How do you spell exudate? It is. Exudate. It's like exude. E-X-U-D-A-T-E. Got it. Thank you. That was actually the most
34:49 epic description of that happening I've ever heard. Thank you. Yeah. I never knew any of that. Thank you. Yeah. It's quite amazing. And the more we learn about this, of understanding how these relationships work. And, and the thing is that this, um, this solution right here, number three, that's up here, this food is a sugar extraction. That's actually very similar to what the plant is exuding in the soil. So this solution right here, you can spray this into your plant. And so say, say you have a young plant and you, and, and, and poor soil. Well, I can spray
35:29 this number three, this food onto my plant surface. And then the plant, instead of having to produce these exudates from itself, it can just take these ones that you've gotten from other plants, it can absorb it into itself, and then it can exude that into the soil. So you're actually helping your plant do exactly what it would do already. And then further, if you think, So you're giving it, this number three is almost exactly like those plant exudates. And then number four here, this cleanser is just like a fruit is falling.
36:05 And then when you ever walk through like a guava forest, when guavas are falling and you smell that like vinegar, champagne-y type smell, the plant is naturally making this cleanser in the soil. So it's making a vinegar in the soil. So all these solutions are just mimicking what's already happening, but in a way where the soil underneath thinks that, like, say I make a food from bananas, but I'm growing carrots, and I spray it on there, and all of a sudden the soil thinks, wow, there's all these bananas growing up above.
36:43 But you may be doing a monoculture of carrots and you can spray different foods from different sources. But I feel like I'm getting a little bit off on a tangent here. But if you can follow that along, you can use these solutions to kind of biohack the soil where you can actually have monocrop type conditions, but the soil thinks there's a polycrop. And it thinks like, oh, there's all this great rich forest above me because there's all this vinegar and all this food and all this medicine and all these things falling on me.
37:17 It thinks there's a whole intact ecosystem and it doesn't know that it's not there. So you as the farmer acting as this surrogate kind of provider of a rich ecosystem and the biology then responds in kind where the biology is just rich and amazing. And you have this filthy soil. and um i've had uh people you know all over tell me it's like you know i started knf and i could only stick a stake like five inches in the soil and then they've been practicing for a year or two and now they can drive that stake five feet into the ground so without changing anything else
37:56 they're just spraying these solutions and putting these microbes and it's relieving the compaction of the soil. So these solutions, what they do is they convince the ecosystem that it's healthy, even though maybe it's not. And then by virtue of doing this, the result is your ecosystem does become healthy. So it's a triple-edged sword there. So yeah, thanks for that question. That was good to kind of get me into that. And What I want to do here now is this next little section is kind of how do I take those nine tools and put them into practice?
38:43 And then the next part after that is a little bit about more the microbial theory. Okay. So when you are doing planting and you're going to go out to your farm, if you look at these solutions that are up here, there's seven of them. The first thing you're going to do is get your soil prepped and build good soil foundation. So that's number one is your soil formula. Then the next thing we do is we combine these tools in a way that helps you with a seed soak solution. So the seeds I'm going to go plant into my soil, I can take these nine tools and combine
39:23 them in a certain way that I can soak my seeds so that they'll get a boost. Then the next one is a maintenance formula, which is something I use all the time. And it's just a general purpose formula. But then I can specifically target vegetative growth by using a leaf solution, this leaf formula that's up here. Then as my plant goes from a vegetative, just like humans will go from growing as youth, then we hit a puberty phase where we go into puberty. And then that's when your plants are starting to bloom. They're starting to put out their flower buds. And then
40:02 after that, then they go into a fruiting phase where from the buds come out these nice fruits or seeds or whatever your plant's growing. And then at the very end, you combine these nine tools into a way that you can have a very good harvest. So that last two weeks before I'm going out, say I'm growing amazing lychee and I want just the best, sweetest lychee. I want to be the legendary lychee man of Hawaii. I go out and spray this harvest formula right before I pick it. And then people are like, whoa, your lychees are twice as sweet. And it's like, yeah,
40:40 Yeah. It's because I followed this formula. So those are the seven stages of growth, all the way from the soil, all the way to harvest. So this table here on the right side of the screen shows how to take all those formulas on the very top there, all these formulas on the very top. And then there are your seven formulas down the side. So just like a table. So say, say I want to do the maintenance solution, I'm going to include food, cleanser, medicine, and structure. And these are, I'm going to take these solutions and they're just like,
41:21 I don't even know if you can see them behind me, but it's just like a liquid solution. And for each gallon of water that I'm making, say I'll add in eight milliliters of food, eight milliliters of cleanser, four milliliters of medicine, four milliliters of structure. And all that, so that, what is that, 16 plus 8, 24 milliliters of solution goes into that one gallon. And then I would then water that gallon out onto my crop, or I can spray it foliarly. So, you guys are following me with this table here? And this is giving you your different formulations coming across.
42:08 So these different stages that I've talked about of, you know, maintenance or soil or seed, you can see if you read that table across of what, what of those nine core solutions I'm including. And those are exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about the plant exudates at a certain point in the plant's life. It's going to want this combination of plants or of solutions. like that would naturally be occurring type of thing. So I'm going to just like leave this of a little hand-waving type of stuff, because I know
42:49 the easiest way to explain this is with Bronson and in the field of taking these solutions and putting them together and to do them. But if you can read this here, and this is just like a shotgun guide, it'll give you a way to do it. And so what I want to let you know is on my farm, I once a week make a 40 gallon sprayer because that's, that's the sprayer I have for my tractor and I'll go around and that will spray about two acres that I have of fruit trees. And then And that's like my sugarcane fields and my, they're pineapples and, you know, pretty,
43:32 pretty much everything that I have that I'm growing intensely is, um, is from that 40 gallons on my tractor sprayer. So how much solution is that for me? It's one liter of concentrates. so to to spray my entire farm once a week i'm using about this much of my solutions and i take this much solution and i pour it into my 40 gallon sprayer and then i'm ready to go and so in terms of amount of solutions that i need i um i end up using on my farm about a gallon
44:18 a month of my finished solutions. So if I want to do a full year of farming, you can take of these, for me, I just need to make 12 gallons of a combination of these. So I feel like it's maybe not the most clear way to explain it, but really, I don't need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gallons of stuff to do my entire farm for a year. I only need 12 gallons of solution. So for me to make these solutions, it really only takes about one week of applying and about 50 pounds of sugar or so to make everything.
45:09 So, um, so I'm not using that much on my farm to, to do this. Like if you, if you take that out to like weigh, weigh all that amount versus the amount of fertilizer it would usually take to do things I'm using just like homeopathic amounts of solutions. So is that, yeah. Um, so yeah. So is there any questions here about this that I can answer before I go into a little bit more the microbial theory and talk a little bit about how those things work together? great i have a question um so for like the maintenance formula you would do that once a
46:00 month for like kind of everything and then all the other solutions based on where the planting is you would also do that once a month or just curious of the timeline of of using these solutions okay that's that's a great question and so what i'm what i'm doing on my farm is once a week i'm i'm going around and spraying okay and what i do is i target to where majority of my crops are so if you're looking at this table here i say to myself okay are most are most my crops needing leaf solution? Like, is it like, are they needing bloom solution? Are they needing fruit solution?
46:51 In my case right now, because I have so many fruit trees that are in the fruiting phase, like my, all my light cheese are happening right now. What I loaded in my tractor last week was this fruiting solution. Got it. Okay. So I went across that table where it says, fruit and everything that was there, that's what I loaded into my 40-gallon sprayer. And it ended up, and it ends up being just slightly more than one liter of these concentrated solutions into that 40 gallons of water. Okay, awesome. I'm also farming on old sugarcane land.
47:37 do you find like in the beginning you have to do a lot more of these amendments and over time not so much or is it just like a regular flow you just do every week no matter what um yeah well well number one is to make it easy for yourself um to do it's it's if it's not easy you're not going to do it so for me the tractor sprayer is really easy i also have um like a little Maruyama weed whacker engine that's a sprayer. And that's what I use around my home garden. And so number one is you got to make it easy. But I need less and less as my plants are
48:26 getting developed. So for instance, because I'm expanding over this 25 acres, but there's a field behind me over here, um, where we're just getting it prepped for Ava right now. And it's, it's, it's terrible. Like there's nothing planted. It's, it's, it's really hard. So what I'm doing with that field is I load up this soil, uh, formula. So the one, the one just below the maintenance, it's the second one down this soil formula. And what I'm doing with that one is I actually have a 250 gallon, um, IBC tote. Yeah. And I have a little roof that fills that thing up and I'm on
49:14 the Hilo side. So it rains, I'm on, I'm on the East side of big Island. So it rains a lot. And so every time that tank is full, I go out there with the, the soil formula. I fill that tank up. I drain a little water out and then I fill it up, which it basically, that takes about, um, it's about a, it's about two gallons of solutions to fill that 250 gallons up. Um, and then I drench that. So my really poor soil, I'm just, I'm just opening a valve and I, and I basically have two inch pipe that I, that I haven't glued together. And so I can put nineties on it and
49:54 put it wherever I want. And I just drench that field. So every time it's, you know, every time the tank's full of water, I'm like, all right, go up there with some solutions, dump them in, open that valve. And so I'm flooding and drenching that area. And that's how I'm bringing back like this really dead land that it's, it's further away from my house. It's like zone five type thing. I don't, I don't know why I'm planting Ava out there, but you know. wow cool thank you so much so and then um the other the other thing that we've done here is um i've we've made these um
50:38 raised talk uh we call them food tacos but we basically take um iron roof and bend it into a, um, a frame and then fill that with soil. So you can garden up at waist height. And I've been working with these veterans who are disabled veterans that can't bend over and they, but they want to get into growing food. So what, what I've done is I've given each of them a jar with like this much of a, of the maintenance solution, um, pre-mixed in here. So I take all four of those components, I combine them in here in concentrated form, and then they just take a spoonful into a spray bottle.
51:20 And so their garden that they're growing in this raised bed, they just take this, they put in one spoonful, and then they go spray each of their crops with a little spray bottle. And they're getting amazing results, growing lettuce, cilantro, carrots, all kinds of things. So even on a small scale, you can pre-mix any of these solutions and then make it easy to just add in for small amounts of what you want to do. So on a larger scale, I'll mix all those things in. But on a small scale, you can pre-mix and then just make your own small little bottle up to do.
52:01 And that's been working really well for them. So, um, so I wanted to just, um, I wanted to just talk to you guys a little bit about microbes. Um, this is, I, I kinda, um, I, I love this idea of good versus bad and what is, what is good? What is bad? And really, um, if, if you're good, your microbes will be good. Meaning that, um, all of you guys, I'm sure are nice, reasonable people that think of yourselves as good people, right? let's say I don't feed you for two, three weeks. Okay, Josh, watch out for him. But if I don't feed you for two or three weeks and I locked you in a room,
52:52 do you think you guys will get angry at each other? I think someone will get violent. Maybe someone would think about eating one of the other people. Who's going to go down first? right? And from being good, reasonable people, if you're stressed out, all of a sudden you become kind of bad, right? And so this is the same theory that's in the soil. Oftentimes we think, you know, like there's disease like Ralstonia or, you know, bacterial wilts or, you know, name some type of soil disease, some type of pathogen that's out there. But if you start to
53:32 look at the environment, it's really what's happening is the environment is bad. And that's why you're getting things that are out of hand. So the three characters we're going to work with here are the good guys, the bad guys, and the neutral guys. Okay. Now, in an ideal soil type of thing, 50% of the microbes out there are going to be neutral. They're going to be in the middle. They're not going to be good. They're not going to be bad. They're just going to be in the middle. Then 25% will be good. 25% will be bad. But this is just a story that hasn't happened yet
54:20 because it's never this case where it's balanced like this, where the good and bad are balanced, And then you have the neutral middle. What you end up with instead is where what happens is instead of being a 25%, 25% of the good and bad, the bad will then, so say in this first case, the bad becomes 5% more, the bad becomes 30%, okay? And the good is 20% here. Well, what happens when the bad becomes the majority over the good is this middle neutral microbes side with the bad. So instead of having just 30% bad and 20% good, you end up having 80% bad and only 20% good.
55:11 As soon as the bad gets a majority, all the neutrals side with the bad. So all of a sudden, If your soil is a little bit out of balance, all the microbes become not so good for your plants. And this is how you have poor soil, is all of a sudden this balance where these neutral guys flip to the bad side and they vastly outnumber your good guys. And this is just the way it works. This is even in humans, social, politics, all kinds of stuff. You have a little bit of an upset majority. And then all of a sudden, these neutral people just go to that side.
55:50 So our job is not to go out and try to fight the bad, because if we're fighting the bad, we end up fighting all these neutral microbes in the middle, as well as the bad guys. And instead of trying to fight this thing, we're fighting 80%. So what the key is, is to do is to feed the good guys. is just to go out there and instead of saying, okay, I got some soil disease, what should I do? Should I go spray poison? Should I go try to kill these bad guys? Should I try to sterilize my soil? You'll end up like in Florida where they have just the citrus disease just ravaging their crops
56:34 because they're trying to go fight the bad guys. They're saying, there's this disease that's attacking the citrus and we got to fight it and we got to spray copper and we got to kill it. and you end up going and what you end up doing is fighting and fighting and fighting. And you're always fighting this bad. The whole theory of what I'm bringing here is if you want to win the soil and you want to bring the soil back and you want to have a healthy environment, the better solution here is to feed the good guys. And so what you do is you start to put out these natural farming foods, all these nine
57:11 tools that I talked about and these seven formulas of putting them together in these ways, you figure out how to nourish your good microbes. And look, in this case, you only had to change that 5%. You only had to, like, say you spread your IMOs and you spread, you know, you go get the good microbes, you put them out there, you feed them, you bring in the reinforcements. And all of a sudden, instead of having to fight 80%, you just increase your good guys by 5%. 5%. And now the other microbes, the bad guys are in a minority and all those middle neutral
57:47 microbes swing to your side and become your teammates and become better. So this is the whole way that natural farming works of how do you get such amazing results? It's not like you're doing all the work. You're really just changing this 5% balance between the good and the bad And when you bring the good into a majority, all of a sudden, now your microbes are able to go find the foods they need. They're not being harassed and shaken down and the bad guys are taking over. You put that little bit majority, now all the microbes, your whole system becomes good.
58:27 So the whole thing of the way I encourage you to farm is don't worry about the bad. You got something that's going that's bad, just focus on the good. Like just bring in the good, bring more of the good workers to the soil, bring more food, bring more resources. And even the most thug people, if you bring like a cute baby around and some food, they're probably going to be nice. Like, you know, like even the most rough guys that you see, you bring the right food, the right atmosphere. And it's like, they're good people. There's really a genuine good heart in people.
59:02 And same, same with these microbes, same with everything. Everything has a purpose out there. So you as a farmer, you as thinking of what am I going to do with my soil? What am I going to do with these things? Just focus on increasing the good. And it's just a small balance between that 5%. Like I said, it's 25, 25, 50. If you just get that 30% on the good side, all of a sudden it becomes 80%. And it's like, wow, all of a sudden this majority of good has become there for me.
59:33 So that's what I wanted to kind of leave you with in this story here of like, you know, what's, what's going to win out there. Like which, which side are you going to choose the good, the bad, and how are you going to get your soil to come to life? Well, it's a combination of using these tools and bringing the good guys and empowering them. And that's how you get to what, um, what you need. So, um, so let's see here. I got a little bit more on this. And yeah, it's basically, you know, it's just, it's providing the basics to your soil. And these recipes are the basics. They're real simple.
1:00:15 You can get more advanced once you're a really good farmer. And sure, you can really get tuned in and really use these to your advantage. But really, in general, it's about just making sure there's food, cleanser, structure, medicine, minerals, good microbes. These are just the basics. And you put those things out there and the natural system, you'll get 80% of your soil all of a sudden working for you. They'll, the microbes will find what they needed. They'll, they'll, this system will start to work in your favor. So it's really, you know, to me, it's a rewarding system. It's, you know,
1:00:50 the side effect is that the runoff off your farm will be cleaner and, and your neighbors, um, well, you know, you'll have better produce and all these things from, from practicing this way. And, and I always, um, huge, huge thing I like to talk about is, is climate change that, um, we as farmers have more access to land than conservationists and, and of the arable land, more than 50% of the land is in agriculture. And so if we want to make a difference in climate change and we want to make a difference, it's farmers that have the access. It's farmers that
1:01:28 have these tools. And the byproduct of good land care is that we're going to grow amazing produce. So the way I look at it is I can stabilize my land by putting more better microbes out there that are going to hold the carbon in the soil, that are going to build better structure. It's going to have more airspace for water to hold. So I'm going to have more moisture in my soil. So I'm not going to have these crazy wet and dry periods. I'm going to have wet soil. That's going to stably let out the water up into the atmosphere. And so I always talk about, you know,
1:02:04 like for me, why, why, why do I farm? It's not, it's not because I'm trying to make money. It's because I'm trying to heal the earth. And I found that farming is one way that you can heal the earth and make, make money with the produce that I'm growing. And it becomes this, um, this positive loop of when I, you know, I do better soil, I get more food, which then enables me to put more land into better cultivation and regenerative practices are the way to do it. So, um, so spreading this idea and getting these solutions out to people,
1:02:40 because I often feel like people are, um, paralyzed when it comes to climate change. we think, oh, it's impossible. But it's really like, if you think of how many acres we have in farming, imagine all that area is holding the water and the soil and it's getting richer and is then the gases coming out of there are good, replenishing the air and everything. So anyway, I get out on that tangent and I love it, but I just wanted to share that with you. And so again, this presentation is talking about the secret society, which is these microbes.
1:03:17 And in you, 90% of the DNA in you is not you, it's microbes. Only 10% of the cells in your body are actually human cells. The thing is that your human cells are way bigger and the microbe cells are really small. So you appear like you're a human, right? Because you have these huge human cells, but you're only 10% human. You're actually 90% microbe. And so. So, so thanks. Yeah, just the rest of that presentation kind of gets into a lot of recipes that we we've
1:04:03 covered a lot. And, and I hope you guys enjoyed that. I'm glad I was able to have something for you guys. I really enjoyed seeing you in the chat. It's really amazing, this family we've made, people coming together. Today was gathering together, and that's what we're doing. It's us. It's you. It's everybody. I'm going to do my best to really heal up this week, really you know focus on drinking some more natural farming solutions throw them in my water really focus on hydrating I just think it's you know that's it's good health it's all
1:04:49 it's a microbiome it's us it's all the whole way through and so I just appreciate you guys tuning in I'll check you out next week I'm pretty pretty sure I'll be I'll be back next week and be be able to be up on this and um but just want to send you guys you know some special love out today mother's day um special love up to the mothers and you know couldn't do this without my mom she's super supportive she even threw a sticker in the chat if you guys saw you know it's it's here's mother's day and what's she doing she's like tuning into this you know and um so it's
1:05:30 it's it's great so appreciate you love you long live the natural farmer knf office hours check it out knf support and um yeah mahalo everybody and uh yeah aloha