Cork talk on revolutionary way to have a greener farm

AFTER I mentioned Korean Natural Farming (KNF) in my article on Dripsey Castle last week, a talk by Chris Trump and Tom Stack at Ballymaloe Cookery School seemed like a good place to go to get more information about the topic.

KNF aims to enhance soil life, fertility and structure on a farm.

The event at Ballymaloe was organised by Slow Food Ireland - check out www.slowfood ireland.com for more details about the organisation and upcoming events.

Chris Trump is a macadamia nut farmer from Hawaii and is one of the pioneers of the KNF farming practice in America. He gave an interesting account of how he went down the route of this alternative farming when he suffered 80% crop failure due to an infestation with stink bug.

Chris was finding it increasingly difficult to make a living with the investment required to provide inputs for crops and something had to change. Nature was out of balance.

The nut trees were left to their own devices and he noticed that they became productive again after three years with no inputs. This made him curious about what was happening, and he began to research the soil, the human soil connection and how to bring back life into the soil.

This led him to Korean Natural Farming or Natural Farming as it is also known. The practice was popularized in Korea by a man called Master Han Kyu Cho and has been used widely for the last 40 years in Asia.

Essentially, KNF is a self-sufficient form of farming where indigenous micro-organisms are collected from the local area and cultivated for application to the soil in place of artificial or inorganic fertilizers.

The result of enhancing the microbial community in the soil is crops that are more disease- and pest-resistant, more nutrient-dense, and with better flavour.

It is widely accepted that micro-organisms in the soil enhance the availability of nutrients to plants and that these micro-organisms enjoy a symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationship with the roots of plants, receiving sugar in exchange for minor minerals collected by microbes.

Collecting indigenous micro-organisms (IMO) such as fungi and bacteria involves using cooked rice and leaving it for a few days in a natural, undisturbed environment like a woodland. The rice will absorb microbes from the environment and mycelium will be visible like white fuzz growing amongst the rice grains.

Culturing these IMOs and applying them to the soil will enhance the soil’s ability to grow good crops.

The other part of KNF is providing plants with the right nutrients at the right time. Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ) can be made to support plant growth and sprayed, used as a soil drench, or as a foliar spray. 

Fresh plant material from different plants growing locally can be used, like comfrey, nettles or seaweed, which are combined with sugar and water and diluted before application to a crop.

Tom Stack, from Ballyagran, Co. Limerick, also gave a captivating account at Ballymaloe of how he has gone down the road of KNF as a result of rising costs in agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and antibiotics.

He took over the family farm in 2012 and, after a few difficult years farming, decided to convert to organic in 2018. In 2019, he travelled to Connecticut to undertake an intensive KNF course and has not looked back since.

Tom believes that he has reconnected with the soil and the animals on his farm since adopting this new way of farming, and as a result of better nutrition from superior quality grass, the animals have far better immune systems - productivity may be down slightly but the costs of inputs are also down drastically.

He has adapted a different lifestyle and it is enabling him to work with nature and lessen inputs. 

He believes that farmers have everything that they need on the farm to nourish it and create a closed loop system, often using waste products to fuel growth. 

It certainly makes a lot of sense, both environmentally and practically.

As gardeners, the soil is at the heart of what we are doing and a healthy soil will produce healthy crops. Earthworms breed based on an available food source. They live in the top 45cm of the soil and move to the surface to eat, creating better aeration in the topsoil layer that we are most interested in as they do so.

Earthworms are essential to operations and yet their numbers have drastically declined with intensive cultivation practiced over recent decades. We need to examine what we can do to reverse this situation.

We need to look at our gardening and farming practices and make serious changes to ensure a bright future ahead.

Both Chris Trump and Tom Stack are utterly passionate about their farming techniques and practice what they preach on their own farms to great effect. It is an interesting approach that we could adapt as gardeners when feeding our own soil to support healthy crops and flowers.

This is part of a regenerative agriculture approach that is providing some alternatives to the modern day intensive management of soil.

Making changes can be challenging, but if it happens gradually and is based on evidence and experience, then the changes can be long-lasting and credible, giving hope for the future.

Nature is a great teacher and if we work in harmony with what surrounds us, we begin to understand and respect that having a balance is what is needed to future proof our soils for future generations.

There are a series of videos by Chris Trump about KNF available on Youtube.