All Answers

Whitish mold will grow on all kinds of things. I have forgotten rice in a rice cooker for a week and come back to a nice bloom! Is this IMO, yes, it is indigenous micro organisms!

Is this the KNF Microbes we are looking for to enhance our soil? NO. These microbes will do little if anything to enhance our soil and will be a waste of time to grow up to immense populations using a bokashi method.

What we are looking for in Korean Natural Farming are beneficial soil microbes. To get these, we must put a box with freshly cooked rice (or other starch material such as potato, but rice has a plethora more reasons why it is used as a media) into the forest in a container that gives it 1/3 airspace to create a perfect microcosm for microbial growth.

When the soil below the box is disturbed as we sweep away the leaf litter and dig slightly into the dirt, this is like hurricane Katrina for the microbes. They are destroyed, but this nice new rice is like FEMA coming in (although as a libertarian I do not believe in this type of activity, I am merely, albeit poorly, illustrating the point) with disaster relief supplies, so all the poor microbes flock to the new rice box to get relief. This in turn captures us a fractal of the forest microbiome and some of the most well adapted and well adjusted to working with the indigenous soil types around.

The leaf litter is also placed back on top of the box while it is incubating to thus create a cocoon type environment that really gives these indigenous soil microbes the best ability to colonize the rice.

These are the microbes you are looking for!

A good collection will be a thick mass of microbes that hold the rice together in a tempe like fashion. The top may have white wisps that look like spider webs or even better white cotton ball looking growths. There should be a minimum of tie-dye looking microbes as these indicate anaerobic microbes, but use the 80/20 rule where 80% should be good, and consider that an excellent collection.

You can see a great collection in this short clip:

2/3 is the sweet spot in KNF for various reasons. One of the main reasons is 2/3 is a close approximation to the golden ratio which is the key to all life as we know it. The closer you get to this ratio, the more easily energy will emerge out of the infinite space which is essential for fermentation. For more information on this you can study Pythagoras and the concept of the square root of the unit square.

If you can’t hit 2/3, don’t worry. Yes, the correct solution would be to find an appropriate container, but let’s get real, if it ain’t easy, we ain’t gonna do it. And since you are already done with it, roll with it. Learn from this experience and maybe next time get closer to mastering KNF.

KNF Medicine and KNF Microbes are not necessary for KNF Fuel. They are an optional side note in the text and actually modify the end product so that you will lose the fats and oils that float on the surface of KNF Fuel made without them.

Sharing a picture will really help to diagnose this.

Also, describing the smell is crucial. If it smells like dead bodies, it is probably too long. If it smells kinds sweet or sour like sour dough, you are most likely good.

Here is a tank we did in a 55 gallon drum that doesn’t have nice bubble rings, but it is good to go based on smell. The reason for no bubble rings perhaps is caused by all the crap that floated up and this metal 55 gallon drum seems to slag off material/rust every time I use them, so not a bad thing. Just not picture perfect.

From my understanding ffj and fpj over lap in transitional period(2 weeks before flower). WCA is for veg. WCA and wcp are used during flower foliar applications and watering.  Please give feed back if I’m on the right track or not! Knowledge is power!!!

Salt or saltwater. Maybe some of that cheap beer that you would have left over from making your OHN.

Maybe one uses both FAA and WCP in vegetative growth period but alternates in quantities. one week FAA is 1:500, WCP 1:1000, the next week WCP is 1:500, FAA 1:1000. this makes sense to me…

I also have this effect happen to me when I ferment ripe banana fruit. I make KNF Food according to the recipe, but the banana material traps in the gasses more than other materials, so it will rise above the 2/3 mark and many times overflow.

To solve this problem, I place a metal screen over the material, then I place a few clean stones on top of that to weigh the material down so it will not rise when the gasses try to escape. 

It sounds like after 3 days the material is probably pretty well fermented? I would imagine your climate is relatively warm as from my research west africa is even closer to the equator than Hawaii. If there is a slight alcohol smell, that is tell tale that the fermentation is complete.

The KNF Fuel recipe does not change whether you are using fish or other land based animals. The concept is to use sugar to control the moisture content of the material so that it will slowly ferment and the microbes will have a chance to disassemble the proteins into amino acids. The primary microbe doing the fermentation of KNF Fuel is KNF Police and there is more detail to that in this answer.

There are benefits to using fish over other land based animals based on the oils that are present in fish such as omega fatty acid balance, etc.

The original textbook recipe does call for the addition of KNF Medicine and KNF Microbes, but in practice they have been found to be not mandatory. KNF Microbes are added to mitigate smell and are listed as optional, and KNF Medicine is to speed up the metabolization of the microbes to digest the meat a bit faster.

IMO2 is never called for in any official recipe and may be a mistake introduced by that instructor.

There are other reasons besides just preservation at room temperature to include the supersaturation of the KNF Food.

To answer your question, are they ruined? No. Are they degraded? Yes. In addition to vital enzymes and plant metabolites there are also a host of biological residents in the KNF Food. All of these degrade as fermentation continues beyond the initial arresting after extraction, albeit at a slower pace. The KNF Food will continue to transform the material as biology and chemistry dictate.

The presence of further alcohol in the solution is okay and still is indicative of the presence of yeast which is desired, but it is when this turns to vinegar that the biology has shifted to acetic acid bacteria and indicate a presence of much more bacteria, which mean much more of the vital stuff you want has degraded significantly.

One way I avoid this situation is to keep my preserved collections in preservation and then fill up a “working jar” with just enough for that month, usually blended with KNF Cleanser and KNF Medicine in the appropriate ratios so that I don’t have to carry around a bunch of jars, and if I forget it or spill it I am not loosing the farm so to speak.