Free Fertilizer = Pigs + Sawdust

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.

October's meeting was the group's eleventh session, and with all nine of Master Cho's solutions now covered, Drake used the evening as a review — taking the Microbes the group collected under a big avocado tree last month (the same rice-box method Master Cho showed at Ginger John's farm) and showing how that same inoculum builds soil foundations in a garden bed, a tree planting, or, for Prem's benefit, a no-smell deep litter floor for livestock. He passed around a bag of multiplied, propagated Microbes for everyone to smell before diving into the theory: why nature builds soil up instead of digging down, why liquids should lead and microbes should chase them, and why a pig pen floor runs on the exact same recipe as a hugelkultur mound. He also gave a quick tour of updates to the pureknf.org website — a new Meet tab holding the full archive of monthly meetings, and a Learn tab built from his training with Master Cho, Cho's books and about 250 hours of his own weekly Q&A podcast, fed into AI and cited back to source. The night closed with questions on fire ants, mainland fertilizer shortages, and what's coming next: combining solutions and reading Master Cho's nutritive cycle.

TL;DR: Master Cho's deep litter floor is woody material (sawdust or any local wood scrap) mixed with local soil 10 to 1 plus 0.3% sea salt, inoculated with Microbes and laid over buried logs — about 90 cm deep for pigs. Lighter animals get thinner floors. Let it sit about a week after inoculating before putting an animal — or a plant — into it, since that's the time the microbiome needs to re-establish. The exact same logic runs a garden bed or a hugelkultur mound: build fertility up instead of digging down, scatter microbes on the surface, and let water and biology do the penetrating instead of a shovel or a tiller.

Reading Soil With Your Nose

Drake opened by passing around a bag of propagated microbes — the multiplied result of last month's forest rice-box collection — and asking people to smell it before he said anything. The answer came back unprompted: rich forest floor. "When you're smelling rich forest floor, you're smelling that humus. You're actually smelling the biology that's living in there." He pushed the point further: you can send a sample to a lab and look at it under a microscope, or you can just smell it — your nose is already telling you whether the bacteria, fungus, and nematodes are there. A handful of soil from a mowed field or a bare orchard won't smell like that, and that absence is the diagnosis: if you're expecting nutrients to cycle, the biology that does the cycling has to be present first.

Build Up, Don't Dig Down

The core lesson of the night: nature almost never builds downward. Roots mostly spread laterally; very little goes straight down through a rock layer. Soil gets deeper because leaves fall and material piles up on top, not because anything burrows. Drake's fix for a depleted plot is the same move as last month's biological skin graft — gather biology from a rich area and bring it to an area that's been scraped clean — but paired this time with a physical instruction: mound your fertility up instead of tilling it in. He told the story of the old Keaʻau papaya fields, where growers would push all the cleared trees and brush into a berm and leave the scraped field bare behind them. The crop thrived in the berm, not the cleared ground. Drake has seen the same thing on his own land: a pile of pushed material cranks with honohono grass and lush growth, while the areas he's carefully weeded end up with nothing but stubborn junk weeds.

Let the Liquid Lead

Rather than mechanically digging or tilling to get fertility down into soil, Drake's approach is to drench — Food, Cleanser, Medicine, Structure, whatever solution is called for — and let the liquid carry itself downward. "These microbes are going to want to follow the liquids down." Once the liquid penetrates, worms and other soil life follow it, and the ground opens up without a shovel. A question came up about throwing rabbit and quail manure directly onto a garden bed: Drake's answer was to add a little biology with it and watch the carbon-to-nitrogen balance so the manure doesn't overwhelm the leafy material already there — and that lactic acid bacteria (the Protectors made back in August) is an even better pairing than plain biology for that job.

Feeding Trees at the Dripline, Not the Trunk

Asked whether to fertilize right at a tree's base or spread wider, Drake said the base is the wrong target — a tree naturally puts its roots out toward where its leaves reach, so treating a two-foot perimeter around the drip line pulls both roots and branches outward as the tree grows into the fertility. On mulch placement, he argued against spreading wood chips into a full ring, since a thin, spread-out ring decays fast and disappears. A concentrated pile or two set at the tree's edge instead lasts longer, and digging into it a month later turns up tree roots that have grown straight up into the pile chasing the nutrients. "If I make half a truck bed pile, then the tree will reach into that, and you'll find it'll last longer, and the tree will feed better into that area."

The Deep Litter Recipe: Sawdust, Soil, and Sea Salt

For Prem's benefit, Drake walked through Master Cho's recipe for a livestock floor, which is the same recipe as a hugelkultur bed scaled to an animal's weight:

• Base layer: buried logs, left in place permanently — they're never dug out, only the top layer above them gets mined. Left long enough, they stop decomposing normally and essentially petrify as fungus myceliates through them; fungus doesn't do well with fast turnover, so slow-breaking-down logs are a feature, not a problem.
• Fill layer: roughly 10 parts woody material (sawdust or any available wood scrap) to 1 part local soil, plus a little sea salt (Cho: 0.3%) — a tip nobody in the room had heard of for a potting mix before, which Drake said feeds the minerals the microbiome needs.
• Depth by animal weight: on the night Drake gave pigs 4 feet (2 feet of logs, 2 feet of wood chips, soil and microbes), chickens about 3 to 7 centimeters, and horses 6 feet. The lighter the animal, the thinner the floor needs to be. Claude's note: Master Cho's own number for pigs is shallower — about 90 cm, with 50 cm of scrap wood under 40 cm of sawdust, soil and salt (Korea 2017 trainings; his livestock book says the top 35–60 cm does the fermenting). The 4-foot figure isn't in a checked Cho source.
• Wait a week: inoculate with microbes before putting an animal in, the same way Drake waits a week after building a new garden bed before planting into it, so the microbiome has time to reconnect before it's put to work.

Drake applied the same principle to his own raised bed that week: cow manure and fresh grass clippings layered in, microbes watered on top, and a two-week wait before planting so the pile can compost in place and burn off any pathogens. He's planning to soak biochar in a batch of the group's natural farming solutions before mixing that in too. His rule for when to reapply microbes: after any disturbance — adding a load of new mulch, harvesting a crop, anything that upsets the biome — give it reinforcements.

Clean Pigs, Rich Floors

Drake laid out three jobs a deep litter floor does at once: it feeds the animal (Drake puts it at about 10% of a pig's diet coming straight off the floor, since the biology restructures the proteins in the bedding into something edible again), it manufactures the best inoculum Drake knows of — the floor sample he passed around that night came straight off his own pig pen — and it eliminates waste treatment entirely, since food scraps that would otherwise go to the landfill get composted in place by the animals. He cited a friend who runs the local dump saying roughly 40% of Hawaiʻi's trash is food waste. Airflow matters as much as fertility: Drake's barn is built so the semi-warm floor lets heat rise and escape out the top while fresh air comes in low, which keeps ammonia from pooling in corners — a smell he says he's walked into at other people's pig pens. His design test for any pen: "Would you sleep there? Would you lay down in your animal's pen overnight?" On his own floor, he said, you could cuddle the pig for warmth — "the pig is the blanket." He pushed back hard on the idea that pigs are dirty animals: they poop on one side and keep the other clean, and it's wash-down concrete floors and manure lagoons, not the animals themselves, that create the smell pig farming is known for. Asked about fire ants in wood-chip bedding, Drake said he gets fire ants in the bananas and on the walls around his pens but has never found them in the bedding itself — and his pigs' eyes stay completely clear despite ants right nearby. He credited Daniel's earlier note that the biology in propagated Microbes also works against fire ants, and offered it as anecdotal, not proven: rich soil seems to balance out which insects show up.

Mining the Floor and Odds and Ends

On harvesting a pig pen floor, Drake's practice is to mine out about half the bedding at a time and re-inoculate rather than clearing the whole thing — the material left behind keeps propagating and gets richer year over year; pens he hasn't run a pig through in two years are still, in his words, a gold mine. Drake's hack for Prem: whatever's going wrong with a soil or smell problem, Protectors (lactobacillus serum) are the fix. "If you had any type of soil problem, any type of bacterial problem, any type of issue, try this lactobacillus — if this doesn't work for you, you got serious problems." Drake compared the protectors to a local ER doctor: they come in, reset the balance, and let the system recover. A side-by-side of serums in the room — one cleanly separated and preserved, one Drake grabbed straight off his barn shelf looking considerably rougher — led to a question about commercial organic versus non-organic milk for the recipe; Drake said both work fine. He also shared, with the caveat that it might just be chance, that he's seen nēnē circle and land near his land after spraying natural farming solutions, and that visitors to his pig pen tend to linger and go quiet near it — his read is that balanced biology off-gasses something calming, though he was careful to frame it as observation, not proof. A question about mainland farmers worried over chemical fertilizer shortages led Drake to mention that two representatives from Perdue Farms visited Hilo this year to see these systems firsthand — his take is that this kind of practice spreads through people seeing it work in person, not through advocacy alone.

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: November 10, 2026 — Combining the Solutions and Master Cho's Nutritive Cycle