A Sewer-Pipe Worm Trough That Eats 100 lb of Pulp a Week

0:00 Vincent Mina: This is a dangerous proposition. I got my little teleprompter. I was up this morning and just wanted to collect my thoughts about what I wanted to share with you folks today. Partly is, let me give you a little background. First of all, my name is Vincent Mina. I am the State President of Hawaii Farmers Union United. Can you hear me back there?

0:36 Audience: No.

0:38 Vincent Mina: I am the State President of Hawaii Farmers Union United. We are the solution, we represent the solution of agriculture here in Hawaii. and I feel very honored and fortunate to be in the position I'm in representing family farms. My, can you hear me now? My little background on our farm, 21 years ago I went to a men's leadership seminar on the mainland And I came back telling my wife, Babe, I can't live this lie anymore. I want to work the land. And I've always been an avid gardener. And she said, go for it, Babe.

1:26 So I was letting go of the trapeze I was on, which was a decorative painter. And I was reaching out for the other trapeze that was out there, which was farming. I'd never farmed before in my life. And so, you know, as a trapezist, the fear is the in-between. That fear of the unknown, whether we're going to make it to the trapeze. But have you ever met a trapeze that wasn't committed to getting you to the trapeze? And so there was only one glitch to her support, was that she was six months pregnant. And to get supportive of me transitioning out of what I was doing into what I wanted to be doing.

2:00 And so our little girl in the womb basically showed us the way. She had my wife craving sunflower greens. You'll have them at lunch today. And she came home with all these bags of sunflower greens. And I'm looking, and all I kept seeing was $5.50, $5.80. I'm out of work. And I said, what do you keep buying them for? I could grow them. She goes, why aren't you growing them, bro? And so that's what started it. And today, that's one girl that said, hey, dad, I know you don't have land or equipment, but I'll show you the way through mom, has her own women's swimwear line

2:42 that she designs and fabricates at 21 years old. So really, it's a beautiful thing having a family farm and being able to have the other things associated with it that bring value to a family and being in that environment growing up. So we make a living on 2,000 square feet. We produce about 400 pounds of greens a week in a plant-based compost and using Korean natural farming protocols. So in developing the Farmers Union five years ago, it was based on having a farming organization that would have representation here locally on a national level.

3:28 So I just came back from Washington, D.C., where the National Farmers Union flies in and all the state presidents for what they call the yearly fly-in, and we meet with all the legislators associated with our state and talk about what we want to see here in Hawaii and the kind of agriculture that we value. And the beautiful thing about that is we go in there as a, not an anti-organization. We go in there saying that we're here to represent are farmers who value practicing methods that are regenerative in nature. And they resonate with that. OK, so we're just having this lei fall off my shoulder

4:12 and it reminded me of something very important I need to stop and do. I want to recognize Jackie Prell right now and give her this lei. Because without Jackie Prell, we wouldn't be here. Do it again please. Jackie has devoted her life to this. If you get Acres USA, she writes beautiful articles for Korean Natural Farming and Acres. So it's giving it national attention. As a matter of fact, Mike DuPonte is going to be giving a presentation to Pennsylvania Agricultural Sustainable Association.

4:56 They get 2,000 people at their conference in February and Mike's going to be doing a presentation on Korean natural farming. Hi Chris! So yeah, we're really excited about the exposure. So in that trip to Washington D.C. I also advocated for a year ago to have a committee, a national committee on regenerative agriculture and local food. And so now we have national representation for that. It's the first time that a national farming organization is supportive of these initiatives. And that's exciting to me because I was on the board of the Farm Bureau from 2005 to 2008,

5:35 and I couldn't even get soil health on the agenda. Good people just don't value their policies. So we get to create our own policies. And we've had some really wonderful work in that respect. A lady here on the island, a Malian lady, is Malian here today? Was instrumental in developing our policies and articulating our policies and what we value. So, you know, this organization is built from a culture just like Korean natural farming. It's an alchemy of elementals that come together. And those elementals sometimes are people. And the people are, you all have gifts.

6:19 Everyone in this room has gifts and joy that you like to express. And so what we do is we create this montage of beautiful energy that is people's gifts bringing to an event, just like today. If either, if any one of you here wasn't here right now, it would be a completely different event. So we all are the event. And so in our nine chapters that we have throughout the islands now, as a matter of fact, this coming Tuesday, we'll have our ninth chapter. We have Hāna in the house today. Okay, Seth? Hi, brother. That's going to be our ninth chapter of the Farmers Union. We have Kauaʻi.

7:05 Who's here from Kauaʻi? All right, Kauaʻi's in the house. And then we have Oʻahu. Anyone here from Oʻahu? All right. Maui, Maui. And we have three chapters on Maui. We have Mauna Kahālāwai, the West Maui chapter. We have Haleakalā, and we have Hāna. And then on Big Island Smiling, I can't understand why you guys have to make a t-shirt. It says Big Island Smiling. I didn't know that. We have Kohala. Anybody from Kohala chapter? All right, aloha Kohala. And we have Kona. Kona here in the house today. Come on you guys, we got a little coffee over there, you can make it over here.

7:43 And then we have Kaʻū, Kaʻū in the house? Yeah, baby. All right. And of course, East Hawaii. Wow, just be off East Hawaii. I hope you're all members, by the way. And so, last year we certified 590 members after five years of being in existence. And right now, today as we speak, when I went to Washington, as of August, the end of August, we had 700 members. So we still have September, October, November, December left for new members and renewing members to set a record. We've grown 70% and our membership nationally is definitely paying attention. Really appreciates the role of Hawaii.

8:30 They want to see us get chartered. What chartered means is we have a certain amount of members, around 1,000 to 1,200 members, and then having core leadership and having your financials, and then the national board votes to have you be a chartered organization. What happens is then when I come to the table as a chartered organization, I have a vote at the table on the executive board. But they've been very supportive, and I really appreciate having that national presence there for us. Because when I went to legislature as part of the Farm Bureau, I found out the legislature

9:10 listens to farming organizations. Well, I mean, when the farming organization is at the table saying, oh yeah, GMOs are great, oh yeah, monocrop, let's just monocrop the islands with corn and then we'll sell it to the mainland and make a lot of money and all that kind of stuff. the legislators think, okay, these guys know what they're talking about, you know, that's what we'll support. So as the saying goes, if you don't have a seat at the table, you're part of the menu. And so that's why we appreciate having a seat at the table.

9:37 As a matter of fact, we just had the governor appoint our legislative chair, vice president of the state, Simon Russell, to the Board of Agriculture. So it's the first time that someone on the Board of Agriculture speaks from a regenerative place. You know, regenerative-minded thinking. So we're really excited about that. And it's been a wonderful evolution, as we're advocating. Now, being a family farmer is really important for me when developing these chapters that other presidents were also farmers. We have a majority of our presidents that are farmers.

10:16 And a number of them are certified Korean natural farming practices. So this is no mistake, or this is no coincidence. This is what we advocate for. This is what we're about. And so this is important to articulate and our movement forward. So what I'd like to do is when I go in and talk to these legislators, I say, look, we're not here to make anyone or any practice wrong. We're here to support our members who value these practices. So we're a solution-based organization. We're not an anti-organization. Thankfully, there are anti-organizations out there

10:49 doing great work to keep that awareness raised about the corporate fiction. Okay, so on that note, can we put the lights down a little bit so people can see these slides? Does that work? Is that going to work with the video folks? So on our farm, I put this presentation together, I kind of tweaked it the other day from a presentation I've had so I'm going to touch on a number of different innovative things we're doing on making a living on 2,000 square feet, because I had a 7,000 square foot lot. So I didn't have land or equipment and the government wasn't supporting me to be on more land and I

11:33 was, for hell, I was not going to dig myself into a grave to be a farmer. You know the definition of a rut is? That's a grave with the ends knocked out of it, waiting for the soil. I didn't want to get myself into a rut. I wanted to farm I wanted to be with my plants but our society right now isn't supporting that our society is supporting extracting supporting consumption excessive consumption and and greed which basically makes us all collateral damage to it you know we'll have babies and don't be the next ones to buy that

12:08 stuff so we need to really make a statement here as to our own well-being and it's happening through the millennial population. The millennials are 18, between 18 and 34. How many here are between 18 and 34? Please raise your hands up high. Okay, that's a great showing, that's wonderful. Because us old guys, I'm the average age of a farmer, I'm 62, and we need young farmers to be able to start showing up in ways that value these things and know that we got your back You know, when it comes to meeting with these legislators and stuff.

12:45 Because most of the legislators don't have a clue about agriculture. Thankfully, we had one in the audience today, Russell Ruderman. Russell, please stand up and recognize the representative. But for the most part, we don't have that, you know, and so we need to educate them in a way that's a lot of style. So this is a 21 year old farm. So basically we've been culturing our compost now for 21 years. And I say culturing it because we're growing everything in flats, plant based compost, and then we cut those greens and then we recycle the flats back onto the land.

13:28 the land. So this is a part of the... First slide, please. The first part of this was developing a vermicomposting system. So I wanted to show you not only the system but how I went about doing it so you can do it yourself if your spirit moves you from this. Basically create cinder block base and then took these PVC pipes, they're sewer pipes, two foot diameter sewer pipes, that's the diameter I found works the best for a system like this. I just couldn't make those little worm bins like a rubber made bin or whatever work

14:04 because I was creating too much material, you know, for them to process. So I needed a bigger area. And this really helped me be able to containerize it in a way that made it efficient. And so I was working smart instead of hard. So I cut those two foot diameter pipes in half and then covered it with corrugated iron as a lid. Next slide please. And it shows the plumbing. Next slide. And I cut a groove in the middle and then every two feet cut a hole where I would put soffit vents. Two inch diameter holes with soffit vents that you see in the soffits of buildings. So when the water would drain

14:45 the castings would stay behind. And so it falls into that trough. So they're not sitting in water. This PVC pipe, by the way, is like an inch thick. It's bulletproof. If you can find construction sites that have pieces of this laying around, it's really great material. It's about $1,500 for a 20-foot section if you buy it outright, but that gives you 40 linear feet, and you can create a lot of earthworm castings. I have a sample I'll pass around so you guys can see the kind of quality you can get. Next Next slide, please. So I used on the ends, I used recycled plastic lumber. Next slide.

15:24 And then I put a trellis for the shade of the worms, because they like the dark and they like the cool. And then I grow squash and lilikoʻi and anything that will vine, you know, brought up on the trellis. And the neat thing about this trellis is it's two-inch diameter PVC pipe. If you take two by two pieces of lumber, you can drive it into that two inch PVC and it makes it like a four by four post because it's stout, especially for the horizontal, you won't get any sagging. So you just fill it with wood and it's really stout. Next slide please.

15:59 And that's some of the ipu that I'm growing off of the trellis. I get sawdust from a woodworking shop for free that I gather and I mulch around with. Next slide. And I put IMO3 underneath, of course. So this is the materials I use. I get the juice pulp from the health food store. They throw it out, basically. I get all their juice pulp. I get about 100 pounds a week. Carbon source, I use sawdust and newspaper. Shredded is better. And then this here, this material, I'll pass it around, it's really wonderful material I'm bringing in.

16:39 We talk about not bringing anything in from the mainland and all that, and I get it. One thing you've got to understand, well one thing from my experience of being a farmer, You don't have to understand anything, but just share my experience. Is that we're growing a lot of European plants here on the islands that we consume. And we don't have the European soils. And our soils are young. And not only are they young, they've been depleted by cane and pineapple monochrome production systems that have just set us back. And I really think it cooled the government

17:16 and held these people accountable to revitalize the soil where they left. But anyhow, these minerals here, a friend of mine gave to me from Idaho, was in this basin from over the millennium. And he said, flying over it, it looked like Grand Central Station. I said, what are you talking about? He said, all the animal tracks that were coming in from all the directions feeding off of these minerals. So I'm now taking them personally. It won't grow hair, but other than that, it's good stuff. The animals, feed it to the animals. But also, and you'll see some pictures, mixing it with IMO3,

17:52 because it's chelated with humic and fulvic acids in its development of the lining, it just loves IMO3. Okay, and then also we're making biochar on Maui, and I have some samples that you can check out. I give the worms biochar and sand as grit, and also condominiums for the microbes, which is the biochar. Is Josiah here? Josiah's making also young animal. And then coconut coir, and then of course IMO3. That all goes into the worm bin. Okay, next. So this is a picture of the kiawe and coconut biochar. Coconut biochar's on the left and kiawe's on the right. Next picture. Worms love watermelon.

18:37 If you lay watermelon rinds on top of your worm bin, it's just great for them. Moist and dark, they just love it. Next picture. That's what it looks like. There's a reason why organic and orgasmic are so close together. Next picture, please. That's the crumbly texture of the vermicomposting with the biochar. It's all about structure. You know, if we were in this room, just say we had a couple of 300 or more people in this room, we wouldn't feel as comfortable as we feel right now. So it's about having space and structure in the soil. So that helps, the aggregates help create that.

19:16 Next picture. So that's the, there's a sample of it, you can see that that's basically what it looks like when it's finished. It's so cool too, it's all opened up then, and I rub my hand across, it feels like silk. all the castings, they deposit the castings at the top. And it's these simple pleasures, I mean I get so high on this stuff, you know? It's so cool, and now if only I can marry that with these guys that are making cheap money developing computer chips. This is where the people need to really be supported is this kind of stuff. Next. Now this is a microscopic picture,

19:54 it doesn't really show up too well here, But basically, it's showing a slime that's on the casting and on the biochar. And that slime is the proteins and sugars that the earthworms deposit. So that's the fat of the land, when you think about it. Next slide. Worm bins are great for sprouting stuff. These were volunteer butternut squash that just showed up. Next slide. So what I do, I basically take the juice pulp from the health food store. The worms, like it ground, they can really rip through stuff fast when it's ground up like that.

20:31 And then I mix in the powder, the mineral powder, next slide. Then mix in with some biochar. And how people say, well how much do you use? I say, like Parmesan cheese, you know. I'm Italian, so that's how I grate Parmesan cheese. I can put more in there. Next slide. And so then I mix that all together, and then I bring the castings that are in there, and bring it all together, just mix it all together, and you can just feel that it's not too moist and not too dry, just to where one would be happy environment. I don't get much leachate that falls out of the bin,

21:06 so then I know I'm doing a good job, in the spirit of, you know, don't have to. I was collecting the leachate. I was making it too wet because I wanted leachate. But it was a lot of work. So I figured, you know what? Just dry it out. That's what you learn along the way. You evolve and understand how you can work smarter and still get the, what you're looking for, the quality. Next slide. So you wanna make sure that your worm bin doesn't get over 80 degrees. Otherwise you have cooked worms. Next slide. That's what a worm egg looks like. I have a friend of mine who got a contract from NASA

21:41 to do microscopic photography of sand, of moon sand. And he's gonna work with me to do microscopic photography of the worm egg. Next slide. So this is how I expose it. I just open the lid, expose it to the light, the worms dive down, I scrape off all the castings on the top. I take about five pounds, next slide, and put it into a tea brewer that I developed. down on a farm you MacGyver stuff you know with what you have and there's 55 Down on a farm you MacGyver stuff, you know, with what you have, and there's a 55 gallon drum, and I took the bottom out of a five gallon bucket, and you can

22:19 see on the right hand side there's pipes intersecting on the underneath. In the pipes there's holes, so I stick that whole unit down into the 55 gallon drum. Water comes up and seeks its own level as to the 55 gallon drum, and then at the bottom of that PVC pipe, I put air hoses. So I run left. So you have a lot of air movement in your compost tea. Next slide. So I've also put in a sink with a garbage disposal. I've always wanted to have a garbage disposal that I could collect the garbage. And so all our kitchen scraps are ground and processed. And you

22:59 see on the left picture the collection colander there, and then I just grind it up like I'm getting it from the health food store, the same, you know, juice pulp, and then put it into the bin next slide so this is the microscopic photography that I was talking to you about in this picture here you can see the hyphae here going across. Well, this is blowing up. This is the same hyphae. So this is IMO. This is mill run of wheat and biochar. That's the fungal activity that's happening, the fungal activity that's happening on a microscopic level.

23:39 Now, this picture was multiple pictures of one millimeter of material. He took multiple pictures and made a composite, and that's what it looks like. Next slide. So this is the kind of things you want to keep out of your worm bin. And if you really want to make an efficient, you know, compost that you can pull material out, you know, and that process, that juice pulp and everything, it processes in less than a week. I'm coming back with another 100 pounds, you know, less than a week later to process. With this kind of stuff in there, you're not going to do that.

24:12 It's going to take a lot longer, especially with red wigglers. Next. Okay, so this is basically some facts about worms. You wanna make sure your pH, if you get in there with a carbon source with your juice pulp, you're gonna keep the temperature down and your pH will be pretty much balanced. But this is some of the ways that you can balance your pH. Next slide. So this is what we were making, IMO3. And we make it by the ton. A friend of mine back on Maui, as a matter of fact, Seth and myself and Ricky Apana, who has this, he makes a

24:51 kiawe biochar, I mean kiawe charcoal for people throughout the state. You see in the store, kiawe charcoal, that's my friend. He has the facility and equipment to do that, and then we also make biochar out of the kiawe. So this is a, as you can see the footprints in it, it becomes real spongy. You'll see in making IMO3 with mill run of wheat that come to pass. Now why mill run of wheat? Well a university extension agent on Maui had it tested and in that test it showed that the mill run is loaded with bio stimulants.

25:29 So if you apply an IMO2 to the mill run, it just takes off like wildfire. It stimulates the biology. Yeah so in a pile like this it's only 18 inches tall the first day we're getting up to 120 degrees And we've gotten it down pretty good as far as the moisture content to make sure that that temperature doesn't get up higher. Because it's important, and you'll find out, that you don't want high temperatures because then it sterilizes your compost. And then when you try to put it out in the field, it's not acclimated to the temperatures in the field. So you want to keep your temperatures down.

26:05 Next slide. Shows you the spongy nature of it. I'm going to push my hand in it. Next slide. So this is how we make it by the ton. We use a cat and we use a dumpster. And what they're putting on is the IMO mixture that we have, gravity fed, being gravity fed from up above through a hose, and then we mix it up. So it's kind of cool that we can make it at that level. Dr. Park, it's a little different than your machine, but it works. Next slide. And this is inside an area that we covered with weed mat, so it's still breathing, but yet in the dark. That's a covered roof over mat, too.

26:50 So we run, that's approximately one ton of material, those two rows. Next slide. That's what it looks like when it's uncovered. We do it on a bed of biochar. So when we start to turn it, we implement some of the biochar into it. I have a sample bag that you guys can check out on that, too. Next slide. And that's the beautiful thing right there. Look at the white actinomycetes that's on that IMO3. That's a very active pile. That is, to me, I love seeing that. I take the cover off. You know you did something right. Next slide. That's what I call the IMO3 biochar cookie.

27:31 Because it holds together really nice, and you can see all that fungal network through it. Put that under a microscope, and you can see the kind of stuff that I showed you earlier. Next slide. This is our compost area on our farm. We run about four piles and basically do it in a clockwise direction. I took an old wheelbarrow, put a screen on it, and that's my compost screener. And there's a vermicomposting area in the back. So our compost area is 400 square feet that supports our farm. Next slide. and there's the close-up of the compost screener. Just an old cement mixer.

28:12 Everybody's got cement mixers at their house they use for one time, and it just sits there, you know, so this is a great way to, because it just turns at perfect speed. And the screen I used was an inch steel screen on the outside and then a half inch on the inside. The half inch won't hold up real well, but the inch does on the outside. So this way you can... I just had a half inch before, and it got busted up faster. So this inch works out really good, and then I put a metal band on the outside so when the shovel hits it, it doesn't destroy the end either. So yeah, that's really fun.

28:47 I was just telling a friend, I just came back from that mainland trip with the National Farmers Union two days ago, on Monday. And Monday afternoon, after all day flying back from the East Coast, the first thing I did was extreme compost, the first thing I did was screen compost, into what I really value and appreciate about the farm. You can see the piles behind the mixer. So here's one here, one here, and this is where we're building. These are the flat trays that are being cut. And I put that fence around it to make sure that they don't collapse over and build a pile up so high

29:25 to where it'll just, you know, it's a static pile. We don't turn it. And so the pile I'm screening from right now, when that's done, we move to the next pile and we build behind us. So we do this in cyclical motion, that's been 21 years in the working. Next slide. This is a fermented plant juice that I'll pass around using hau flowers. And, you know, Dr. Park showed us how to make fermented plant juice, and it's really a beautiful thing when you make it. It's just that it's, you know, doing it by hand like that, and you want to get a lot of it, it's kind of difficult.

30:04 So develop the system using a spade and a big rubber tub to where you can get in there and just, you know, standing up, you can chop it all up and make a bulk of it pretty quickly. I've had my wife's local girl, when she tasted it, she said, oh, it tastes like Neem Moi. So it's really cool, especially the hau flowers. So significant of a flower to Hawaiian culture, yeah. Next slide. So this is a trial we did at Maui Tropical Plantation. And this is the commercial time of the presentation. We're having our annual convention, our annual state convention at the Tropical Plantation, November 13

30:41 through 15. Highly encourage you to get there. We got Congresswoman Gabbard and her dad, who's the Ag Chair of the Senate, going to be giving keynote presentations. We're just really excited with the program. It's going to be a three-day program, ending up with some live music, so we're excited about that. But we did this trial up at this farm, at Bobby Paiheia's, a dryland taro farmer. And so this is when he plowed the land. This is old cane land. I don't need to go any further than that. He'd been on old cane land. And so what he did was he grew sun hemp on the property.

31:22 And that sun hemp was, he grew it up for seed. So what we did was we had the straw after this. And we lined up the straw on either side of where he plowed, we laid down a drip, and then we broadcasted IMO3. Now I wanted to make sure that we got the results we were looking for, so we laid a lot down. And then we planted the huli, and then mulched with the straw of the sun hemp. Now what's really significant about this when it was developing and growing beautifully, the grass on either side, you know, was just the

31:57 weeds were getting up to this tall, and there was nothing in here, no weeds. The sun hemp and the IMO3. Now I have a video up on YouTube you can check out where I put my finger right here and it's like this, you know, as hard as it can be. But then when you go underneath the towel, the finger goes right through. So that's really hard. This is Glenna Owen. Okay, Alika Atay is the president of the Mauna Kahālāwai chapter, three quarters of their board of Hawaiian, myself and Simon Russell, the legislative chair of the Board of Agriculture.

32:29 Well, Glenna Owen is a procurement officer for the Department of Education, and she wants to work with local farmers to get local food into the schools. Yeah. And so Glenna was so excited about what we were doing there and what this trial represented. As you can see, myself and Scott Enright, Department of Agriculture's Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, there by it, he came and looked at it. He's supporting a dispensary on Maui as a pilot project for Korean natural farming projects, protocols.

33:04 So that's coming forward. And then you can see the kalo, the bottom right picture, how beautifully it developed. And that was just using IMO3 and using the liquid amendments as a group. And you'll learn all about that. But really excited about what this represented. The farmer was just so stoked. You mean I don't have to use that weed mat anymore? All the expense of the weed mat he doesn't have to use anymore. anymore. He can grow his weed mat using sun hemp. Chris, you've done a lot of use of sun hemp, yeah,

33:36 on your farm on Kauaʻi. And so, beautiful cover crop. So the more we can, you know, one of the things on the Maui, on Maui's general plan is supporting the seed industry. Okay, we all know what that means, right? It's not getting Maui organic as far as GMO means, right? But we can take that policy and use it to create a cover crop seed industry. Wouldn't that be cool, you know, that we could have a local source of cover crop seed and then start healing these lands that are laying fallow, and then do alley

34:11 cropping with animals. Mike and his work with animals, you know, we can work out systems, whole systems of agriculture that restore, revitalize the land, and at the same time get into quality food production. So this is, we're really excited about what this trial represented. Next slide. Okay, so this is a picture of kale in Wailuku. No way you can grow kale like this and not get so totally attacked by a cabbage worm. And look at the vitality of that kale. Yeah. Next slide. This is one basil plant, four feet. And this was the trial I used, and then the kale,

34:52 with these minerals, with these minerals in the IMO3. So very excited about what that represents, because once you give, you know, once you give the plants the matrix that it recognizes to do its genetic best, this is what happens. That's a lot of pesto. Next slide. And then, you know, celebrate life, because you never know when it's going to end. Thank you very much everybody.