Sweeter Fruit = Sour Fruit + Perfect Timing

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

November's meeting was a small-group wrap-up of the year. Laura Reber, an extension agent who also coordinates the Master Gardener program, opened the night and stayed on to answer questions. She runs the natural farming workshops with Prem, the livestock agent, and Drake. Drake then covered Master Cho's nutrient cycle. He traced it back through Cho's Japanese teachers to a 1918 Oregon plant-science paper, and showed how Cho turned it into the chubby/skinny framework that decides when each solution gets sprayed. He explained why the biggest meal belongs right before changeover, and why that is where fermented unripe fruit (the phosphoric acid) matters most. He also showed how Cho changes the recipe in rainy weather. Drake finished with a live demo of the new cost and spray-schedule calculator on pureknf.org, then took questions on composting meat with Protectors and on how Cho synthesized Japanese and Korean methods. The group then went to eat.

TL;DR: Plants swing between "chubby" (building and accumulating) and "skinny" (stretching and consuming), and Master Cho's solutions are timed to that swing. Most growers load the soil up front. Cho gives the plant a leaner start so it builds roots, then gives its biggest meal right before changeover, just ahead of flower buds and fruit set. That meal should lean on phosphoric acid, which comes from fermented unripe fruit. Late feeding mostly just sweetens the fruit. When it rains, the plant gets less sun and less sugar, takes up more nitrogen, and grows soft, so fruit cracks and roots suffocate. Cho's fix is to push calcium up and nitrogen down by adding more Structure and Reproduction and less Fuel, spraying ahead of the rain and in the breaks. Drake's new calculator at pureknf.org turns all of this into a cost estimate and a week-by-week spray schedule.

Where the Nutrient Cycle Comes From

Drake has been digging into Master Cho's history, and he named Cho's three Japanese teachers: Ōinoue Yasushi, Shibata Kinshi, and Yamagishi Miyozo. Cho never met them. He learned from their books. Most of the nutrient cycle comes from Ōinoue, who Drake said bred the genetics behind a huge share of the world's grapes, "something like either 60 or 80 percent." Drake described him as super famous, then persecuted for doing natural farming, and eventually jailed after upsetting the wrong people politically. Almost nobody knows the grapes trace back to him. He wrote a very good book on the nutrient cycle. Claude's note: Ōinoue bred the Kyoho grape, now Japan's most widely grown grape, but not 60–80% of the world's. Japanese sources confirm he was shut out by the academic establishment and that the military took his research vines during the war; they don't record him being jailed. Cho's own account says he died in prison. More on his page.

The idea goes back further, to a 1918 paper out of Oregon. It tracked how carbohydrates and nitrates oscillate inside a plant. When nitrates dominate you get vegetative growth. When carbohydrates dominate you get fruitful growth. The paper also asked when to apply which fertilizer. Drake noted that he first learned Cho's version in person in 2017, and that he was lucky to have recorded those classes. Now he can reprocess the recordings, fact-check them, and keep unlocking the Korean. Several people in the room had been at the Kohala class.

Flooded, Chubby, Skinny, Dormant

The chart Drake showed gives four conditions for a plant:

Flooded: nitrates but no carbohydrates in the plant. You never want to be here.
Chubby: nitrates plus carbohydrates. The plant is building and accumulating.
Skinny: less nitrate than carbohydrate. The plant is stretching out.
Dormant: the nitrates run out and the plant goes dormant.

Drake's plain-language version is that plants build leaf material, then stretch, then build, then stretch. That is how most things grow. A second chart breaks out nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and calcium by stage. Bigger dots show where a plant needs more of each. Nitrogen leads during vegetative growth, phosphorus during changeover, and calcium during reproduction. Cho's own chart plots those stages against calendar dates, roughly February to September on the one Drake showed. Cho changes his mixtures as the season moves along, which means you can turn it into a spray schedule for yourself. Drake also pointed out that Hawaiʻi probably doesn't have much of a true dormant season.

Master Cho's contribution was to bring in the human life cycle. Drake's example was morning sickness. A sour, acidic food with phosphoric acid in it can help avoid those symptoms during pregnancy, and Cho found the same pattern in plants. Drake said Cho was best known as a veterinarian, so he learned life cycles from animals. Claude's note: Cho's documented training is Suwon Agricultural High School and farm study in Japan; no checked source calls him a veterinarian. He was known for natural pig and poultry farming, and his own résumé says he studied plant and animal life cycles for over 40 years. That is how Drake explains many of Cho's solutions, which came from noticing similar patterns across systems and prescribing something for each.

The Biggest Meal Comes Before Puberty

Drake called this one of the most important and least discussed points in Cho's teaching. Most farming puts the biggest meal at breakfast. Growers amend the whole soil up front and make it as rich as possible. Cho gives the plant a harder start so it puts out roots. Drake joked that the plant gets "a rough childhood." Then, as the plant heads toward puberty, the changeover between growing and fruiting, it has the root system to use a big meal. That is when you feed it most, and the plant converts the meal into fruit.

Cho also calls for phosphoric acid at this stage, and unripe fruit is one of the richest sources. "If you ferment a lot of unripe fruits and you give it a lot of that during this time period, that's when it's going to use it the most." Feeding heavily at the end, Drake said, mostly just sweetens the fruit. You are no longer feeding the plant. He added that this doesn't mean neglecting the plant at other times, only that most of the feeding should happen around changeover. Cho's own chart puts it as three meals: breakfast 30%, lunch 50%, dinner 20%, with lunch given about a week before the flower buds form so the plant has time to take it up. On the timing question from the room, he said the changeover happens right before flower buds show or fruit sets, so it is almost at flowering but just ahead of it. On Cho's generic grow guide, flower buds show up in the middle of the bloom stage, which means the changeover already happened before that.

Different crops get different emphasis. For leafy greens Cho leans on leaf solution rather than bloom, cuts, lets the leaves regrow, and cuts again. Drake's point was that if you know what each solution is for, you can modify the schedule yourself.

What Cho Does When It Rains

Drake used the recent wet weather to show how Cho changes his base recipe. In rain there is less sun, so the plant has less sugar. More nitrogen comes down, which gives soft growth. The roots and leaves are wet, so the fruit cracks and the roots suffocate. Drake's summary was that less sugar plus more nitrogen means the plant pops when it rains. Cho's recommendations:

Concentrate your materials instead of spreading them out. Drake always favors big piles, especially on the wet side of the island.
If you flood out, drain it.
Put calcium up and nitrogen down.
Feed ahead of the rain and spray in the breaks.
Spray again after a big rain.
When the sun comes back, give calcium and seawater.

In the recipe itself, Cho adds more Structure and Reproduction, both of which carry calcium, and he adds them stronger than the usual 1:1000. In his 2009 talk on Hawaiʻi papaya he gave the numbers: Structure goes from 1:1000 to about 1:800 in heavy rain, and Fuel drops from 1:1000 to 1:1500 or 1:2000. He also reduces the Fuel and keeps the rest. Drake's teaching shortcut is to think in terms of what the plant is doing. If your plants melt in the rain, that sounds like they need Structure. If the fruit cracks, they need Reproduction. And you tone down the Fuel.

Chemistry Helps, But You Don't Need It

An attendee asked how you add more or less phosphorus and potassium. Drake's answer was that all of those are already inside the solutions. He shows the chemistry because it explains how the system was understood historically, but Cho's solutions are "much more humanized." You don't need to know chemistry to use them. He asked the room when any of them had last felt they had a phosphorus deficiency. His point was that a hungry person thinks in terms of food, not nutrients, and the same goes for plants. Chemistry can be a useful frame, but thinking biologically is useful too, and the two fit together.

The New Calculator at pureknf.org

Drake and Prem were trying to work out how much to make and what to charge if the group starts producing solutions. That led to a calculator under the Learn tab at pureknf.org. It works two ways, by batch or by acreage.

By batch: pick one of the nine solutions and it estimates the cost to make it. Medicine came out near $45 per gallon, since Angelica is expensive. Fermented fish came out around $14 per gallon, which assumes the fish waste is close to free. Drake pointed out that fuel and cold delivery aren't free, so real-world costs run higher and you can plug in your own numbers. He would love to see local, quality solutions available to buy with a guide on how to use them.
By acreage or square footage: for a generic annual crop on one acre, it estimates 5.2 gallons of Food for the year, "plus whatever you're going to spill or drink or eat." It also gives you a full spray schedule with seed, leaf, bloom, fruit, and harvest formulas by date, such as seed formula on January 5th, then leaf formula the next week. There are options for crops like leafy greens and fruiting vegetables, and for pests or molds.

An attendee spraying 30 gallons a week on a garden of 512 square feet ran the numbers live. The estimate was about $17 for the season, rising to about $18 when the rainy or cloudy setting was switched on. Drake said that is why small kits could work, and that for a garden that size you would need about 7.8 fluid ounces of Food and 22 fluid ounces of Cleanser. He imagines people coming in with a square footage and leaving with a kit and an application guide that is easier to read than the full schedule. The numbers are cited back to Cho's lectures and charts, 88 checks in all, such as the swine lecture for the microbe amounts. Drake said it seems accurate, but "some of these things are just not as accurate."

Spray Rates and Drake's Greenhouse Bucket

Drake made a correction on volume. The group had been talking about roughly 25 gallons per acre, but Cho's range is 100 to 250 gallons per acre, about ten times more. Claude's note: the checked Cho figure is about 100 liters per 300 pyeong on young crops, roughly 108 gallons an acre, rising toward 320 gallons an acre under a full canopy. That's about four times the old 25 at the start of the season, and more as the leaves fill in. Asked whether to hit the plants or the topsoil, Drake said Cho wants as much on the canopy as possible, and that better coverage helps. A drone, for example, will cover everything. If you want life to flourish, he said, you need more water.

At home, Drake keeps a bucket in his greenhouse and makes about five gallons at a time. Measuring 4 or 8 milliliters into a single gallon is hard to do accurately, but 20 to 40 milliliters into five gallons is easy. His bucket holds seed microbes collected from under a bamboo stand, a few ferments from banana and guava, Reproduction, and Cleanser. His cucumbers and tomatoes are huge, with no powdery mildew so far. He dilutes it into a watering can once a week, not trying to do anything fancy, and sticks close to what the recipes call for.

Protectors in the Compost Pile and the Rest of the Questions

Someone asked about composting meat. Drake pointed back to August's meeting on Protectors, the lactobacillus recipe made with milk. Add it to a pile with meat and it speeds decomposition, cuts down pathogens, and takes away the stink. He compared it to a probiotic that "sanitizes the situation," and one gallon dilutes into a thousand gallons. Anytime you are composting gross things, Protectors is good to add. He also mentioned that Cho's Medicine is garlic, licorice, cinnamon, ginger, and Angelica, which makes a good immune stimulant for the plant. Drake believes Cho came up with it himself.

Asked whether KNF uses animal inputs, Drake said natural farming is integrated animal farming. The pig pen floor sample he passed around at October's meeting is one of his main inoculums. He added that Cho's system is a synthesis. Cho learned the nutrient cycle from the Japanese, but in Japan it is delivered as ground-up granules of some chemical, while in natural farming you ferment something to make a natural solution for the same job. The enzymes, vinegars, and animal systems were what Cho brought in.

Drake also pointed people to the Meet tab at pureknf.org. All of the year's recordings are there, including the January Food meeting, with a summary of each recipe. His view is that the site is now a complete learning resource, and he hopes people will use it to watch a recipe together and then make it.

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

Next Month: December 8, 2026 — Complete KNF: plants and animals together. Bring your questions.