Plant Rocket Fuel = Fish + Sugar

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

May's meeting covered Fuel — the KNF solution made from fermenting whole fish heads and guts in brown sugar. Drake opened by pouring a cup of finished Fuel straight down his throat in front of the room ("I fell off a dirt bike last Tuesday — my neck and spine are messed up, and this is what's putting me back together"), then passed the jar around for smells and tastes. He walked through the recipe live, layering fresh fish and sugar into a five-gallon bucket with help from two volunteers, and covered the full arc: what amino acids actually do for a plant, how to know your batch is working, how long to age it, and — critically — just how little of it to use. The evening's second half belonged to a special guest: Daniel, a natural farmer and coconut rhinoceros beetle advocate who flew over from Oʻahu to share his multi-year campaign to protect coconut trees through KNF feeding programs, JADAM sulfur, and biological controls.

TL;DR: Fuel = fish heads and guts layered with equal weight brown sugar in a five-gallon bucket, sealed with a solid lid. Deep-sea fish are best (mahi, aku, ono, ahi) — no freshwater fish, no dog food, nothing already rotten. Layer like lasagna, check the smell the next day (should smell like a fresh fish market, not rot), and wait: three months is okay, one year is better, three years is best. Dilute 1:1000 (4 ml per gallon) to 1:3000 (1 ml per gallon) and spray the underside of leaves. A little fuel goes a very long way — too much and your plants go soft and attract every leaf-sucking pest on the property.

What Fuel Does

The older KNF vocabulary calls this solution fish amino acid. Drake calls it Fuel because that's exactly what it is: "Who's thrown gas on a fire? What happens? It volatilizes. It just burns. It explodes. That's what this recipe does for your plants." The fermentation that happens inside the bucket breaks fish protein down into free amino acids — the literal building blocks of DNA, enzymes, and cell structure. When those amino acids hit a plant's vascular system, the plant doesn't have to synthesize them from scratch. It can put them straight to work.

The primary visible effect is leaf growth. Drake describes it as growing solar panels: the plant expands upward and outward, canopy fills in, photosynthetic surface area multiplies. Young plants and leafy greens benefit most because they can't yet synthesize their own amino acids efficiently — Fuel bridges that gap. A healthy two-year-old fruit tree is doing much of this work itself, so it needs proportionally less.

Alongside the amino acid load, Fuel carries a biological component. The fermentation is driven by wild lactobacillus — it's everywhere, you don't need to inoculate — and because lactobacillus is facultatively anaerobic, a sealed bucket is fine. Every application also delivers a dose of beneficial microbes into the soil and onto leaf surfaces.

The Recipe

The ratio is simple: equal parts fish and brown sugar by weight. The standard batch is 20 pounds of each in a five-gallon bucket. Drake worked in roughly 3-kilogram increments — weigh the fish, add the same weight in sugar. His source for the night: fresh mahi, aku, and other deep-sea fish heads picked up the day before.

1. Lay a thin layer of brown sugar on the bottom of a clean five-gallon bucket.
2. Add a layer of fish — heads, some meat, spine. Heads give the most juice; too much gut content and you need extra sugar to compensate. Whole fish work fine too.
3. Cover with an equal weight of brown sugar. The sugar melts down through everything as fermentation begins; don't worry about topping it up as it settles.
4. Repeat layers — lasagna-style — until the bucket is about two-thirds full. Leave headspace.
5. Set a rock on top to keep the fish submerged below the liquid line. If fish floats above the sugar at the start, it's exposed to air and will start to rot instead of ferment.
6. Seal with a solid lid. Drake skips the breathable cloth lid the original recipe calls for — keeping black soldier flies out matters more than airflow, and lactobacillus doesn't care.
7. Write the date on the bucket. Drake admitted his own buckets have no dates and he genuinely can't tell how old any of them are.

Deep-sea fish are the best choice: mahi, aku, ono, ahi. Freshwater fish lack the right oils and meat profile. Frozen fish is fine — just knock off any large ice crystals before layering and check the smell carefully the next day. Do not use fish that's already rotten — bad in, bad out. Dog food is also out; too much starch and filler, none of the amino profile you're after.

You can build the batch incrementally. Got a small amount of fish today? Weigh it, add the matching sugar, seal it up. Catch or buy more next week? Layer it in. As long as you match weights each time and keep everything submerged, you're good.

The Smell Test: First 72 Hours

The day after you make it, open the bucket and smell it. It should smell like a fresh fish market — briny, a little sweet, nothing offensive. That smell means lactobacillus has taken hold and fermentation is proceeding correctly. A correctly-fermenting batch left outside will barely attract flies; the lactobacillus has outcompeted the bacteria that signal rotting food.

If it smells like rotten fish, vomit, or sulfur — something went wrong. Most likely the fish surfaced above the sugar line. Fix: add more sugar, push everything back below the liquid, reseal. Check again the next day. If it's back to smelling right, you've saved it. Still off? Add more sugar and submerge again. "If by day three of checking it, you still haven't gotten it together and it still stinks," Drake said, "just make it pig food. Compost it. You're probably not going to save it after three to four days of that."

The lesson: always err on the side of more sugar, especially if you're using a lot of gut material, which carries more liquid and needs more sugar to stay submerged.

Aging, Storage, and Yield

Fuel gets meaningfully better the longer it sits. The amino acids simplify over time — long chains break into short ones, short ones become free aminos, free aminos are immediately plant-available. Drake's timeline:

• Once liquid: technically usable, but raw and rough
• 3 months: okay
• 6 months: noticeably better
• 1 year: good
• 3 years: best — smooth, sweet, fully simplified

The maturation is like a fine whiskey. The sharp fishiness softens into sweetness. One of Drake's older batches smelled so clean that someone put it on their rice on the spot. The jar made multiple laps around the room.

To harvest, tilt the bucket and pour through a fine filter or old t-shirt. You'll pour the same bucket off two or three times over months; more liquid develops from the remaining solids each time. A full five-gallon bucket will yield roughly two to two-and-a-half gallons of finished Fuel by the time it's fully exhausted. The dried-out fish solids come out like jerky — your dogs would love them.

Keep finished Fuel at a stable temperature and out of direct sun. Heat fluctuations degrade quality; sun exposure turns batches bitter (Drake held up one bucket as an example — it had spent time in the sun and tasted noticeably more bitter than a shade-kept batch of the same age). Traditional producers in Vietnam bury their buckets in the ground to maintain constant temperature. That's where the connoisseur-grade stuff comes from.

On batch size: Drake strongly recommends multiple five-gallon buckets over one large drum. If a 55-gallon batch goes bad, you've lost 200 pounds of sugar. If a five-gallon batch goes bad, you've lost 20. Make four small ones, use two, let the other two keep aging.

Application: How Much, How Often

Dilution: 1:1000 to 1:3000. Four milliliters per gallon is 1:1000; one milliliter per gallon is roughly 1:3000. Use it in combination with the other KNF solutions — Fuel works within the full maintenance formula, not as a standalone drench.

• Spray the underside of leaves. Stomata concentrate there; foliar uptake is far more efficient than soil drench at the same rate.
• Frequency during vegetative stage: once to twice a week. Watch the plant and adjust — if it's responding cleanly, hold the pace.
• Young starts and leafy greens: these benefit most. They can't synthesize amino acids at scale yet; Fuel gives them ready-made building blocks.
• Mature trees: back off. They're generating their own amino acids continuously. A little, regularly, keeps things burning — but you don't need to push it.

Do not exceed 1:500. Drake was emphatic about this. Overdosing Fuel creates soft, fast, nitrogen-heavy growth that is a direct invitation for thrips, scale, and aphids — leaf-sucking pests are specifically attracted to that kind of tissue. If you see them showing up and you've been heavy with the Fuel, that's your diagnosis. Throttle back and reach for last month's solution: Structure (water-soluble calcium phosphate). Fuel and Structure are counterweights — one builds canopy, the other builds firmness. "If your plant is too rigid and strung out, add Fuel. If you're getting leaf suckers, you need Structure."

Special Guest: Daniel on the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle

Daniel — a natural farmer and KNF practitioner who flew over from Oʻahu — took the second half of the evening. He's spent years on the front lines of the coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB) fight: running community pig trials, testifying at the legislature, distributing biological controls, and — at the time of this meeting — under active investigation by the Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture for what they're calling pesticidal claims against his work with Metarhizium anisopliae.

The CRB strain in Hawaiʻi is CRBG — a genetically distinct Guam variant, first found at Hickam Air Force Base between 2013 and 2016. The military controlled it on their base without chemicals: curtain air burners that processed 13 tons of green waste per hour removed all beetle breeding habitat. The beetle cleared the base and moved across the street to state land. The state's response since then has cost $24 million, and the beetle has continued spreading — 50 miles in one year on the Big Island.

Daniel's core argument is about where the battle is being fought. The CRB spends 80% of its life cycle in mulch and breeding sites. Every state program targets the remaining 20%. His approach: go after the 80%. Feed the trees with KNF solutions so they're not weakened and chemically broadcasting vulnerability to the beetle. Spray JADAM sulfur — diluted 1:500 with KNF solutions and 1:100 surfactant — to camouflage the trees' scent signature. Trim and clean the frond bases, then pack beetle entry points with a 50-50 mix of beach sand and swimming pool salt. And inoculate mulch piles with Metarhizium anisopliae, a naturally-occurring fungal pathogen. Daniel's trial at his grandmother's property in Kahana: 200–500 CRB larvae per month before treatment. After one application of Metarhizium, they found 15 the following month. The month after that: none.

He told the story of an elderly auntie in Punahou — daughter of a man known as David of Punaluʻu — whose father had planted 300 coconut trees between 1925 and 1973. She showed Daniel a small grove where every tree was planted for each of her great-grandchildren, in the tradition of honoring new life with a tree. "Every tree has a story," Daniel said. "Freaking shame on me that I don't know it." He and his crew have been showing up every Friday to work her trees since.

Daniel distributed JADAM sulfur and portions of Metarhizium anisopliae to anyone who wanted to take some home and try it, along with a practical CRB management worksheet. His ask: visit the Aloha Organic website, geotag your coconut trees, document how you're maintaining them naturally — and start treating them as the cultural treasures the state legislature declined to officially designate them as.

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

Next Month: June 9, 2026