Korean Natural Farming

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Basics

Korean Natural Farming (KNF) could be called Natural Regenerative Farming but it was created in Korea. The basic idea is that you use microbes around you to regenerate your soil, and help you create different plant solutions to help plants grow to meet their potential. There are 2 main focuses. 1 - regenerating the soil with indigenous bacteria and fungi, and 2 - making plant solutions that help feed your plants in different ways depending on their current growth.

Note - this is a no till gardening method. You can till to get started if you want, but tilling breaks up the microbe colonies that we’re working so hard to grow. If you till every year then you’re only getting 1 years worth of benefit. If you let it grow properly for 3 or 4 years you’ll get massive benefits to soil compaction (there’s an image of a guy burying a grounding pipe by just pushing the full thing down into the ground after years of regenerating the soil).

2nd note - You should watch the videos below before getting started. This is just an overview.

Regenerating your soil

To regenerate your soil you use IMO (indigenous micro organisms) to introduce strong living organisms to your soil from a nearby source of untouched perfectly balanced forest. There are 4 different stages to IMO and there are pretty good videos showing how to make them.

  1. Stage 1 - You use a box of rice out in a nearby forest to collect balanced microbes (both bacteria and fungi). It should be from a place that is natural, growing nearby, in a “harder to grow” place - usually a slightly higher elevation so that they’re strong and ready to go
  2. Stage 2 - you take stage 1 rice and mix it with brown cane sugar to pull the moisture from the microbes and put them on pause - these can keep for years if stored properly
  3. Stage 3 - you take stage 2 IMO and mix it with carbs + carbon (like 50 pounds of animal feed oats and 50 pounds of fresh wood shavings or wood chips) and compost them together for a couple of weeks mixing daily to keep it below 120 degrees F
  4. Stage 4 - you take stage 3 IMO and mix it with equal parts of your own soil from your garden and follow the same processes to teach the microbes how to populate your soil.

IMO 4 can be used in tons of different things, and is then lightly dusted over your soil and watered in to help it populate and regenerate your soil. It can be used in pig pens to make a no smell pig pen, or chickens to do the same. It can be used to really boost a compost pile and take it to the next level.

Feeding your Plants

Once your soil is good to go you can focus on your plants. Basically every week you make a new diluted solution to water your plants with, it feeds the right microbes to help your plants grow in specific ways. Keep in mind that 80% of KNF is in the microbes above, if you only did that you’d get most of the benefits, but these others take things to the next level.

Plant Life Cycle

Plants move through 3 different stages of growth (in general). It starts with seedling and ends with fruiting and in the middle is “teenage”. In each stage you feed them a growth formula 1 week followed by a structure formula the next week. You alternate between those 2 (eventually you can get to the point that you know which thing is best based on your plants current growth, but alternating is a good starting point). The formulas are made from natural ingredients you can make in your house and they’re nearly the same each week with a few minor differences. The main difference is the type of food you add to the formula which is either an eggshell extract, a vegetation extract, a fruit/flower extract, a bone extract, etc. You dilute the extracts into water at about 4 or 8ml per gallon of water - and water your plants (or foliar feed) with it.

Recipes

There are 9 different recipes of things you can make for your plants, videos on how to make them all is found on Chris Trump’s video channel (linked below). His videos are really great production quality.

  • IMO 1 to 4 - These are the micro organisms, IMO 4 is used in lots of things and is the heart and soul of KNF
  • LAB (Lactic Acid Bacteria) - This is basically the bacteria used to make yogurt and cheese, and is in the air all around you. This is a great input that you can even drink yourself to help your gut. It’s easy to make using milk and some rice. This is really the best place to start.
  • OHN (Oriental Herbal Nutrients) - A set of 5 fermented tinctures of garlic, ginger, licorice, angelica, and cinnamon. It takes 3 months to make :slight_smile: so get started. They’re mixed together to make OHN which is like a health tonic for plants and humans alike. A little bit is used in every formula.
  • BRV (Brown Rice Vinegar) - make it yourself or buy it at an asian market, try and get live vinegar if possible. This is a special vinegar that helps plants accept nutrients and is used in almost all formulas.
  • FPJ (Fermented Plant Juice) - This is basically the growth tips of quick growing plants harvested early in the morning before the sun hits them, picked and then mixed with equal weights of brown sugar and fermented in a jar for a week. The juice is then strained and used to feed your plants.
  • FFJ (Fermented Fruit Juice) - Same as FPJ but we use fruits instead, this is a great food for plants that are fruiting.
  • FAA (Fish Amino Acids) - Basically homemade fish sauce. You take layers of ocean fish and brown sugar and put them in a mostly air tight container with a little OHN and a little pinch of IMO 4 to keep the smell away and let them ferment for 6 to 12 months in a cool dark place.
  • WCA (calcium) - Basically dissolved eggshells in vinegar. Really good for helping your plants make fruit.
  • WCAP (calcium and potassium) - Basically dissolved charred bones in vinegar. Great for young plants to grow strong (this is used in the structure weeks)
  • Sea Water - this is either literally water from the ocean or sea salt mixed with water. You highly dilute this but it provides a lot of micro nutrients.

Formulas

We use the recipes above to make different formulas. You’ll feed 1 formula a week to your plants based on their growth. The names of these formulas come from dr drake, he shows them in his weekly videos a lot and sells a book that goes into more detail (though you see most of the book if you watch his videos, and it was a little bit of a let down when I bought it because of how expensive it is)

Each of the measurements is for 1 gallon of water (or more accurately 4 liters of water)

Formula Notes FPJ FFJ BRV OHN WCAP FAA LAB Sea Water WCA
Maintenance This is the base for most formulas. You can just feed this if you don’t want to get more specific. 8ml - 8ml 4ml 4ml - - - -
Soil Formula This is used when you add IMO4 to soil to prep it for the year. 8ml - 8ml 4ml 4ml - 4ml 190ml -
Seed Formula This is used to either soak seeds for a few minutes before planting, or soaking transplants or trees before transplanting them. 8ml - 8ml 4ml 4ml 4ml - 150ml -
Leaf Formula Used to grow leaves 8ml - 8ml 4ml 4ml 4ml 4ml - -
Bloom Formula Used to promote flowering 8ml - 8ml 4ml 4ml 4ml 4ml 125ml -
Fruit Formula Used to grow fully developed fruit - 8ml 8ml 4ml 4ml 4ml 4ml 150ml 4ml
Harvest Formula Used to make your fruit extra sweet and finish things off. - 8ml - 4ml - - - 190ml 4ml

Video Channels to watch

Both Drake and Chris have been to Korea to work with Master Cho who was the founder of KNF. They’ve both been doing this for 10 years plus.

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Master Cho also had a son that is a chemist that came up with a version of Korean Natural Farming (which is more prevalent on youtube) called Jadam Natural Farming. It’s kinda the quick and dirty version of KNF

The main differences:

1 - To make the “IMO” you take some leaf mold and dirt from where you would have gotten your IMO collection and some boiled potatoes and sea salt and mix them into water and let them sit for 24-36 hours. You then dilute the end product and water your plants (don’t let it sit for more than a few hours after it’s ready)

2 - To make the fertilizer you take all your veggie clippings and put them in water in an anaerobic environment (put a lid on the bucket and leave it for a while). The anaerobic environment breaks stuff down and makes a liquid fertilizer. It stinks, but it’s supposed to work, water your plants weekly with it.

3 - Jadam Sulfur (JS) and Jadam wetting agent (JWA) - as a chemist these are 2 natural ingredients that are used as an organic pesticide. Master Cho’s son found a way to make liquid sulfur without using the normal expensive ways that you can do at home for cheap. The sulfur is an extremely effective herbicide and pesticide and using the jadam wetting agent helps the sulfur to stick to the plant and coat it so that the sulfur is more effective.

According to Dr Drake JADAM is not as good as KNF, but is pretty good and is quick and dirty.

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I’m a big fan of both of these methods! I use bits and pieces of KNF and JADAM here in my garden, I try to do as little extra work as possible, so mostly I use IMO2 from KNF and JLF from JADAM. The main thing I take away from these methods is a philosophy rather than hard and fast rules and formulas. Philosophically, both methods seem to focus on the following:

  • Rejection of the industrial agriculture mindset.
  • Rejection of reductionist science (there is no such thing as “good” or “bad” in nature, nature is fundamentally not comprehensible to humans in its full form, nor does it have to be in order to do good farming).
  • Rejection of many “sacred cow” type rules that are common in Western organic agriculture (ex: anaerobic fermentation is traditionally a big no-no in Western organic ag, but is encouraged in JADAM.)
  • Putting power back into the hands of the farmer (the farmer is the expert, not the ag industry consultant).
  • Using what you have on hand, not relying on purchased or imported inputs.
  • The importance of community.

Since this is a landrace forum, let me say this: Despite the philosophical goals listed above, one thing you find very little of in either method is discussion of the varieties that one might grow, seed saving, or survival of the fittest - things that are well understood by the people on this forum. Other than the occasional allusion to “modern seeds are weak” in KNF, both of these methods have very little to say about trying to grow varieties that are naturally suited to your conditions, and seem to be about getting popular varieties that are normally grown with industrial methods/inputs to work using organic and local DIY inputs. This reflects the primary goal of both of these methods: getting farmers in South Korea to be more profitable and independent by getting off of industrial agriculture. From the landrace perspective, some of the KNF/JADAM techniques might seem too much like coddling inherently weak crop varieties. For example, I don’t use any of the pest control methods from KNF/JADAM, to me that is a battle better fought with genetics.

Mixing KNF/JADAM with landrace breeding principles makes for a pretty powerful combination, and if the landrace selection process goes well, I find that I need to do less and less KNF/JADAM type intervention over the years. It’s a pretty nice way to speed up the process of establishing the good soil you need for a Fukuoka-style annual food forest. For me JADAM liquid fertilizer (JLF) is a great way to soften up compacted ground, invite tons of worms to the soil, and requires almost zero labor. It turns organic material into a form plants can easily “eat”: water soluble nutrients. I highly recommend starting a JLF bucket, it is dead simple and deeply useful.

It’s interesting to note that KNF spends a ton of time talking about what to feed and when in the life cycle of plants, but in the JADAM book his son abandons this idea entirely, saying that it’s not important as long as you have your base nutrients already in the soil. JADAM also rejects foliar feeding (huge focus in KNF), which is fine by me because foliar feeding is a ton of work, and seems somewhat unnatural.

I document my growing here if you’re interested in one version of how KNF/JADAM can be profitably be combined with landrace principles:

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I think your videos is where I first learned about KNF in general (I thought that JLF was called Jadam :)). I agree with you on many levels. I like making all of the KNF inputs for stuff like seed starting / transplanting, but I plan on JLF for weekly watering (agree that foliar spraying is probably not worth the effort). But your thoughts are right in line with what i’ve been thinking combining landracing with KNF. We let the plants themselves prove that they’re strong, and we use biology to make the place they’re living a nice healthy place. The liquid sulfur stuff just seems like too much to me, and landraces should remove that need entirely. I think in the long run though adding IMO4 and jadam’s microbes (I’m thinking of using both of those) to your soil will make the end product of our plants healthier to eat - which is what is most interesting to me personally (and one of the main reasons I garden in general).

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I am interested in trying KNF. One question is where to get my IMO culure. My town is surrounded by commercial corn and soybean farming and people in my area love Roundup. Where would I find a place unaffected by chemicals in my environment?

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Find the closest forest. If it’s uphill thats better, but the closest forest thats been a forest for a long time is your best bet