Makapala, North Kohala, Hawaiʻi Island · October 19–21, 2017
Three days in a Makapala hall with Master Cho Han-kyu: when to feed a crop, what to feed it, and why. All seven recorded sessions are here as they happened. His Korean is translated again and checked, so you can read what he said, not only what the room heard.
8 talks on “soil”
Cho opens the advanced seminar with questions, not recipes: what is nature, who are you, what is the biggest farming. He argues that health comes from healthy food, so the farmer is the foundation of the world, and that farming by your own judgment or a professor's theory makes 'smart fools'. He ends on the chain soil welfare, crop welfare, animal welfare, human welfare, written on the flip chart.
Drake Weinert brings back what soil scientists said at the Hawaii Farmers Union state convention and maps it onto Cho's solutions: Microbes (IMO) as biodiversity, Food (FPJ) as concentrated root exudates, fungi that build soil aggregates. Then questions: why FPJ is like an exudate, fixing deficiencies, the fungus-to-bacteria ratio, sprayers, and spraying a mixed garden where crops sit at different stages.
Found Work on the rhizosphere, the soil right around the root, not the whole field
Cho draws the deep planting hole JICA used in Tanzania, 60 to 70 cm with fertilizer at the bottom, the way Hawaiʻi is told to plant fruit trees, and shows four ways it kills the tree. His way: no water, five lumps of charcoal on top and IMO4 over them. Then raising seedlings in poor soil before rich, and the Kona lava field he turned to 3 cm of soil in six months with charcoal, IMO4, corn and the Type 2 feed. The session ends with a cheer and dinner.
From a drawing of a plant, Cho traces the food chain under it: the leaf feeds the root, root waste feeds microbes, microbes feed earthworms, earthworms draw moles, and mole tunnels air the soil. He tells how Chris Trump's waterlogged macadamia orchard in Kohala came back that way, and how a paste of soil and Microbes (IMO4) healed trunk wounds. Then soil is the crop's mother, and Tanya leads a qigong break.
Found 150,000 to 200,000 microbes live on one square centimeter of leaf
Cho walks through his Microbes (IMO) slides: the starter caught under bamboo, IMO2 with equal sugar, IMO3 on rice bran, and IMO4 made with half field soil so the local microbes meet their relatives. He says natural farming restores soil in two months where organic takes one to two years, then shows IMO4 spread at 150 kg per 300 pyeong in a Korean greenhouse: white film, earthworms, risen soil, and a 180 cm stick that goes all the way in.
Found A small starter, propagated, can bring five acres back to normal
Cho opens with plans: next time he wants to walk farms and diagnose crops, and he wants Hawaiʻi visitors to eat on natural farms. Then he cuts open the mangosteen a participant gave him. It's nearly empty, because the tree was overfed when young and lacked calcium phosphate the July before. His fix is IMO4 mixed 1:1 with vinegar-moistened bone char, spread in a ring at the drip line ahead of flowering; the room's questions settle what the 1:1 means.
Back at the projected prescription table, Cho goes over the first two columns again: a corn cover crop with Microbes (IMO4) under it, laid down as no-till mulch, and the seedling soak. Then he leaves the table for his picture of a Natural Farming farm in Hawaiʻi that visitors come to: something blooming or fruiting in every season, a guesthouse, good food, and a place to learn.
Found Soil prep starts with a cover crop, and in Hawaiʻi the best one is corn
Told he has two minutes, Cho asks what matters most in farming (the soil), then runs through the whole season on the projected table: cover crops, the seedling soak with the leaves kept dry, Type 2, the changeover and next year's fruit, Mineral D as water drawn from rock, Type 3 and ripening. He closes with his hopes for Hawaiʻi: classes on the islands, a CGNF Hawaiʻi quality mark, and starting small.
Found The most important thing in farming is the soil: love it