Fermented Seawater, Brown Rice Vinegar, Fish Amino Acid
Drake opens with Master Cho's recipe for fermented seawater: seawater diluted 1:30, rice wash water at 1:200, and FPJ (mugwort or dropwort) at 1:500, held half a day in summer or two to three days when cool. He explains brackish water like Puget Sound works too, since estuaries mix fresh and salt water and carry more microbial life, and that the top inch of seawater holds the most microbes while water 10 feet down holds more minerals and less plastic. Brown rice vinegar comes from one-third finished FPJ to two-thirds water, sped up with a scoby or a splash of apple cider vinegar.
On FPJ, he explains why mugwort and dropwort are chosen for KNF Food: mugwort revitalizes plants at bud break, dropwort is rich in iron and manganese and helps circulation, and cucumber is not a true substitute for either since every plant carries its own hormones and enzymes. He also talks through favorite herbs for medicinal KNF Food, including oregano, rosemary, basil flower, and comfrey.
On IMO troubleshooting, Drake says a stalled IMO4 pile can be kick-started with a little FPJ and lactobacillus, and that low-temperature piles holding 100-110°F can still finish well if left undisturbed. He covers EM as lactobacillus, purple non-sulfur bacteria, and yeast, notes yeast breaks sugars into alcohol and CO2, and warns that IMO3 should be converted to IMO4 within one to three months or it will turn into moths.
He closes with foliar spraying (mist the underside of leaves, don't let it drip), drenching at four times the spray rate (100 gallons per acre vs. 25), fixing a fish amino acid batch with little liquid by using fish heads and guts, storing LAB in the fridge for about a month before it loses its rod shape, and a note that monocropping with KNF is fine on existing farmland but is not a reason to clear diverse forest.
Questions answered
- 3:34 How do you make fermented seawater? — Mix seawater 1:30, rice wash water 1:200, and FPJ (mugwort or dropwort) 1:500, then hold half a day in summer or 2-3 days if cool.
- 6:10 How do I make brown rice vinegar? — Take finished FPJ, use one-third of a bucket plus two-thirds water, and let it ferment into vinegar.
- 9:37 Can I use brackish water instead of seawater? — Yes, brackish water like Puget Sound often carries more microbial life since it's an estuary where fresh and salt water mix.
- 11:00 How do I collect microbially rich seawater? — Skim just the top quarter-inch to inch of the water, where microbial activity is highest.
- 13:11 Where do I gather mineral-rich seawater? — Go about 10 feet below the surface, below the layer where pollution and microplastics tend to float.
- 14:37 How do I reconstitute seawater from sea salt? — Add 30 to 35 grams of sea salt per liter of water.
- 18:10 Is cucumber a good replacement for dropwort and mugwort in FPJ? — Not really, each plant carries its own unique properties, so cucumber only approximates them.
- 26:48 How do I jump-start an IMO4 pile that won't heat back up? — Spray a little FPJ and some lactobacillus on top, and check that you haven't added too much dirt.
- 31:36 Do you make EM for KNF, and what would you add for EM5? — EM is lactobacillus, purple non-sulfur bacteria, and yeast, already present in KNF ferments, so it's not core but works fine.
- 37:35 What's the best way to apply KNF foliar sprays? — Mist the underside of the leaves lightly; if it's dripping off the plant, you're over-spraying.
- 40:12 Is it okay to drench instead of spraying? — Yes, but use about four times as much, 100 gallons per acre versus 25 for foliar spray.
- 41:34 My year-old FAA has little liquid, did I add too much sugar? — Probably not; extra sugar just settles at the bottom. Use fish heads and guts for the best liquid yield.
- 46:15 How long can I store IMO3 before it spoils? — Mix it into IMO4 within one to two months, three at the latest, or it can turn into a moth infestation.
- 50:53 Does a pressurized sprayer kill the biology in compost tea? — It's likely more about impact than pressure, a fine mist is fine but biology bouncing off the leaf can be destroyed.
- 54:49 How long can LAB be stored in the fridge? — About one month is safe; after that the rod-shaped bacteria start to decline unless you super-saturate it with sugar.
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 Welcome and I Ching
- 3:34 Fermented seawater: recipe and uses
- 6:10 Brown rice vinegar from FPJ
- 9:37 Brackish water vs seawater, and collection
- 15:47 Vinegar fermentation and makgeolli
- 18:10 Cucumber vs dropwort and mugwort FPJ
- 22:14 Favorite herbs for medicinal KNF Food
- 24:30 Drought-resistant plants and FPJ
- 26:48 Jump-starting a stalled IMO4 pile
- 30:30 Insulating an IMO4 pile in cold weather
- 31:36 Do you make EM in KNF?
- 34:11 Yeast's role in fermentation
- 37:35 Applying KNF foliar sprays and drenches
- 41:34 Troubleshooting a low-liquid FAA batch
- 44:33 Storing IMO4 and why IMO3 spoils
- 47:30 How much FAA to make and use
- 50:53 Does a pressurized sprayer kill biology?
- 54:49 Storing LAB: fridge vs sugar
- 56:13 Monocropping with KNF and IMOs
- 58:25 KNF Support and KNF Farm
Transcript
Auto-transcribed with Whisper. Click any timestamp to play from there.
0:00 Hey good morning welcome to the office hours. Sorry I was a little bit late. I had some technical difficulties just trying to get my mic together and this mic isn't going to want it's but and my other camera was messed up so anyway just getting here this morning good to be here thanks for tuning in and hopefully you can hear me alright. I know it's probably a little quieter but I have to go off the mic on my computer. So, start today, get myself a little centered here before we go into this, and start with a little bit of I Ching.
0:49 So today is dispersion or dissolution, and disperse hard attitudes with gentleness. So the hexagram one comes to indicate there are rigidity and harshness present, either in yourself or others, and that they should be dissolved now for the benefit of all. Whenever we fall into a negative state, such as judgment, fear, anger, anxiety, or desire, our attitude becomes structured and inflexible. As long as we remain in this condition, we cannot receive the assistance of the higher power. Therefore, if we wish to return to good fortune now, we must take steps to dissolve the hardness.
1:40 The image of Juan is that of warm spring wind steadily dissolving winter us. It is meant to teach us that through perseverance and gentleness rather than aggressiveness, we can overcome what is hard. The I Ching counsels the use of religious forces now. Employ music, prayer, meditation, a common project, or some other form of sacred concentration or ceremony to release pent-up energy in yourself and others. Allow harsh and unforgiving feelings to be carried away by the song of a flute, the reverberation of a drum, or the sound of the wind through the trees.
2:29 and your mind's eye see where the flow of positive energy is blocked and imagine this place is an ice pool breaking up in a thawing river unfortunately until the inflexibility is removed there can be no unity either within your own spirit with others or with the sage remember that inferior emotions are hard where the attitude of the superior person acceptance detachment modesty innocence and equanimity have a quality of softness to them by returning to this now you ensure your own good fortune so good good to see you guys um or i guess you're seeing
3:20 me and wanted to start off with a question from last week. I was kind of this morning going through these and had a question here. It was talking about, last week he talked about storing seawater but there was also a second question there that was talking about fermenting seawater and so So looking here at Master Cho's old recipe book, I'm just going to read to you the recipe for fermented seawater, which says mix seawater diluted 1 to 30. Mix in some rice water at a dilution of 1 to 200.
4:11 And mix in a can of food, also known as fermented plant juice. And he recommends that you use mugwort or dropwort at a dilution of 1 to 500. And so mix all that together and keep the mixture for half a day in the summer. and for two to three days if it's cloudy or a bit cooler. And then he says use the mixture when it becomes whitish in case. And so the rice wash water, if you're not familiar, that's the same process you use when you make the K&F protectors, when you're getting the rice starch off the water.
4:57 So just take rice, put it in water, and stir it around until you get that cloudy water. and that's the rice wash water that he's recommending you put in this at one to 200 dilution. And then it says here how to use the fermented seawater. Although it doesn't really, or it says the fermented seawater prevents and controls anthracnose, which is a common root-eating fungal problem. And he also recommends you add IMO4, KMF medicine, and KMF structure to the fermented seawater
5:44 for increased microbial activity. So a little bit on fermented seawater, it's a pretty easy thing to make. And yeah, so the rest of this recipe here he's talking about how to use seawater itself. So kind of covered that last time. And next question here was from GoPro. And he or she was asking about how do I make brown rice vinegar? And that's kind of an easy one to do.
6:30 So what I do is I take the finished fermented clam juice, a can of food, and make that one third of a bucket, and then add two thirds water to fill it up. And that will then ferment into a vinegar. so I typically use any like I'll try to make a banana fruit um food and then use that in there to um yeah how my audio is low and a microphone closer you know I I really I guess I can put this thing closer like my keyboard right here and it's probably also the fan is spinning
7:21 like crazy a bit but my usual mic is out so I will try to put this closer and try to make that happen sorry sorry about that um I didn't sound check prior to this I was trying to get all the questions together and um just didn't sound check to get my mic on so apologize again about that so hopefully this is a little bit better I did put it significantly closer to myself so anyway the the vinegar is you know is the fermented plant juice or the K&F food and then two-thirds water and then to that you can add a scoby which
8:12 you can get from a finished vinegar that you already have the scobies look like these discs like if you made kombucha you've seen these kind of pancake solid gelatinous things forming in there those are the scobies if you don't have one of those you can also accelerate your vinegar by taking a apple cider vinegar you know like the organic one they sell at the store and just pouring a little bit of that vinegar in as a starter to help it along. So, yeah, so hopefully that answered that on the brown rice vinegar.
8:58 And someone, I think, yeah, GoPro, you're on today too. Hey, how's it? You were saying you just got your niruk and about to begin matgoli. so it's a good process to make it making the traditional brown rice vinegar is always recommended but if you don't have access to brown rice doing it from any fruit so taking you know making apple cider vinegar or making coconut vinegar or in my case I make a lot of banana vinegar any of those are really good so the next next question here was from Toma hot toe 33 and
9:43 he's saying that he lives near Seattle and it's a four four-hour drive to the ocean but it's only 10 minutes to the Puget Sound which has brackish water and he read that using brackish water in place of seawater is okay. So I just want to talk a little bit about seawater, the difference in seawater versus brackish water. If you're using brackish water, there's probably more microbial life in it because as one of the most fertile places on the planet is where the seawater is mixing with fresh water in the river like estuary type of places and I would imagine that
10:36 in this case the Puget Sound acts as a giant estuary where fresh water and salt water are mixing so there's probably higher microbial activity microbial life happening so in that case it's happening kind of in the top quarter inch to inch of the sea not there's not that much microbial activity happening down deeper so if you are going to gather seawater and you want to gather the most micro microbial activity you want to gather when you go to get your seawater just try to skim the very top of the water off and collect that and that being your your best chance to get the most microbial activity.
11:23 And the microbial activity can be hugely beneficial because there's basically two sets of microbes around. There's freshwater microbes and there's saltwater microbes. And so if you're taking the saltwater microbes and bringing those up onto your land, then it's like mixing in a whole nother diverse culture and you can use this seawater that you've collected with a bunch of microbes to kind of revitalize your land and this is an analogy that's real um apropos to living here in hawaii because we're on an island and it's it's like you know
12:08 it's a small town and if you've if you've dated every person around and you're trying to look for a partner it's it's kind of hard because everyone has relations with each other and set in their ways but imagine putting this seawater on your land is like bringing in a busload of exotic tourists that are that are wanting to to live there and so it brings in this opportunity for more diversity to happen so the the soil microbes that are living there meet these new seawater microbes and they're able to interact enough to reproduce and it helps to
12:44 increase your diversity of of the microbial population and again that seawater is always diluted 1 to 30 or in some cases you know for the ripening solution it's diluted about 1 to 15 but it's always diluted before you put it to the land so that you don't cause salinity problems. And to go back to the collection of seawater, the other reason to gather seawater is to get minerals back on your land. And the minerals you would want to grab from a lower strata of seawater if possible. So if you're not trying to go for the microbial life, you want to get more the sea minerals, then gather it from
13:31 from below the surface and i've been told by certain people that about 10 feet below the seawater is much cleaner place to gather it because a lot of the pollution and everything mixes on the top of the seawater but that if you can get seawater from 10 feet down you can get beneath that layer that's been kind of contaminated with things like fukushima leaking in the ocean and you know you see the Pacific garbage patch of plastic that tends to float up in the top 10 feet all these micro plastics and things tend to float up in the top 10 feet unless
14:11 they settle down to the bottom so the bottom of the ocean so if you're gathering just 10 feet below the ocean you're gathering a very high mineral rich ocean to to get these minerals out of there so that that's also So grabbing the minerals from deeper is also similar to reconstituting seawater. So when you reconstitute it that way, you're also getting a lot of minerals. So that's taking sea salt and mixing it with seawater. And to reconstitute seawater, you'd add between 30 and 35 grams per liter of sea salt to make seawater.
14:56 so i want to jump back here to the to the live a little bit and answer some of these questions coming over um so so gopro again you did you did ask about the brv so um so that that's you know that's good kind of answered that already um oh you think the time change has something to do with this healing earth. Actually in Hawaii, we don't have daylight savings. So it's the same time for me. It's just, I should have just been in the office earlier getting these things set up. I apologize about that. But yeah, Hawaii doesn't have daylight savings time. It's really a, it's a nice thing.
15:40 We don't have to set our clocks. They're just, they're always Hawaiian time. So how long do you let the Mongoli keep fermenting? I've never made the brown rice vinegar using the Magoli process. However, to answer that, another way to make the brown rice vinegar, as I was saying, was to take the one-third plant juice, the two-thirds water. But the other way you can do it is in that you can put it in like a... I just leave it open to the air because it it's an you know if it's aerobic fermentation it'll
16:27 turn to vinegar however you can seal it and make it anaerobic so cut off the oxygen and put on a you know a release valve so the air will go out but air won't come in I mean you can get those at brewing stores and you can convert that instead of just letting it go straight from the plant juice in water to vinegar, you can actually convert it to an alcohol, which can happen quicker. And then you can expose that to oxygen and the alcohol will then convert to vinegar. So that's like a Makkoli type process. And I think that's about two weeks of being exposed to the oxygen.
17:06 All your alcohol will convert over to being vinegar. I'm not entirely sure because I don't do it that way, but I've heard of it. and I know that it is possible to do that way. And so Healing Earth, oh, and you're saying you want the wine and BRV. Yeah, I would definitely maybe just keep the wine and make BRV from other things that are a bit cheaper and easier to do. And yeah, Healing Earth is saying it's easier to buy these vinegars And sometimes it is, you know, you can get high quality brown rice vinegar in gallon containers, fairly, fairly inexpensive.
17:51 And when I was in the Philippines, they had coconut vinegar for just really inexpensive. So that's a good choice that's pretty affordable to do. Making it large scale on a farm, I often make it from just farm waste to make vinegars. So Healing Earth is asking, what are the dropwort and mugwort replacements? Is cucumber one of them? And the dropwort and mugwort are chosen by Master Cho for specific reasons. reasons. He mentions these because what they have in them are specific properties that
18:38 the droport is really, I'm going to read it to you right here. Let's see. He says it produces a lot of juice but somewhere in here in his book he's talking about how over here okay so so here he's talking he's talking about mugwort so what he says is even though there's a slight difference between regions it is best to pick from the end of march to april when the japanese mugwort is full of energy. So he's talking about certain times to pick it, but I believe in this book as well,
19:24 he does talk about these things. Okay, so here, so the mugwort is strong against both cold and heat and has good vitality and a good amount of iron. The Japanese mugwort is used for giving vitality to the crops when they sprout buds at the end of the dormant period in spring japanese mugwort revitalizes plants in this way so he's using the mugwort especially when he's doing plant tips you know so here in hawaii what i what i tend to use for that same thing is something like sweet potato shoots and also bamboo shoots to use for these young emergent things but he's
20:13 saying that the mugwort is really good for you know when when things are first budding up and in your first plant juice you would use during spring or when you're sowing seeds would be from a mugwort and then here on the dropwort he's saying dropwort is full of iron and manganese which are good for blood circulation stimulating the peripheral nervous system and recovery from injury so drop board is typically given to two women after they have childbirth as well as a as a tea and so these types of properties when you when you ask are is the cucumber replacement for drop or
21:01 or mugwort you have to look at these types of properties that are um that are what you know what do what do people say about cucumbers you know it helps when i hear about cucumbers you know i think of people putting it on their eyes when they're spying and it's also um helps with like wrinkles and those types of things kind of this rejuvenation factor with cucumbers and so any plant material that you're taking you can kind of look these things up different nutrition facts or different, you know, like remedies of what do people use these things
21:35 for? And those are what you're looking for. So is cucumber a replacement for both of these? I would say, you know, not necessarily. Each plant has its own specific unique properties that it brings. And so looking at, you know, what they do and what they're good for, you know, each of them has their their place and nothing can really replace any of them but you can get approximates to what they are um hey tyler's here hey man we got to have your video last time um and he's asking what are my favorite herbs for using knf medicines for medicinal purposes what ratios do you take
22:21 him and he knows that i've mentioned come free um previously and love the chats and yeah thanks uh shout out to you and hannah for sure hope things are going good in oklahoma and um so what are my favorite herbs for using um someone someone mentioned it the other day it's the herb that i can't talk about without being demonetized on here um that's a that's a great one to use um
22:47 And, but herbs that we've made KNF foods out of are, oregano is a great one. Oregano tends to be kind of anti-parasitic. It's also very like spicy and heating, so it can, you know, increase your immune system in a lot of ways like that. I've made a ferment from rosemary, which is delicious to add to salads and those types of things as a dressing. It's also kind of wild to eat it. I'm not sure the exact properties of it. I've heard it helps with memory, so maybe if I drank more of it, I'd remember more of the properties.
23:34 And then also in herb we use a lot is basil. and I use make it from the basil flowers which is you know just helps those flowering things again it's great as a as a salad dressing as well any of these herbal things are kind of sweet and they make mix a little vinegar in there and drizzle some fermented plant juice on there and you've got a great salad dressing also I really like the comfrey fermented plant juice can of food it really is a good thing and especially delicious on pancakes. So putting putting those things
24:16 together are good. So hopefully hopefully I've answered the question. There's a couple more on the on the vinegar but hopefully I've kind of gone over that pretty extensively. So someone's mentioning here Mark Smith is saying I have a lot of weeds that are drought resistant. uh making fermented plant juice from them should help others that are not so hardy and yes um so i just sometimes that's a little bit um hippy dippy to say and like ubi-abi and out there of like you know what what um how does this actually function so if i have a
24:53 plant that's drought resistant and i make a fermented plant juice what you're doing is you're extracting all the enzymes and hormones and the different plant chemicals that are in there. And then when you spray it onto another plant, because it went through that fermentation process, the other plant doesn't have to digest and break it down. It can just immediately absorb all of those compounds directly into it. So that's the way you're transferring these things that are like these properties across.
25:29 because it's not only just the chemicals like say like you know i was talking about the dropwort and there's manganese in it like sure there's that chemical element of that but there's also these growth hormones and enzymes that also give the plant these characteristics and those are the things that are more absorbable in this way to transfer these abilities across and to bring them across so it's it's it's not just so um like out there and weird you're actually if you do a good fermented plant juice you make a good can of food you can then transfer it and that's how it's
26:03 working so it's more than just the chemical level it's up into like these compounds these molecules that are that are super complex and you can can give so it's a great idea if you you know if you're in the desert and you go out and you get like some sagebrush and other things that are growing out there maybe even some cactus and make those into fermented plant juice and then transfer those and spray those on your other crops that aren't as attuned to the desert you you'll probably get some of that happening and in you know it's kind of a hand-waving theory of how it happens but
26:37 it definitely works um so give it a try and try it there um so stonemason7767 is asking is there a way to jumpstart a pile of IMO4 that won't heat back up? IMO3 went well, added dirt, water, and nutrients, and nothing happened. Okay, so one thing is that you're, I'm not sure if it was an older pile of the IMO3. If you go immediately into it, it kind of helps that activity. Also, you may have added more dirt than you should have. Sometimes it's like in my piles if they're not heating up it's not enough dirt. So one way to kind of
27:29 jump start the pile... Yeah, Suze is yelling at me that it's... I said that backwards so apparently just reverse what I just said um but i've jump-started these piles by just spraying a little bit of can of fuel and also a little lactobacillus on the top of these piles after they're going and that kind of gives it enough like party food to kick back up but the last two or three im04 im04 piles that i've made have actually been um low temperature piles that they didn't actually heat up the same way that the IMO3 did. They actually stayed at about 100 to 110 degrees, somewhere between there,
28:18 and just went. And the microbes were active. You reached into the pile and it was above ambient temperature. And it turned out to be this nice ambient pile that after about 10 12 days it started to cool down and was um you know it smelled just like the fungal like you're walking in the forest and you got that nice fungus so my my nose knows that those batches turned out and they worked even though they happened at this low temperature and they were static and i think part of the problem with those were that we turned it too early that the microbes were taking off.
29:04 They were going to heat up, but then I disturbed the pile by turning it too early. And some folks on the internet will recommend that you turn your pile like almost immediately and for sure turn it the first day and all this stuff. But it's really based on the temperature and the temperature profile. And if you do turn it too early, you may interrupt those microbes because the action of turning it, what heats up a pile is these microbes are making love with each other. They're right next to each other. They're making love. They found a good partner. They're starting to heat up.
29:36 They're starting to reproduce. They're starting to create that diversity in that pile. And if I turn it, I'm going to break that apart. And it's like interrupting people right in the moment of their action and their heat. And it's hard to get back in your groove, to get right back in, to continue to reproduce in that manner. So if you're turning it preemptively and too early, and you're just turning it because you're following a recipe versus watching the temperature or using your hand as a temperature
30:04 because you'll know when things are above 120. You can't keep your hand in the pile. It's too hot. You'll immediately have to pull your hand out. And if it's not in that range, you may interrupt that lovemaking and then it can never kick off to that level. So do be careful turning them too early. That could be another thing. And it could be that you've added a little bit too much dirt to it. And you're also saying that it's a little cold here in Indiana, high 40s, low in the 28s. So if it is that cold, definitely try to insulate your pile. It's like even putting a like a old
30:44 sleeping bag or something on top and surrounding it with some like hay bales or something that you can or straw bales that you can really insulate your pile to keep it. It's just it's just like us, You know, if we were sleeping outside in the low, you know, the high 40s to low 20-8s, we'd freeze. The microbes are very similar to us. So give them a little bit more insulation or pile up, you know, some straw above your pile so you can really give it that insulation, that things that it needs. And Tyler Fry is here all the way. We visited Tyler last on the Lava tour.
31:24 So I had a Felicia for me, Tyler. Good to see you guys. Hope everything's going well with the winery and your girl up there. So we've got another question here. Do you make EM to use in KNF or is that not a thing we use? use. I have EM but want some EM5. What do I add for that? Okay, so EM is typically a collection of lactobacillus, purple non-sulfur bacteria, and yeasts. So in natural farming, even though it's not one of the core solutions of the nine core solutions. It is in Master Cho's old recipe book
32:15 here and it's yeast here. So in natural farming, we do use lactobacillus and we also use yeast. So these two things are commonly used. Yeast is used more rarely because it's a little bit more esoteric and how it's used, but they are there. And so by using these two things in natural farming, you're going to get benefit. One of the things, you know, it's compatible. The thing about it is that similar to just using too much lactobacillus or too much yeast, is these microbes are very
33:01 powerful and you can sometimes eat out the nutrition in the system that would inhibit then the indigenous microbes from um you know like it ate their food it's just like you bring a bunch of like specialized engineers into a place they may eat all your and steal all the jobs from your civilians and stuff and then they're going to leave and ship the money elsewhere and you know coming from Hawaii I'm pretty familiar with this type of stuff but but you just want to be careful not to overuse it and if you if you are using EMs and all those things be sure to
33:38 you know use the maintenance solution which is the the food the medicine the cleanser and the structure and if you're always spraying microbes plus these foods you will have what you need to be doing um you know to keep your em there um and em is in terms of like what i call it i call it like the protectors again it's going to be um those doing what they're um you know like protection type of stuff so uh since since i got into yeast and and you guys are here tuned in yeast isn't talked about that often but i'm gonna i'm gonna read to you a little bit about the function of
34:20 yeast so yeast is a microorganism which is in charge of the last step of fermentation yeast breaks down sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide which is ethanol fermentation which is a necessary process sorry this book is a little clink English yeast enhances metabolism and expands capillary vessels yeast functions to recent resynthesize organic substances decomposed by various microbes into amino acids hormones vitamins etc which are beneficial to the crop yeast produces various substances example vitamins
35:06 nucleic acid, minerals, hormones, and fatty acids in the body. Yeast also produces eight essential amino acids that humans cannot synthesize. It is healthy to eat many fermented foods containing yeast. Yeast has an excellent ability to decompose chemical fertilizers. Yeast usually sticks onto the fruit surface. Many yeast exist specifically on the grape. So especially since Tyler's here, he runs a winery, his family does, and he's super familiar with, you know, they grow grapes, they have a vineyard. So producing some yeast for your local region using these things.
35:54 And then also, you know, this is one of the reasons why folks that eat kimchi, you know, at the end of your fermentation you're getting yeast also in the fermented fruit juice recipe you're getting those yeasts happening even in the vinegar where you know it's mostly acetic acid or acid bacter acid bacterium bacterias but those yeasts also develop in a scoby a scoby is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. So anytime you have a SCOBY growing in things, there's yeast present. And so one of the reasons we don't use yeast here as one of the nine core solutions
36:36 is that yeast is kind of de facto in all the other solutions. So it's in the fermented plant juice, it's in these, the can of foods, it's in your vinegar. That's how the vinegar is able to break down these amino acids as well so it's not typically you know mentioned as as one of the things but if you did specifically synthesize yeast and you have it um you you can make it and i'm not going to go over the recipe right here right now um but but just to give you an idea of what you know the benefits of using something like em which already contains yeast and has already
37:13 been symbiotically linked to the lactobacillus and the purple non-sulfur bacteria, which also are super beneficial. Those are just a bit to tell you how all that fits in here. So got a question here. Let's see. What is the best way to apply foliar? Does French work too? so maybe maybe I think made old drench yeah you were saying drench French new French work to get a French person to apply no the best way to apply foliar it depends on your scale it's all about you know making it as easy for you to do as possible to make it as fun as possible it's not easy and
38:03 it's not fun you're probably gonna have to pay someone a lot to do it and or if it's you it's probably just not going to get done. So the best way to apply foliar on a small scale is I even use those little small, I don't know, liter bottle sprayers to just do certain things around the house that need spraying. We have some brand new kava starts that are coming up and I only have a few of them so I mix up a little tank and just go spray those. On a larger scale, I don't recommend a backpack sprayer it's just too heavy to carry on your back and mixing up that much water it's
38:43 it's you don't want to have you don't want to carry your water so i do have like a small one gallon to two gallons hand sprayer that i'll carry around and that works well um but what i really do on a larger scale is i use my tractor sprayer so the tractor is carrying the water or i use a system where i have a barrel set up and then from there i run a small pump that runs it out to a hose that has my sprayer and so i'm only carrying the hose and the sprayer around and that runs off a weed whacker engine and people always ask me what it is it's it's if you want to look it up it's a
39:21 maruyama ms 75e and i really should get sponsored by maruyama because i always promote this thing and probably sold more units of that than anyone else because it's so convenient and so easy to use and it just burns a little weed whacker two-stroke engine and it has plenty of power and at one time I was running it about like over 300 feet long when I was working on a papaya field to go spray key with the foliar spray is to spray under the leaves as much as you can but just soaking the area soaking the thing if you are spraying in on the plant and it's dripping down you're over
40:00 spraying there's no need to spray that much you can move quicker you can spray more easily it's just to mist it like imagine you just get wet but it's not enough to have it drip down really that's the level of spraying you want to do is it okay to drench yes i do drenching up at my pig pen where i catch water off the roof and then i drench and i'm primarily using the sea water in that case and i talked about this prior and i'm also using vinegar and uh can of food in there to to feed these um and it's it's a gravity fed two inch system that i can basically open it up
40:38 and it drains 275 gallons in less than five minutes so making it efficient making it easy the one thing about drenching is that you have to use about four times as much so for the same the recommendation for spraying is 25 gallons per acre of foliar spray up into the canopy or onto the plant leaf surface but drenching is 100 gallons per acre so because the plant it's harder for it to go into the soil to pick it up into the plant itself you have to add more of it however if you are drenching now you're building more of your soil microbes and the whole substratus so gotta
41:20 to think about that too and there are reasons for drenching that's why i'm doing that up at my animals especially with lots of seawater because i'm trying to rebuild the mineral structure in the soil so both those are good um robble tonewoods is saying i made faa about a year ago while there is breakdown of the fish carcass there does not seem to be a lot of liquid I'm assuming too much sugar went into it. Should I add more fish to fix this? You know, I'm not sure on this because I would have to see and maybe see a little video of it
41:58 to see what was happening. If you're just using straight up bones in the carcass, you're probably not going to get much. The best part of the fish to use for fish amino acid is the heads. the heads have a lot of those fatty acids those um aminos those things we want um i also use the guts from them um and when i'm getting like fresh ocean fish the spines are loaded with meat and all these things and usually i'm getting liquid within like a few days afterward and at first it smells you know pretty fishy and then eventually it starts to smell smoother it's hard to describe
42:35 what smoother smells like but um but it gets that more refined um like tastier kind of thing it's not as fishy smelling as as it goes so so i'm not sure why you didn't get a much that much liquid i've never had a problem of adding too much sugar to my fish amino acids um what usually happens if you add too much sugar is then it just settles down to the bottom and you get a layer of sugar it's not like less juice comes out usually the juice would come out and the sugar would just dropped to the bottom so it doesn't sound like you've added too much sugar and I'm not sure
43:09 exactly what what happened here so hard for me to diagnose without seeing more but in my case I've never added too much sugar and the ratio is usually equal weight so if I had 100 pounds of fish heads I'd add 100 pounds of sugar and just layer that through don't chop up your fish it's kind of gross just just layer it and you will end up with really good fish amino acid which I call knf fuel because it's such adds so much energy and fuel to the system so jk triple g is saying he loves labs so do I so should everybody in this world because they are protectors that keep us
43:50 healthy and we should get this recipe out to way more people because everybody needs labs one time my friend charlotte had this dream where she saw that i saved the world with lab like everyone had all these problems and i just taught everyone lab and we sprayed it everywhere and we fixed climate change we fixed pollution we got rid of smell we got healthy all these solutions for our world So it's, you know, LAB is a crucial part of that. You know, so are the IMOs because they're, you know, they will eventually come in behind the LAB, but everyone should love labs.
44:28 So shout out to you, JK, Triple G, way to go. So Iceman, I think this is Don from Alaska, is asking about storing IMO for Cedar Box or maybe Feed Bags. so storing IMO4 after you're done and I think there was a question about IMO3 somewhere in here let's see here anyway so so storing IMO4 in feedbacks if you are gonna pop some holes in them just air holes at the bottom so that you can have them so they can breathe because even though IMO4 is stable
45:14 and sleeping it's not complete it still needs oxygen so feed bags are typically um um you know waterproof and airproof so pop some holes in it so that that way um you know just just with a like a pen or something just make holes not big enough that the stuff will spill out but just you know so that air will get in there and then the key is not to like stack them super tall um what i'm doing for my imo storage is i built a box that's kind of like a raised um it's about a foot or so deep by about three feet wide by about 10 feet or eight feet long and i just pile it up
45:53 there that way it's it's off the ground because sometimes my barn does flood and i don't you You don't want to have moisture enter the system. And it just sits there. And it's aerobic enough. It's not deep enough of a pile to cut off airflow. And it stays aerobic and it stays smelling great. And I can store the IMO for about a year. If there was a question about IMO3, I just want to tell you right now, I just had a bunch of IMO3 spoil. And this was a classic thing. some folks on the internet say that you can store IMO3 for a long time but it's not true.
46:31 You're better off to make IMO4 and store that for a long time because once you've mixed it with the soil the texture becomes different and it's not as open for moths to come in. So what happened to all my IMO3? It turned into moths. There are now like hundreds of thousands of moths up at my barn. they're starting to get into other things it's i created a huge problem by storing this im03 and you want to mix it within a month or two to make im04 you know three months at the latest to mix it because the im03 still has too much food available and it will convert over into
47:10 your your mom like into bugs and all kinds of things so that's the reason for not storing it for a long time. So next question here, I guess, excuse me, I'm getting a little sip of coffee. Is Mark Smith says, I need to start my FAA now. I tried once, but it didn't turn out right. How much do I recommend for small gardens for a growing season? what what i recommend how much you need for a small garden for a growing season is you don't need that much of it maybe a liter of this stuff maybe a half gallon maybe a gallon it depends how
47:53 you define small garden to some people small gardens are way bigger than i think some people it's just like you know 10 square feet or something so it's hard to say on that however if you go and make it today and go get a make a five gallons buckets worth and you store it it gets more and more potent as you store it over time so i've had batches here at this farm that are over seven years old and they are so smooth so good that we actually use these batches in cooking so we'll mix it into a stir-fry mix it into um um into the kimchi into into burger meat
48:36 and it makes all these things so delicious and and especially where um i think this is something i want to eat more of because i i understand how these ominos rebuild dna and bring this usefulness back and i sometimes i fear i'm turning into an old man i got like wrinkles on my forehead and stuff so i gotta like drink more of this apparently some yeast to help break these things down and synthesize these things but there is yeast in the the faa especially as it gets older there is lactobacillus there are those microbes in there keeping it preserved and so those are what
49:12 um so i recommend even though you may not need that much this year go and make a five gallon bucket of it because you can always pour it off later a five gallon bucket will render probably two two and a half gallons of or yeah maybe about two gallons or so of usable fish amino acid maybe maybe a bit more depending on what type of fish you use and where it's from and how all those things but um but you will you will benefit by making it now and having it later even if you only need a little bit so the question next question was on the im03 i'm glad i already talked about that
49:51 and the four um and this question here from shaman king do you agree with the theory that using any sprayer where the pressure where you pressurize a compost tea or any solution kills or destroys the biology so from from what i've the the on the question of what sprayer and how much for the the biology I just want to get one thing out there first is that I'm not when I'm spraying things I'm not that worried about the biology itself usually what I'm doing is I'm putting out IMO4 as a solid bokashi so I guess the thing that I spread as a dust there then what I'm doing with
50:34 the sprayer is I'm spraying the like liquids like maintenance solution um and leaf solution you know my puberty solution. Like I'm not worried about the the biology per se through the pressurized pump. However, I do want to address that that I've heard and I should find the scientific studies is that it's not so much about the pressurization of the pump itself. It's about the impact. So if I'm spraying and it's coming out as a light mist and it's lightly landing on my leaves, that's going to be okay for the biology versus spraying it where it's hitting the plant and
51:11 bouncing off that's going to really destroy the biology so i don't have scientific data on that or anything that's just what i've heard in my case i'm not trying to usually spray out too much biology i'm more putting the biology out and then giving them foods to feed them in the supplemental feeds those ways so if you are doing a big compost tea um you know i'm sure there's plenty of compost T research to look this up and if you do find something link it to me maybe I can share it next time so that way we can we can share and get good science on this you know and oftentimes when I'm
51:50 like if I if for instance I make a Jadam microbe solution which I call disgustingly cheap microbes I'll just drench that out with a watering can so the biology that I'm putting out in areas I'm not trying to spray it I'm just drenching it I'm just putting it out it's happening those ways so um so and I guess part of that is maybe my fear of killing the biology through the pump but I'm not sure if the highly pressurized things do it I know when you're making compost tea you don't want to have a pump that's grinding your biology up especially if you're trying to go for a fungally
52:23 oriented compost tea because that's why I use an airlift because I don't have that same grinding thing because you want fungal strands to grow and then you don't want to grind those up so there's a bit of caveats here in compost tea and destroying biology and what equipment you're using and then go and then Austin's saying it does for sure so yeah I just be careful on all that find find some scientific literature try it yourself spray it put it under the microscope see something i just haven't done yet um if you grow indoor so gopro is asking if you go grow indoors and
53:05 correctly recycle waste water hydroponics with salts it's amazing outdoors are good for nature yeah um yeah they will survive high pressure but not like a turbine yeah so so this is so gopro is is verifying kind of what i was saying you don't want the turbine to like the pump to smash it um but not the pump pressure so so i think i think it is okay on that um so in healing earth is saying that i hope my im03 hasn't been stored too long about four to six months plan on making im04 with it in two months you know it's it's fine you know just look
53:49 at it see if you're starting to get bugs and things in there it's um but i do recommend next time you do this to do it a bit quicker um there's more vitality like i was talking earlier the person someone was saying their im04 didn't kick off fully as the as that stuff starts to break down it it doesn't turn into your soil living microbes and they don't hibernate they're still active there's still food sorts around them which is the whole reason to go from im03 to im04 is you're taking what was growing in this food source and then you're tuning it to learn how to
54:23 eat your soil which is what those microbes are going to be eating in your field anyway they're not going to be eating a bunch of millrun or that kind of stuff out there um so um okay and so apparently if you look up tim wilson you can find more on the pump pressure sprayer so get to a couple more questions here and then um so how long can labs be stored in the fridge and how long if mixed with sugar um so if you're going to store lab the lactic acid bacteria in the fridge um for sure one month is good um as you start to go beyond one month two months three months the amount of
55:07 lactobacillus the the long sticks that you find under the microscope start to decline now whether it's a pleomorphic thing and they're changing into other biology i'm not entirely sure but they do start to lose their rod shape um so so they go down if you however if you do super saturate it with the sugar not only is it better for digestion and better when you use it and keeps them stronger, they also last longer because you're tying up that water and you're tying up the amount and ability they have to grow with each other. So I always recommend super saturating
55:50 unless you're going to use it immediately. If you're going to do any type of storage, super saturate it. It's even better for you to ingest as a human being and to use later um in your in your solutions so um i want to thank you guys for for joining in today there there are a couple more questions which i'll get to start with these next time um there is one last thing that i wanted to talk about and that's somebody um i got an email here let me pull it up that last time I was talking about the like mono cropping I didn't get to the Facebook questions
56:31 sorry guys let's see so last time I was talking about mono cropping and then I got a YouTube comment where a guy in Brazil was saying that he didn't want the you know the mono cropping and I And I just want to put a caveat out there that I'm not encouraging folks to go cut down a diverse forest and start monocropping. By no means is that like what I'm advocating because it's not. But what I am advocating is that if you are doing high intensity agriculture already, you can continue to monocrop.
57:11 If you're bringing in the IMOs, you're bringing in these plant juices, you're bringing in these things. but I always think that you know as you're done with the day spray that biology out so you create diversity try to increase the diversity in your forest you know always try to replant you know planting forests getting the natural systems to go are going to benefit us in the long run so I just want to just be be clear on that that I'm not advocating to go cut down the forest and put it into K&F monoculture, even if it's better than regular monoculture. I am advocating, however,
57:46 for these ideas of, you know, existing agriculture. Let's improve that. Let's get things growing. Let's get things better. And one last little bit here is I wanted to give you guys just a message from our sponsors. This actual presentation is now sponsored by the Pure KNF Foundation and viewers like you. So if you want to get on there next time, super chat, hook it up, makes it well worth my time. But this and all these presentations of the office hours are at knfsupport.com.
58:32 and that is our foundation's support website it's where we answer more questions it's where we're building a knf community to help each other and to recognize experts in the community so if you want to check that out and then also if you want to help me out specifically and you want to help yourself out check out knffarm.com and come out to the farm to get training here at the farm there's nothing like learning in person tasting scene being integrated into this for a full week and so we got a lot of good things happening at knffarm.com those those
59:10 opportunities so i want to thank you for just letting me do a little bit of um you know sponsorship stuff if you've lasted this long you're definitely into knf so supporting our community and making that happen so um want to wish you a great november uh hoping it's growing for you guys we'll see you next week Sunday again and be back for more office hours so thanks thanks for tuning in you know long live the natural farmer Aloha
59:56 So, let's go.