Liquid Wood Chips and the 1:2:2 Maintenance Mix

0:00 Vincent Mina: Thank you all again for being here and hanging in there. I know it's later in the day, it's kind of hard. But this presentation you want to, you know, get your blood sugar level up for because it's really a wonderful presentation. Drake's doing, like, you know, there's people that talk about stuff and then there's people who actually do it. and he's talking and he's doing. And not only is he doing on a level of being able to support and teach our keiki, but he's out in the streets, in the median strips, growing food. Go figure. How beautiful. I told people about that. He's inspired me.

0:43 I talk to people back on Maui about that. They look at me like, huh? But I think it's wonderful. So please give it up for Drake.

0:53 Drake Weinert: Aloha. I'm really honored to be here and to have such a big turnout. I've been involved in natural farming for at least eight years now, and to see this much momentum and how we've really sown the seeds over the years and collected our beneficial microbes and fed them enough sugar that now they're starting to multiply, and it's fun. It's like a party. It's like an adventure. And so I'm honored to be here today. So many amazing people here that are making personal transformations in themselves,

1:44 and then it reflects out, and you start natural farming. So, I'm trying to tell some jokes here. And I love talking about natural farming, and one of our big things in natural farming is staying humble and being, you know, humility. And so sometimes I get really excited, but I like to always come back to like the, you know, like do it myself. And then people see how it works and then they want to try versus I tell them. And then they hear me.

2:29 And but the proof is in when you see, you know, someone with such vitality and someone who's made a health recovery or someone who now raises their pigs with no smell and has happy neighbors and all these things. it makes you want to, it draws you towards natural farmers just naturally. And so I love it. Every facet of my life, you know, becomes natural farming. So I know there's some, you know, it's a growing family, and we're all new members as well as experienced members coming in. And it's so nice to share and to be here today. So what my goal is here right now is I have a presentation.

3:09 It's 26 slides designed to kind of take what we've learned today outside, all of our inputs and all of these different things we saw, whether we took raw materials, and I'm going to show you how to maybe get a little less feedback on this mic, and how to put it all together as a solution. So formulating CGNF Hawaii natural farming solutions, this all comes from Master Cho in Korea, Han-kyu Cho, which is the Cho Global part of our natural farming. So what this comes from is, as you may have all seen, is that the natural farming comes

3:59 from pigs. So when you look at natural farmers and you're like, why are these people so cool? It's because they hang out with pigs a lot. And pigs are really mellow, great animals that are great teachers and very patient with you to teach you a lot. And so natural farming, I started out with this. You know, we kind of always start out with a philosophy part to kind of say, because it's kind of different how you approach it. You're not just going and putting A with B with C. you're kind of thinking about these systems and really understanding why you're putting a with b

4:35 with c and not just going a to c you know all these steps in between are important and so when we observe nature and we kind of start with this philosophy and one of my main philosophies is trying to get out of the way you know it's a classic eastern like get rid of your ego type of thing i'm trying to get rid of my ego and farming so natural farming is compatible of you know, think about I farm for the microbes. The microbes do my farming. And that's a great way to crush your ego because then you're just kind of helping your friends out

5:10 and they're responsible for what's happening in the ground and in the soil. And they do a great job if we support them. You know, microbes can make or break us. You know, it's either a plague or it's abundance in a healthy ecosystem. And I try to provide enough food so that it tends towards that healthy ecosystem. More food, happier microbes, happier macro world resulting from this micro healthy health that I've created. I also put up here about the field. Someone earlier mentioned the matrix. It's kind of this idea of like this field that we're all in.

5:54 I like it not only do we farm in a field traditionally, but they also create energy fields and micro fields and vibrational fields out there. And so we want to make sure our field always has enough food to invite beneficial microorganisms. So fungus and bacteria and those things. And it's a function of food in our field. So whether that's on your body, it's in your animal, it's in your actual what we call fields. enough food out there is what you need to do. And how to judge the right amount of food. This was a, I love metaphors. So I find metaphors really good for teaching.

6:33 If you can think in these metaphors, it makes it common sense. So I was thinking the other day about, you know, I was watching this documentary on this guy who just puts out wood chips. That's all he does. It's called Back to Eden. It's a great video. He just puts out wood chips. He stopped tilling the ground. He stopped doing all these things and the only fertility thing he does is wood chips And I watched that and I thought wow, you know, that's genius Why are the wood chips doing it for him? Why are they're providing all the fertility he needs and if you think in nature

7:07 Only branches and leaves are falling. It's only eating wood chips in nature And so when what he's actually doing is he's really by putting that much wood chips. He's really concentrating his fungus And just like when we eat, we heat up and we digest, the same thing when you put that much life out into your soil, it's digesting. And you can think of that as a low-burning fire. Just like your digestion only raises your temperature a few degrees, same with this. It's not more than 120 degrees out there. If that, that's incredible. It must be a really rich source.

7:43 Usually it's happening at what we consider ambient temperatures. so if you think of it as a fire and you always put enough wood out there to keep that fungal little burning fire happening and obviously if you put too much at once you'll smother your fire and you'll kill it and you know you'll you'll kill that and if you feed it just you know at the right amount then it's going to give you a nice heat that's going to be consistent you know you don't want to grill with a fire that's really hot and you don't want to grill with something and it's too cold. And so when you adjust your amount,

8:20 oh, thanks for that, getting rid of the feedback. Feedback can be good in some instances. So this low-burning fire, I really like to think of that, because then I'm now feeding, like I'm not looking and saying, are my plants hungry? I'm looking at my field to burn this fire, these microbial interactions that are then creating the heat to cook my garden. So again, that's that step back of like my microbes are in charge and that second step. I put this warning in here at this last point on this slide, which says there's always cheaper versions of natural farming.

9:01 It's happening naturally outside with nobody doing it. So it's free. There's always cheaper versions, but CGNF Hawaii, the recipes that we've kind of gotten the instructors that you've learned from today are of the highest quality. And Derek spoke this morning. He said, keep the quality high. And that's what we're trying to do. You can rot something in a bucket and do something like that. That's cool. But what we're doing here is the highest quality of ferments and really finding where that is, adapting it to our local restrictions here

9:41 and adapting to that, but I always try to aim for the highest quality. I've learned from a bunch of people. I'm always learning from every source of people that just take manure and put it in water. I'm like, hmm, you know, I'm just thinking of all the nematodes and stuff going crazy in there and all the pathogens in the water, and I'm like, but I always learn something from seeing people's approach to this. And this approach that we're presenting here just happens to be one of the highest qualities.

10:09 in all of my experience, I've never seen one and been like, wow, that's better than Master Cho had kind of given to us. You know, these are the best. Sometimes you can't afford it, but do, you know, get there. And then these are the highest quality. So just to let you know, like, where can we use natural farming? Everywhere is the answer, if you cannot tell from that list. but I enumerated a few out just to show you that I think in the family garden is the number one crucial spot I see as we return to more local food production in our own yards you can make all your own fertilizer at home

10:53 with sugar you can put this out into your yard you can get your compost you can get this little miniature cycle of natural farming happening in your family garden and your, like I said transformations from inside how you've got this revolution going because you don't go to the you know like you're eating healthy and we're all you got so much abundance and I have to share with your neighbor so family gardens number one spot to start learn commercial operations I you know we're getting natural farming into commercial operations as we've done more research

11:27 to get university support I mean we're at the University right now so this like this is the switch of like you know recognizing microbes as our answer and as we get the documentation that when you enter into a commercial thing you now have like a bottom line you know it's not like oh my pumpkins didn't work it's like no now my business needs this steady supply and so natural farming can provide that and we're working to really provide that support infrastructure under that so that you know today you can go ask about you know at the

12:07 University we're trying to bring that in here so you can get that information on natural farming I put up these rough estimates of one hundred and seventy five dollars an acre a year and a hundred dollars an acre a year for a vegetable and orchard these are just like if you're gonna go do the maintenance spray this is like a Richard Perea type budget of what he's about what are you spending and so it's not quite like Master Cho level like I did all my IMO-4 and I got my OHN and I got everything perfect that's probably not this price point especially your first year it may be your second

12:45 and third like maybe two to three years in because when I went to Korea I noticed the farmers that were in natural farming longer did less they were happier and they did less because they set up that foundation the microbes are working for them they just come back with a little bit of foods for $75 spray their thing and they got this foundation that's eight meters of soil fertility that they didn't have to buy and bring from someplace now they activated eight meters so they spray a little bit you know and so you can really get your cost down the more you treat your living soil as a friend.

13:27 I put up here remediation of damaged lands. IMOs are notorious for eating oil, for eating radiation, for eating bad smells. They can clean up almost any waste site especially combined with the Korean natural farming of putting the sugars with the plant juices with the like we're learning about it can clean up almost any damaged land you know there's stories of farmers Ginger John blasted land puts IMOs worms return fertility is back there's a story of me going down to downtown Hilo was herbicide it for decades come into that

14:13 triangle, put IMO in biochar, coconut husk thing, just super abundant. So this can heal all damaged land. I put up hydroponic aquaponics systems, because I believe any of those things where it's synthesized chemical type stuff, we can do those same things naturally through fermentation. So it can replace all your inputs. I haven't personally grown that way, but I'm sure I could, you know, it's pure food. It's the same idea. I also put up here growing in pots because, you know, some people just, you know, start a little rosemary plant and start natural farming it.

14:57 And, you know, anywhere, it'll work from any scale is what I'm trying to show here. And I left this little bit, you can kind of see I, like, prototyped this slide as I was building it. I left in the show balance sheet, yearly production, how, what costs, because that was kind of a note to me of what I wanted to put in here on this slide. And I wasn't able to put that into the presentation in a way that was, because there's so many unique cases. Like I have this, I'm growing tomatoes, I'm growing that.

15:29 But what I do have is a spreadsheet on my iPad that I'm happy for any size acreage or whatever. You tell me what you got, I'll plug some numbers in. and get you a cost benefit in iPad seconds. So I want to bring that is available. We know the cost, we know manufacturing. They're getting cheaper as more of us get into it. Like there's all of us here, they're getting cheaper. On the left side of the picture is my keiki making a fermented plant juice, but look how happy they are because they get to lick their hands after they're done.

16:08 And they're like, they pull out chunks of sugar this big from the bag, and they're like, can we have this one? I'm like, no. Break it in half. So what I wanted to do is, you know, everyone was talking about, like, co-op and label and, like, make a group and do all this stuff. I've been in this for a while. CGNF's kind of been part of what we're doing. I have this sweet little graphic up there. And within this CGNF, I think these systems that I have listed here pretty much give us a standard thing of,

16:54 you know, if you follow these recipes, you'll have everything you need to be effective on a farm. And then there's other things, you know, like someone's like, well, I fermented this, you know, like Richard today had his Christmas berry tincture done with alcohol, which that's not on our list, right? But that's compatible in a way, and you know, and then if we block out with these to say, okay, we got these solutions that natural farming offers, and then you can have additions into those, then that gives us a basis to work off of.

17:30 And this is what I've been taking a lot of my time and energy to really try to solidify, is what do we call these things? Because forever we've called it fermented plant juice, which I take the plant and I ferment it and I get juice. So that describes a process, right? What I'm calling them is that same thing you call a fermented plant juice, I'm calling it a plant food. because now I go to use it, how do I use it? Well, plant food, I feed my plants it. But a fermented plant juice, what do I do with that? I don't know, it's a fermented plant.

18:05 So what I've been doing is trying to get our vocabulary to match our usage because when this came from Korea, it came as how to make it. So fermented plant juice, fish amino acid. They don't tell you, like, okay, this is plant food, this is a DNA booster, this is going to make it flower. and so naming it by their uses is what I'm trying to bring in here. And so I got some people closing their eyes here and I'm an elementary school teacher and I love to be upbeat so I will enunciate a little better and get some energy because I was kind of droning on, right?

18:54 Did that feel good? Alright, so I got these things up here. I just wanted to show you this slide because this is going to kind of contain the next couple slides of what I'm going to go through. You see I got life establishment formulas, plant maintenance solution, and maintenance enhancements. I'm going to go through those three and make them as exciting as I can. So, before I get to that, something for everyone. Because I talked about cost. Everyone always tells me natural farming is too expensive. Something for everyone. What can everyone afford? A trip to the ocean.

19:31 I guarantee, well, I mean, some of us maybe not, but 99.9% of us can go to the ocean in Hawaii. And it is full of this brine of minerals that are just free right there. So if you take seawater, and you've done it at 1 to 30, so I take one part of seawater, So this thing here, and I take 30, which if you see on the right, it equivalents to, if I have one gallon, I put 125 milliliters in there. I'm going to have the same salinity as my blood. Just like when they put an IV into me, it's salt water, tiny bit, same thing. So the salt condition's gone. If you're in Australia, use biochar.

20:13 But it also now has every element because they all washed into the sea. So I now got this sweet, super mineralized thing. And I have the saline microbes synergistically affect the soil and help to build soil structure. Because there's basically two classes of microbes. You've got freshwater and saltwater. And when you take the saltwater ones and you combine those with the freshwater ones, you get this diversity that would not occur 400 feet up from the ocean where my property is. The ocean water would only get up there in small quantities.

20:50 But when I bring all these microbes, they now bring these guys and they're like, whoa, I've never seen you before. And they create diversity in your soil that we know IMO is all about diversity. That's one of its huge benefits. So when you bring the second family in, you get huge synergistic effects. Also, I know they sometimes use a chemical product on things before they harvest them, like wheat and sugar and all these things are poisoned before they harvest it to increase the sugar content and that's crazy because dilute sea water 1 to 15 will do the same thing for you

21:32 so instead of using a um you know glyphosate which has chlorine and super bad for your soil just use a little bit of salt water which will it stress your plant the same way right when you're you're about to harvest it. So it puts all the nutrients and then the extra salt water makes it sweeter because your tongue loves minerals. When something's full of minerals, you're like, wow, that's flavorful. It's a great detector. So you put the seawater on there, it goes into your plant. And another thing to do is to ferment it for 24 hours with fermented plant juice

22:06 before you use it. That just increases that potency. Those sea microbes get to grow with this plant juice a little bit, get their extra boost, then you put them into the soil, and you've got already this active culture going into your soil. So, and my fermented plant juice recipe is down on the bottom. And I'll just let you know, I'm gonna put this presentation online. I put everything on naturalfarminghawaii.net, which the URL, I think, is at the end of the presentation. So, seawater everyone can afford. Now I'm going to get into a couple of natural farming solutions.

22:46 These are how to combine what we learned today. And this first one I was going to start with is just liquid green manure. This is kind of like a custom green grass liquid fertilizer thing. But I've been often asked, what do we do about green manure? And green manure is expensive, mulch, all that stuff's expensive. So fermenting the essence of it out is what this recipe is all about. This is how to make liquid green manure. And so what you do is you take grass, like your weeds, cut them pretty short, put them into a blender with water, and turn it on high and blend it.

23:28 And now you've got a grass juice. That is what I'm referring to in the recipe down on the right side in red where you see it says grass. It's just one of my things that's a quick, I just made a blend of grass that I got all that chlorophyll and whatever weeds you have, like honohono or whatever, put them in there, grass, blend that up. Then the other thing I do is I make a starch source. So I take like a cube of kalo in water and I blend it the same way. You can even do the grass and the kalo at the same time in there.

24:01 But you're just trying to get some simple starch in the water and grass in the water. And the rest of these are recipes that we learned in Korean natural farming. And so there's a lot of acronyms. I'm just going to keep them up there. But you add into it indigenous microorganisms, or IMO. That can be IMO2 through IMO4. Any of those? You add in the, and those are your microbes, then you add in OHN, which is your medicine, right? So this, any interaction that's going to happen there, they're going to have medicine.

24:37 Then you add FPJ to act as their food, so while they're multiplying in their soil, they'll have enough food to eat. Okay, you include BRV, which is brown rice vinegar. Also, I make it from bananas. We didn't get to that recipe today, but look it up online really easy to make vinegar at home I put it as a solvent. That's not vinegar so hard to describe what it does in the soil. It is so amazing It's a catalyst that helps things digest like you can eat twice as many plates of laulau If you chug some vinegar, so if you're ever going to get in a hot dog contest

25:21 Also, if you put a little vinegar in your water in the morning, you drink it, it helps flush you out, right? And that's so that same thing. It's a flusher. It's it's it's amazing stuff vinegar Cannot I mean you could say more about it here for an hour Same thing about lactic acid bacteria, that LAB, could be here again for an hour. I called it oxygenators. Richard called them the workhorses, but what these guys do is they keep the environment beneficial to us. If we're not there you get smells that are not good to you

25:56 if lacto's not present. When lacto's there it keeps it beneficial to microbes for us. So it oxygenates as well. And then I'm adding in fish amino acid. Fish amino acid is like the fuel. It's like the gasoline to the fire. It's really dangerous to use but can get you really good results early you know and so we added into this what happens is all these things synergistically work with each other for about 24 to 48 hours they create something that's like this looks just like regular water, except for when you smell it, you can smell that there's microbes in there.

26:44 So I have it here, I made it just to show everyone can, not now, but come up, check it out, it's here on the table, it's that middle bucket. This is essentially what I've made here. If you smell it, it smells like chlorophyll, smells like it's active, smells like it's energy. This is gonna enable me to very, you know, Richard was all about water and using those things. I tend to think that it's a good idea for us here because water is so abundant. So take this here, now that I've got it fermented, and then this five gallon bucket is still diluted out one to five hundred. So from

27:26 this five gallon bucket now I've made, you know, that's four gallons, I made a lot, two thousand gallons right so so now i you know and um and you um so so it's really potent stuff here and but what you want to do with this is to drench more it's 100 gallons per acre to really get this green manure in because as it ferments for 24 hours the microbes are going to grab that chlorophyll which would have been your benefit from having that wood chips and all that wood juice and the microbes are going to extract it out and turn your starch source into an alcohol.

28:08 So it binds it in a water-soluble form and that's why it acts as liquid wood chips. And you think of wood chips laying a layer of mulch on top, but did you hear the story about Vince told that the kalo grower that put the IMO down and none of the weeds grew? By changing the biology to be this fungal wood loving great stuff, the weeds don't want to go there. So it acts as a cover mulch even though there's no mulch there because you put the microbes there minus the wood. It's this weird concept, you know, like you've done the effect of the wood chips without the wood chips.

28:48 wood chips. So this, I put this up here because I believe this to be one of the most affordable ways and the way that I do it a lot is this right here. I make this kind of tea thing, ferment all these things together, this is what I'm spraying out all the time. This. I do, no no, let's go, but however I am going to move on to the next slide which is this one, so I'm going to talk about about indigenous field treatment and this one here is where we do our IMO4 and so this is like this is like the jet of getting around you know like high

29:28 tech if you did this this you know like you know I thought economy or something there in the luggage you know this is like first class how to do stuff and so starting with IMO4 IMO4 is concentrated fungal spores I don't know if you got that from outside but essentially what you're doing is you're taking the stuff from the forest and concentrating and like taking their eggs and tuning them to be perfect for your environment for soil and then you're putting them out so it's like taking super soldiers and applying them and if you don't go

30:03 to the IMO 4 stage it's like taking regular people or like you know infants so you know some there's benefit to going through these stages to get to I often can't always afford to go this far. Time, money, lots of reasons. But if you make it and you put 1,200 pounds per acre, I guarantee you will get phenomenal results. Assuming you made your IMO right. But that alone is phenomenal. The mill run acts as a fuel. The microbes go to work. This alone, the IMO 4 would be good. I then recommend incorporating a functionalized char. Vince showed the picture of the char, all the mycelia on it.

30:52 Same thing, when you put this into the soil, the char now gives the microbes a refuge. If you just put the microbes out and conditions get bad, they die. If you put the char out, conditions get bad, they go into the char. Conditions get good again, they come out, get bad. and so it gives them a home, a safe haven, a persistence in your soil when you add char. I recommend that. Josiah's going to put in a plant here. It's going to get cheaper. I don't know. I put up $125. That was just an estimate of what I thought it might cost. It's functionalized because it's activated with IMO.

31:28 So don't put out raw char. Always activate with IMO first. Then I mulch, you know, however much that costs you. if you can get it locally, if you can do it from your own property. Like I said, that documentary, the guy just used wood chips. That alone will get you to IMO, will get you everything you need. And then this last little bit up here is, you see the treatment on the right? This is now a liquid formula that I'm combining. OHN, FPJ, BRV, LAB, FAA, too many acronyms. I'm combining all these things together, and you can see my reasons for it on the right of why I put them in.

32:08 Same reasons to the other one of I'm trying to get these components in there. And when I put 1,200 pounds of IMO out, great. When I come back and I water it with this, how do I use those liquids? Now I water it on top. Now all that food is going to go in and all those microbes are going to start working into my soil. Now my soil is going to aerate and puff up. And so not just putting microbes out, but then feeding them liquid once a week. This is how to establish the best soil foundation. If I was to run a high-tech operation and had good capital investment, I would do all this,

32:51 and you would grow unbelievable produce, assuming you have the market for that, which I just don't have the desire. I like previous with imperfections on it you know like what so oh wait can you go back one second so just to follow up on this so this one this recipe here was is using all our solid amendments and then watering these liquids on which the recipe before that was getting all of these solid things in this sort of liquid version which is why I use it. So do you see the difference between the liquid green manure and then this is

33:37 more of a field treatment solution of setting a soil foundation? I just want to make that clear.

33:43 Audience: What's the dilution that you use with the field treatment solution?

33:49 Drake Weinert: This dilution, I don't ferment this one for 24 hours. I use it straight up and the dilution is exactly as you see it. In the previous, the green manure, I fermented it for a day first, so then I needed to re-dilute it. This one I'm adding in and using it immediately. So this is the product that you're seeing on this one. Does that make sense?

34:15 Audience: Yeah. Yeah.

34:16 Drake Weinert: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so this, that number there, the 164, isn't adding all those together. I summed all those together to say add 164. So that way, the measurements on the right that are in milliliters in the table. For each gallon, I'm going to add that much. But I also make these. The reason I say those as individual components, and I show these up here as individual components, but really what I want to be able to do is to give one solution,

35:03 which I'm going to show in the next slide. So this is what I want to kind of simplify the natural farming down, and to take these three inputs that we call OHN, FPJ, and BRV, combine those all three into one thing and call that a solution that is now our maintenance solution. So if you say I use maintenance solution, that implies that you sprayed OHN, BRV, and FPJ diluted in those ratios. Because this recipe right here is a common denominator of all recipes. every recipe you'll find has all three of these in it and so let's just call it the maintenance

35:43 solution this is the core of natural farming if you a lot of these things i'll say just in isolation if you just use this in isolation it would be enough you know if you just put imo out as an isolation it would be enough if you just put wood chips by itself it would be enough when you combine all these together and use the maintenance solution the whole system is going start to work. We all eat good food, we all do good work. When we're content and we have what we need, it just flows. So this here, this is what I've been bottling and kind of

36:17 selling. And it's in these bottles that I make here, where this is what's in the bottle. And this gives me a really cool tool because one 500-milliliter bottle will do 30 gallons of water. So it's nice. I mean, this is a nice thing you can take. You're ready to go. You want to, you know, you don't have to measure out your OHN and your FPJ. You just take the maintenance solution, pour it in 20 milliliters per gallon, and you're good to go. And so I try to, you know, make this as easy as possible. that we just talk about, you know, like, you did maintenance solution today,

36:58 because then that's really a common vocabulary for us. Instead of saying, well, I put some OHN in and this and that, you know, if we just, if we really make it easier for ourselves and say, well, you know, I did maintenance solution once a week, and I, you know, and then I put IMO out as a soil foundation, I'm starting to name these things by their uses. And then that makes it easier to use for all of us when we talk to each other. So this one here, maintenance solution, it's the core of natural farming. You can use this anytime.

37:36 You know, always we say dilute more if you're curious, if you're unsure. I say, you know, this 20 milliliter dilution, but start less if you're... But I spray this everywhere, on the roadsides, everything. So the reason I wanted to show that and kind of make that the common denominator is now I wanted to go into this part here, which is kind of our, how you go through the growth cycle. So this is where I think it can simplify natural farming because all these in common have with them the maintenance solution. So if I look at it any stage of my plant, I can

38:23 apply the maintenance solution. So if I take that part away and I look at it and I want my plant to flower, the only thing I have to know is, well flower is water soluble calcium phosphate, WCP. And so knowing which stage your plant is in and how to enhance it in that stage is the maintenance solution plus this little amendment which I'm just calling an enhancement to our formulas. So you're just enhancing your maintenance solutions because I notice my plants, you know, I just planted them. They're all little

38:57 starts. So I'm going to add my leaf enhancement into my maintenance solution. Now I'm going to get better leaf growth. So I see my plant's starting to put up flowers and I'll switch and I'll add my flower enhancement into my maintenance solution. And you'll notice this is a common denominator between all of our things. The one addition I add to this, there's so there's only you know there's help. So we start with fish amino acid for leaves, we have calcium phosphate for flowers and roots, and then we have calcium to make sweet fruit. I can explain why you use those but

39:39 but they really help the plant at that point to ease into what's happening. So you know the plant naturally wants to transfer its sugars to the fruit when you spray calcium on it, it helps that happen. So each of these aids our plants, aids our microbes to help what's happening. So any questions on this slide here. So WCA is water-soluble calcium and we typically made that from eggshells or crushed coral. We did a demonstration outside and we cooked it. It's preferable to cook it. As you cook it you change, you remove organic matter

40:29 and leave the calcium behind and that's preferable because you won't have as much contaminants in your dissolution that you make. Yeah it helps because there it's you know, coral's living, it's alive when you cook it out it gets rid of that living part and just leaves their shells behind. So I put this together as kind of like a... I think it's a cool label. To stand for quality. I've been working on this with a lot of people and I believe what Derek was saying of making some unified label,

41:19 figuring out our inputs, making all our same solutions, getting, setting this really high quality bar. You know, I've heard, when I was out there, I heard some of the, talking to our audience and saying, we got to, we got to. Well, I'm, in my small effort, trying to like provide that with everyone here. And so I think making a label like this where we can stand behind Cho, can figure out, you know, there's solid inputs between, and we can really make this, you know, you know it's the highest quality. When you eat that, you know it's like, oh, you know, no poison was on that. This was the best.

42:01 So that was the first part. I got this little second part because as I was giving this, as I was kind of getting this together, I was talking and I still need, there's still parts of this I need to follow up on, but I was realizing that, you know, I'm trying to teach how to use the inputs, or excuse me, the solutions, how to apply the solutions. But you guys also may need a primer on biology. Because that's what this is all about. I'm up here saying microbes this, microbes that, but what am I saying?

42:39 Obviously it's a scientific thing that has a very deep level of study, but as natural farmers there's some very simple, crucial biology we can learn. So this second part of this little presentation is to talk to you a little bit about the biology and to see the guys we're working with. And to finish, my first part is, how do I actually spray the stuff out in my garden, right? So I got this sprayer here, and I had to take off the spray handling, the thing that you use to spray, because the thing kept clogging. So now I just use my finger and I squirt.

43:20 And I use this little two-gallon thing and I pump it up and I squirt on everything, right? And I go around and I squirt my garden in the evening. I make these mixes, like I said, right here is one of them. I would take that, put it into my sprayer, go around and spray. I'm soaking my stuff until it's wet, you know, it's dripping. I try to hit the under part of the leaf. But this is a sprayer made out of plastic from someplace, I don't know where. and you know like there's a lot of ways to do it like like a big sprayer like

43:50 air kind of blowing thing but I was invited to the Unity Summit and I got there and the place smelled like urine and feces and I'm down at the Wailoa Park you know that big pavilion oh it smells so hard so I got there and some people were cleaning the floor with orange cleaner, citrus cleaner, stuff cleaning it with brooms and stuff. I was like, ah. So I walked to my car, and I mixed these mixes up, and I spray them on the side of the road from a tank in my car. Flip it on, and I spray the sides of the road. And I had a bunch in my car, right? So I'm cruising around doing that.

44:30 So I grab some, and I put it into this dish, and I walk around, and I was like, how am I going to spread this? Well, what is this here? This is ti leaf, right? Simple technology. It's been around forever. And I was thinking about it. And why did they used to do that? You know, you go to get blessed and stuff, right? And what happens? They, like, bless you and they put the stuff on you, right? The juju, whatever the guy had. But there's a reason to this.

45:16 There's a reason to this. And I believe that back in the day, we were really in tune with microbes. And we knew what was going on. And so when you come to go get a blessing, what's going to happen to you is you're going to get the best microbes put on you because that will start to heal. All of a sudden, your skin rash went away. You're like, wow, I feel better. You can digest better. You're like, wow, this guy did a miracle, right? Maybe. Maybe he was just naturally farming. But I want to show you something. If I spray with this sprayer here, it's going to put out a trickle and do some things.

45:50 But it's going to be a little bit like Rocky Horror Picture Show. You ready? Maybe I'll get a bigger cup. To the front row. Somebody stop me. So, did you get wet?

46:17 Audience: Yeah. I got wet.

46:20 Drake Weinert: So, no, but how did you get wet?

46:25 Audience: How did I get wet?

46:26 Drake Weinert: Well, like, so my point to this is you're not soaking wet, right?

46:31 Audience: No.

46:31 Drake Weinert: What happened?

46:32 Audience: It was refreshing. Misted.

46:35 Drake Weinert: Yeah, misted, right?

46:36 Audience: Yeah. Droplets.

46:38 Drake Weinert: It was misted, right? And really fine particulate size. Really small particulate size. Really small. And that is ideal for putting out microbes. Ideal. So I think, I go around and I'm like, oh, I got all this expensive technology. You talk to this guy who's got a drone to fly up mauka and drop all this stuff. And I'm like, cool, I'm going to save the world. And then I think to myself, man, why do I need that guy? I can just get a bunch of friends to walk around with some ti leaf and some microbes and just... And we got it out there better. Better particulate size. Better thing.

47:16 We even put some mana onto it. We got this whole session going. And this is what they were doing in ancient times. It wasn't just like, oh, here's some water. They were putting microbes out. They had no-smell pig pens. They were doing and using this technology. And we only have fragments of it today of, like, the guy with the ti leaf. And you're like, well, you know, it doesn't really make sense to us today. But when we connect in and we go into this natural farming, there's something. He's putting the spirit, the tiny little life out there, right? And that's what this is about.

47:47 So how do I use it? Now, I do this. I walk around. I get my keiki. We cruise through the garden. I call it Kāne wai ola. Right? Bring the life-giving waters of Kāne into our garden, and we spread it around, and we go, and it's fun, because with the sprayer, only one kid can use it, right? I want to be that kid. Then they end up dropping it because it's too heavy, and it's like, you know, like, so this, now they get the ti leaf, you can go in small buckets, they all whip it at each other, they have so much fun, I don't know, you know, it's like they're spreading it wherever, now they go home,

48:21 their better immune system, you know, like, this whole thing going on and so I thought you know like low-tech like this is simple we can get hundreds of people not even like just me walk you know spreading the stuff the earth's gonna get better you know and so low-tech this way particulate size being fine I find when I go downtown and I was using a sprayer to spray people were into it but I walked downtown with this stuff people were like but what are you doing? Yeah, yeah. Plus, ti leaves grow everywhere around here. I recommend the green kind. They've got good stems. Average-edged ti leaf.

49:09 They also make good lei. I don't know if you noticed. But very, very useful. So that's ultimately how I do it. I kind of get down. I try to bring natural farming into my life in the most low-stress way possible, because it's better for me, it's better for the microbes. I love to make ferments. I've been getting into it lately. I think I want to go on a fast where I just drink fermented plant juices from different types. I still haven't gotten to that level, but I've got a whole bunch now, a collection of different types. Each one has its own healing properties.

49:46 and so I mean I I live natural farming pretty covered in microbes I haven't showered in like 10 years I smell good though I was gonna throw the litter from my pig pen at you guys but we're inside that's not it'll be too clean in here But no, so right here, this is from a pig. Don't eat it.

50:39 Audience: Oh no.

50:41 Drake Weinert: Yeah, it doesn't taste like bacon, even though it came from bacon. But it's good. It's actually super dehydrated, so... But I love microbes. And... So do you see this quote? does it look kind of official? Because I made that quote up. Occulture Rex.

51:26 Just the king of hidden something. I don't know. But this here, I believe this to be the truth. That because microbes are small, we're bound to forget about them. We are in a revival here right now. We're remembering this stuff. Like I said, why did we use this and spray this on each other, we're in a revival. We're finding out why we did all these things. And it's because a lot of it had to do with these microorganisms. And as we start to rediscover them, health comes back to us. All this stuff comes back to us. But think of us in generation, generation, generation.

52:03 You tell all these people, and they're like, yeah, but they stop. They don't add equal parts of sugar. And somehow the quality of these recipes over time, And it takes a revival like this to remember the microbes, to study, to see them, to bring back this. I mean, they're inside of you. You get 3% of your body weight, Dr. Park was saying, is microbes. 3% of your weight is something we completely forgot about maybe like a decade, 20 years, 30 years ago. You know, like a handful of people knew. And now a room full of people are educated on this of like, these things are in me.

52:39 I better take care of them and they will take care of me. Right? And so we're about to enter into this like golden age of being in harmony of just like, I can eat cheese because I'll drink some lacto after. You know, and my friend grew it. So towards the bottom here, I named a bunch of microbes. IMO, LAB, those are acronyms, kombucha, Shwa-Saka-San, EM-1. These are all microbes we're familiar with. and these are the things that are starting to come to the forefront now with these different names that we're getting to but we can see them in order

53:27 for you to see microbes with your naked eye there have to be about a trillion present so when you look at your thing and you see a mold on half your fruit and you cut it off to eat the other half there was already a trillion there for They're all on the other half too. You just ate them. You just didn't see them. Mycotoxins. Mycotoxins is what makes the world go round. It's what's driving everything. Certain things are putting out antibiotics here, driving this, driving that. And when you eat too many mycotoxins, you die. But you can heal and clean those out of you with natural farming.

54:07 But that's the rule of it, is to see them with your naked eye has to be more than a trillion present. But to get sick, that's not the key. Who's seen food poisoning in a restaurant and been like, I'll have some of that? Nobody, right? No one would order food poisoning on the menu. They'd be like, nah. And if you could smell it when you're eating it, you'd be like, nah, right? You can't see it, so just a very small amount of bad guys getting out of balance can really mess you up. Small amount. And that's why I have this. Because this enables me to see one single microbe.

54:48 So if one bad guy is in there and I have enough patience, I could find him. This enables me to see 400 times into the soil. And now I can see these microbes. They're big. They blow up. They're nice. This cost me about $400. Actually about $700. because it has a nice camera on it and this is a really nice one. It's essential if you're going to do any experimentation in natural farming. You want to know you did it right, you want to know you got to have one of these. And I can quickly and easily check. I made a

55:26 batch of IMO, should I put it out in my field? I can quickly put it under this, see how many good guys, how many bad guys, how many, what ratios I'm at. This little simple tool here can save our lives and I don't know how for how many hundreds of years this isn't that advanced technology that we kind of missed all this that the soil is alive and living but this gives you the ability to look at it live if you plate things you've all seen the chemistry where you made a plate of bacteria on a petri dish those only grow anaerobic non-oxygen that live on that agar to see

56:02 soil microbes, you have to, like, they can only culture a very small amount of them. To see them you actually have to take your soil, put it in water, put it under this guy, and you can see them all. They won't grow and multiply, they're dying, they're on their way out, but I can see them at least, and count them, and know. Without growing false numbers of way pathogens the way plating methods do. Plating is not a good thing for soil microbes evaluation. So someone in a micro lab offers to plate this. I thank you. I have my own plate and it's full.

56:42 So this, I learned this from Elaine Ingham, Rodale Institute, really great stuff, look up them. But this opened my eyes to natural farming. It gave me the keys I needed to be on my own, to take, verify, to do the science. No longer had black box I don't have a transparent LED lit up box. So yeah so let's go so what am I looking through when I look through this this is my biology primer is I'm looking for fungus fungus fungus fungus right and in context of fungus if you're not a soils person you probably thought oh fungus is not maybe the most

57:28 palatable word. I love fungus though. Mushrooms, yeah, are the fruit of fungus. And, but they're, we use them in natural farming because they're easy to ID. Um, nematodes maybe even more so, but fungus for our case here of, so on the right, that picture, that's through the microscope, and one of those pieces of life on there is a fungus. And it's easy to tell because it's the only one that looks like that, there's only one fungus on there but it's really easy to see, and it's that tube structure on the right, the chunk of tube, and those tubes, what

58:08 they do is they run throughout, those are the hyphae, those are the mycelium, those are the things going, they act as electric water airlines, they move everything to the soil, they plug into the roots, they can virtually extend your roots millions if not trillions of miles, there's fungus in the plants that's designed to plug into this. This whole network is really, this isn't the native network of how it works, these fungus plug into each other, move things, this whole network happens in the soil. And when they do, when fungus gets into your

58:40 soil, it then gets aerated and clumpy and bigger things can move in. And so fungus are the grand soil architects of creating the nice loam and then everything else kind of comes in and the bacteria and the nematodes are kind of If you focus on the fungus, there will be dependent variables. To look for fungus in the soil is super easy. I take a little chunk of soil, make a slide like this. I'm looking for something in my soil that has a uniform width, just like that thing on the right. It's three and a half micrometers wide, which I judge by saying that that one speck I pointed

59:31 at was one micrometer, and I take those specks and I imagine them lined up across there and I say, oh, about three and a half of those. Now I can get a scale. So I know it's three and a half wide, and it's dark brown in color. So I can say, okay, if I found this in my compost or IMO or my soils, I know I'm doing the right thing, I'm headed on the right path of natural farming, I'm bringing more life, more network, more connection, more richness via fungus. When I look through and I see one chunk, anywhere I look in my slide, anywhere I go to this

1:00:05 random spot and I find one chunk, I know I now have equal parts of bacteria to fungus. So I'm going to use that in a minute. so I look I want to make sure I got equal like how much bacteria to fungus I have and if they're anywhere I go I find one I know I'm in the sweet spot and that's going to enable me to determine you know where they're at especially in a commercial setting.

1:00:35 Audience: So one to five dilution is one part soil, five parts water?

1:00:37 Drake Weinert: Absolutely. So this is this graphic that I like to use I created this a while ago but this is the main thing of natural farming this is what I'm trying to do is that this column here is bacteria and the one below it is fungus and so if you see if we start out and then going horizontally is soil conditions so closest to me is your worst in your weeds and furthest away from me as our best forest. Like, you know, imagine mango trees. So we often start close to me on my side, which says that we got 10 bacteria, 0 fungus. If I go out into the yard out here, I go anywhere, and I take this little

1:01:25 microscope, I sample, that's what I'm gonna find. It's gonna be hard for me to find fungus. I'm gonna have to search through, search through, search through, maybe I find one. I'm also gonna look at some big clumped and like muddy water, it's not going to be very clean to look at in this scenario towards me. As I start to change that relationship of bacteria and fungus to each other, I start to move further away from me. And if I go into a thriving forest on the far side, I'm gonna find way more fungus by biomass than bacteria. So on that far

1:02:07 side they got plenty of fungus, not much bacteria. On this side they got plenty of bacteria, no fungus. So somewhere on the middle of this is where we want to be for growing our crops. Now the way to move along this scale towards me is to destroy your soil. It's to till, it's to spray something that we heard of talk about. I'm not even gonna mention it. All those things reset you and you come back to me over to the side. Sometimes you gotta tilt, right? You gotta do something, you gotta do some earthworks, you gotta do some things. So you come back, you come

1:02:44 this way. You've damaged your soil. You want to grow crops. You take the IMO, you take these, the liquid green manure that I'm talking about, you water this out and it starts to push you towards the middle. Especially when you start to get your IMO from a really nice forest. It's gonna start to push you that way when you take those IMOs, you put them in your soil and you feed them right there, they're gonna grow and now you got all that fungus working for you and you move further down that scale. As you move into the middle and you get to where it's equal

1:03:21 parts, that's 600 to 600, you should not have to worry about weeds in a traditional sense. The plants that are weeds that grow are typically really fast bacterial oriented things. As your soil gets more rich and you go that way those plants aren't going to want to grow. What's going to want to grow is more like perennial ground cover type stuff and things that aren't as pesky and weedy and spiky. It's going to be nice lush leafy rich stuff growing. So you can So my whole idea here is this scale here of where I want to be here.

1:04:02 And IMOs enables me to move further that way, faster than any other method that I've discovered. The classic way of permaculture is to come in and plant all the trees on the far left. You go in, you plant your trees, you plant all these things. But in permaculture, we leave the soil empty, right? We plant all those trees. So you'll find in three years, the biology will come in. and in three years your permaculture project takes off and takes root, and you don't got to do anything. You can do that same thing by planting all those permaculture trees on the far side,

1:04:33 coming in with the natural farming biology, put that into your soil, and now everything, your top and your bottom, are already on that left side. So within a month or three months, you're like, what took people three years? So what's above relates to what's below, but what I'm saying here is that in natural farming we can get that below factor because most regenerative projects that are coming back are fixing the above stuff what we can see natural farming fixes the below stuff the stuff we can't see and I think that's where we got to start you know start at the soil

1:05:11 start where it makes sense so that's why I support this and let's move over there right let's get over to our trees on a B let's shift our arrow CGNF solutions get there. A little bit about how this works is that basically in your soil you got bacteria at the bottom. Bacteria are the building blocks. They make up everything. When I really start to look at the microscope and the dirt, there's very little dirt. Almost all of its life stuck and glued to life. Life on life on life. I sometimes wonder if the continents are just glued together microbes because

1:05:50 there's not that much just like when you burn a tree there's only a little bit of ash like there's not much that like earth there's not that much like mostly microbes glue to each other so we live on top that that's our basis is bacteria the fungus are the middle layer which I think they're the most important because they're the architects and the engineers that take the bacteria building stuff and they build buildings like this which now gives us a space in here where we're protected from the sun, like the fungus built all this stuff for

1:06:19 and then your top layer of the protozoa and nematodes are us. We're in here to eat the food, to recycle the nutrients, to get the flow, to get it juiced and rolling. And so when you get all three of these layers in your soil and they're functioning happily and healthily, all your nutrients and everything will be provided by this cycling biological system. And we can benefit the most in this by helping our fungus enable this whole pyramid to happen. Put the good guys in, they happen. I think I've got a couple more slides. So yeah, I'm going to talk about bacteria

1:07:03 and nematodes and finish up our little primer on biology, which I'm starting to fall asleep. It's going good though, right?

1:07:19 Audience: Yeah.

1:07:20 Drake Weinert: Okay, cool. Cool. Yeah, so, because I absolutely love this stuff, so I can talk about it forever, and I, you know. That's true. And that's the thing that draws me to it, is natural farmers, and the heart, the love, the, you know, the truth comes out. And then the science backs us up, you know. Sometimes you just, like, love, and people are like, where's the science? But this actually backs you up. You're like, yeah, it's right there, microbes. And the bacteria, you know, make us or break us, it's everything. I guess they're pathogens, microbes.

1:07:53 They are your NPK, they're your bags of fertilizer, are your bacteria. They're living bags of fertilizer, and you want them to die at the right time and in the right place, so that they're deposited right where your plant needed them. This happens naturally. Plants take sunlight, convert it into sugars, and then pump the sugars. Some plants, like 80% of their sugar gets pumped into the soil. So imagine you're eating food, and 80% of it you're putting into your soil, you're not eating yourself. That's what the plant is doing. Why would it do that?

1:08:31 Because the biology, the bacteria, is exchanging those sugars for things the plant can't make. phosphorus and potassium and these things. And the bacteria are full of those and they're exchanging. They're like, oh, thanks for the sugar and I'm going to die right here. And now you've got phosphorus there. Because they die quick. They go through a generation every 30 minutes. So, you know, half your bacteria have already died since I started this talk. You've already not had a new set. Pretty awesome.

1:09:04 Because you got all that fertilizer, and that's why you're still alive and pumping and all those nutrients. Had you got it all at once, you'd have been like, oh, but then you, you know, slow die off. Don't generalize too much on my statements. So basically they glue to each other. This glue turns out to be super important. It's called glomalin. And the more you read Acres USA, the more you realize, man, this is a cool magazine. You should read Acres. Because they're going to talk about glomalin, which is this glue that turns out to be fundamental to stopping erosion and all these things.

1:09:46 It's what makes the soil soil, is this glue. And it's from the bacteria, and you can't get it without them. yeah so just to sum that up the plants grow the bacteria with sugars so that they provide NPK bags right where they need them in their roots the root puts the sugar out, bacteria's right there it's right where it needs it so this little system, that's primarily what as a natural farmer how I'm going to talk about biology, or bacteria You'll hear a ton about nematodes from Koon-Hui. This is her tool for soil, like getting a metric and measuring, did I do good, did I do bad, is nematodes.

1:10:42 four out of five multicellular animals are nematodes. So think of how many animals and things you've seen that have many cells, and then multiply that number by five to get how many nematodes there are. Or four. I don't know, however that math works, so I should be more precise. But basically, if you went out to space and you got rid of the dirt, you'd still be able to see the continents because of the nematodes. They're that prolific in the soil. And when you talk to a farmer, what do you hear about nematodes? You gotta kill them. Kill them all.

1:11:22 Let's use this stink chemical. It's not even going to read the label. You got nematodes. Yeah, I know, people want to nuke them, right? Nuke them. Nuke the nematodes. But they are 4 out of 5 multicellular animals. around and every animal you see try to kill four times as much. So when you think you're killing the nematodes, you're not. You're just upsetting them. And they play a very vital role. There's four types of them. There's bacterial feeding, there's fungal feeding, there's root feeding, and there's nematode eating. So those four

1:12:02 types, typically we're only worried about the root feeders and farming. Root feeders, root feeders, but they come because we create conditions for them to arrive. They're so happy, they're like, thanks for just planting sweet potatoes in this whole monocrop, that's what I wanted. And so they thrive, right? So intercropping other ways to mitigate nematodes, but in our case why we're concerned with them is, remember I talked about the bacteria coming around the roots? Now this nematode swims in, and the nematode's like a bear that's kind of messy, and he just walks in and

1:12:35 and he swipes a couple people and knocks off their arms, and they're like, oh, and then he eats maybe one, but he doesn't chew their head, and he leaves the legs around, and then as he's going out, he drops a bear present, and he cruises, and the nematodes are the bears of the soil, that all this bacteria and things are right there, and the nematode cruises through and eats them and leaves a bunch of leftovers for the plant to eat, because if the bacteria's alive, the plant's like, give me the phosphorus, and the bacteria's like, no,

1:13:03 But this nematode comes and eats it and just splatters it everywhere and then the plant gets to suck some of that up So the nematodes are the cyclers, they're the great recyclers If you take those out of your field and you nuke them, which you can't just select one, you know, you kill them Now your nutrients don't cycle So you got all this stuff out there and it's just like sitting there and it's not, you know, it's more bacteria, you know and Then you're, you know, you run into a number of problems, so

1:13:30 So, nematodes also, right when they're in the root zone, cruising around in that rich bacterial area, they're big. They're making airspace that roots are also large. So, roots can penetrate and follow the holes that nematodes make. They're tiny little worms. And I found that their population is imbalanced if your fungus is imbalanced. I've never seen nematodes be out of balance if the fungus was in balance except for one time on Molokaʻi where I looked at this pot where he had been taking IMO and burying it in a pot and when you bury IMO it becomes

1:14:19 anaerobic and you kill it and it becomes like a it's so rich that now it's this feeding ground for you know it's like zombie land or something and what happened was that thing was swimming there was a tree in it in this pot tree was perfectly fine perfectly fine you look at that you think oh wow you know great great seedlings I put under the microscope it was swimming with fungal feeding microbes. Nematodes. I've never seen more nematodes in a sample. This thing had like thousands of nematodes. And they were all fungal feeding because I looked at their mouth. They were all eating fungus.

1:14:58 So he buried the IMO. IMO is tons of fungus. Fungus eggs. They had gone, you know, turned bad and now this was a feeding ground for all these nematodes. So you look at the plant. The plant's doing fine because the only nematode that's going to affect your plant is going to be a root feeder. So you look at it and you think, oh, it's fine. You would never know that if you took that pot and you put it into your ground, you've now inoculated your whole area with fungal-feeding nematodes. So you've unleashed all your nice fungus, you've got your garden bed,

1:15:28 you put this pot in, now you've got all these fungal-feeding nematodes that take off and go nuts. And so by mishandling the IMO, you can actually grow bad guys, in our sense, but it wasn't affecting the plant, right? And so without the microscope, you look, you look at the, you think it's okay. But this is what this tool enables you to do to see these larger indicators of that was not a healthy situation. And, you know, I know it was because the IMO was in there, but this would give you, you know, like a way to diagnose those types of issues. So I also love nematodes, but not as much.

1:16:13 So what I wanted to do, I hope you enjoyed this here, I wanted to kind of show a little bit here of, you know, I've been doing this for eight years, I don't know, these are pictures taken in 2008 or 9, I don't remember which year, but in October, and that's in Korea.

1:16:32 Audience: Who's that guy?

1:16:32 Drake Weinert: I took my beard off that week. Sold it to like that, you know, like lots of love. But what they're doing in Korea is they're growing just the most amazing produce. Like look at that apple. It's picture perfect, not a blemish on it. So sweet, so thin the skin, just taste off the hook. They're able to market that to Seoul. We have a market of Honolulu, or Maui even. But they're doing amazing things. That's the group that I went with in the upper left. You can see Mike DuPonte, Kim Chang, Tanya, Paulton, who else? There's a bunch of superstars in there. Mike, Liz, yeah.

1:17:17 Audience: Your dad.

1:17:18 Drake Weinert: My dad, yeah, he's cool too. And Dr. Park. But we cruised around Korea, we saw all these operations. They spoke Korean, we spoke English, we had a translator, we tried to learn what they were doing, but it's been eight years since we've done it. I feel like at this point I've reverse engineered it enough to have that quality standard we're all looking for. If I taste your input and I know whether it's good or not, and then I can bust out my microscope because I really want to double check on it. But we toured orchards. We saw extremely successful operations here.

1:17:58 The bottom left is a persimmon orchard there. That guy did nothing. He put a little bit of calcium out right when his fruits were going off. Other than that, he was doing well. So from that Korea, I kind of proved it out here a little bit. This was downtown Hilo. That was that triangle that I talked about that was nuked with toxins. And we grew a huge kalo field there. This was 2010, 2011, right in there. And we grew all this taro downtown, biochar, IMO, coconut, a little bit of dolomite, and solid.

1:18:45 On the right, more downtown Hilo. When I started the project, it just looked like all those spots were moths. I was like, come on. So I got inspired because in elementary school we had revitalized Liliʻuokalani Park. And I moved back here and I learned natural farming and I was like, well... So I just did this project. Now it's part of Let's Grow Hilo. It's still down there, all natural farming right on our streets. And we grow taro. And I've been doing natural farming since I had the spray on my car. It's super easy. Now I just drive by. Like before I didn't know.

1:19:28 But to show people natural farming, this is how, you know, this was part of my learning curve. Like I just went in and did it, you know, and done a lot of things good and a lot of things, you know, always improving. But now I teach school. I work with elementary school kids from kindergarten until eighth grade. and it's been so fun to get them into the garden and give them something that they can get you know our hands in and teach them what dirt is versus soil and what's dirty and what's what do these things mean and where does our food come

1:20:03 from so we'll have a lot of natural farmers pretty soon more coming out and I love it with this that's us turning IMO up top is a picture of IMO that we looked at, there's one of my students using this exact microscope here and teaching them the depth of the soil and how important that is. That was a good metaphor. So, and just, you know, in Korea we saw some commercial things, they had a really high-end market. We're trying to get it together. This is, Chris sent me this picture a couple years ago this is him you know this is his sprayer set up

1:20:48 going through a mac nut orchard to spray natural farming inputs they had put IMO down on the ground here before doing this I went to this same row recently and there are the grass is gone it's they don't mow that section anymore because you gotta mow mac nut orchards to pick up the nuts right they don't mow that section anymore and they don't need to the IMOs have gotten rid of the grass because it's so fungal in that environment that now they just pick up the nuts. So where you see him driving on grass, it's now not in that row. And he's done a few hacks.

1:21:24 Like you see the thing on the right, that's his fermented plant juice with a five-gallon tote, you know, water boy thing. To make enough on a scale large enough, you've got to get, you know, of scale and size. I love to do half-gallon jars, but I often make five-gallon buckets of things. to have enough. But one five gallon bucket makes 500 gallons. Times that by five, 2500 gallons. So the multiplication factor of making these things makes it okay on a large farm. Your startup, because you have to make all your inputs, can get a little rough. That's why we're trying, we have, I have

1:22:06 fermented plant juice available in large quantities. So if you're a farmer and wanted like gallons, let me know. And that's yeah, so that's his setup. It works on a large scale, love to get more of that. So what I wanted to just finish up, I got I think this might be my second to last slide, was this this is Master Cho for those of you who haven't seen him. He kind of looks like the image, that's the official Korean, you're part of his club farming there. Our logo is very similar to that with Cho. What he's doing there is putting his hand like this. It's the Korean way of saying I love you.

1:22:53 Now I will take a picture of that before I go so I can send it to him. He'd probably be stoked. But what I love about natural farming is that, you know, I can do commercial, we can have commercial dreams and go that way, but I think growing your own food, being local, more in a community. So I put in that lower picture down there, which is, that's a classic picture of Ginger John from back in the day with Dr. Park when that was like one of the first animal piles he turned. And what I love about natural farming is it brings us together,

1:23:24 you know, more, more than anything, you know, like, like, look, there's eight people turning that pile, you know, like you just, um, being, being part of it, being, you know, it's all edible it's just i i love the inspiration i've gotten from Master Cho um and what i'm doing here is kind of like you know um like to you know pay him back or i don't know how you say that but like wanting to like you know he's he's given this great stuff so for me to be here to talk to you guys, it's like, that's cool, you know, so in his, you know, cool. So I think one last slide here,

1:24:09 no, let's just skip this one, go to the next one, so this, this is my last slide here, and I just wanted to show you where, where I'm at right now of this, you know, this is my school garden, I'm going to be one of the garden tours on Saturday, and we're going to go to this school garden and so you know I just I turn this place from a yard into like a food forest and I love being in it I love growing things I love observing them and being part of nature and cooperating with it and thank you may the beneficial microbes be with you

1:24:56 So I think we're going to wrap it up for the day.

1:25:19 Audience: Were you going to tell people about the app?

1:25:22 Drake Weinert: Not today. I do want to remind you I have two samples up here. One is my pig waste, which smells divine. And the other is that I made all this with a solution. So if you see and observe this, you'll see it's changed color. It's been alive. I did this yesterday when I came here to drop off equipment. I started this just so you see what a 24-hour ferment of getting it ready to go is.

1:25:49 Vincent Mina: If anybody wants to see the amendments I was showing this morning, You're welcome to come up front. I'm going to have a moment to...

1:25:56 Audience: Farm life presenting. There's Drake. There's Wayne in Hawaii. People are coming in. They're a lot of good information.