You don't pay the sun.

Two experiments you can start today

1. Plant juice. With a grown-up, pick the tender tips of the fastest-growing weeds in the yard. Mix them with brown sugar in a jar, cover with a paper towel, and smell it every day. In 3 to 7 days it smells fruity, like cider. That's Food. Full recipe below.
2. The fizzing one. Toast eggshells in a dry pan (grown-up job) until they tinkle when you drop them. Drop them into vinegar and watch it foam. When it stops bubbling, about 3 days later, you've made Reproduction: calcium a plant can drink.
3. Test it like a scientist. Plant the same seeds in two pots. Give one plain water and the other water with 1½ teaspoons of Food per gallon. Measure both every week and write it down.

Drake: Food is “the one that gets the kids all riled up” because it's ready in days.

Your first month

1. This week: start a jar of Food from your most vigorous weed, and a dish of rice-wash water for Protectors.
2. Next week: spray Food at 1:500 (1½ teaspoons per gallon) on the undersides of leaves, early morning or two hours before sunset. Water Protectors into the soil at 1:1000.
3. Every month after: add one more solution, in the order below. That's how the Hilo group did it, and by next year you'll have all nine.
4. Always: try anything new on a few plants first, never the whole garden.

What a jar does at farm scale

1. Run a strip trial. Pick a few acres, spray them next to your usual program, and compare at harvest. Don't bet the whole farm on anything new.
2. Drenching the soil? Use four times the water (100 gallons per acre) at the same dilution. Never make the mix stronger.
3. Microbes at scale come from 50-pound bags of horse feed, your own field soil and two weeks of turning. Put them down at about 3 pounds per 100 square feet.
4. Sprayers: a hand pump for a garden, a motorized sprayer for 3–5 acres, a PTO or boom rig beyond that, and drones for big ground.

Honest note: most of our teaching comes from small Hawaiʻi farms. Master Cho's methods are practiced in 23 states and 29 countries, but on a corn-and-bean operation you'll be pioneering. Keep notes and tell us what you see.

Start with the smell

1. Protectors first. Lactobacillus in the drinking water helps digestion. For a piglet with scours, a syringe of it in the mouth is the emergency move.
2. The no-smell pen. About two feet of logs on the bottom and two feet of wood chips on top, seeded with Microbes. After a farmer dusted a handful of Microbes on his pen floor after each wash-down, Drake came back a week later to no smell and no flies.
3. Let the pigs do the turning. Deep litter that's been fed Microbes becomes, in Drake's words, “the world's best microbes you could ever have.”
4. Nothing gets wasted. Guts from butchering become Fuel, bones become Structure, and eggshells become Reproduction.

A Hawaiʻi pig farmer in our archive was invited to Iowa by Iowa State to talk to hog farmers, after workers died from manure-pit gas. No-smell pens are why.

A year where winter is real

A student up north grew Microbes indoors all winter. Drake: “Shovel the snow off the sidewalk, come in, shovel the IMOs inside.”