Every human stomach has a story and if we sent an archeology team to yours, excavators might discover particles that signify a relationship to nature, a connection to environment’s history, culture, and economy. Or you could simply bring food remnants known as table scraps (organic matter) to Dragon Heart Farm where Tyler Russell and Brooks Thomas will talk story.

Standing at a long wooden trough are Thomas and Russell at Dragon Heart Farm, in the village of Hawi on Big Island Hawai’i at Lincoln Road, pulling back with their hands what looks like soil to reveal hundreds of wiggly worms. Not quite soil yet, for right now they scrape a layer of dark brown granules, the result of your meal scraps—apple cores, broccoli stocks, chicken bones and more—crumbling together when sawdust, sunshine, and water are added. In this beautiful muck are compost worms, filling their stomachs with your organic matter and then making fertile castings (poops). Turns out that waste makes fertility.

In worm composting demonstrations, Thomas will often drink a glass of water enhanced with these dark brown compost granules full of worm castings to illustrate how our human stomachs flourish in equal health as to the entire Earth’s stomach—which is soil. Healthy soil means healthy human stomachs since our food originates in the soil.

Brooks Thomas and Tyler Russell welcome farm adventurers.

Soils amendments are an expertise crafting at Dragon Heart Farms where they make GrowFAAST (fish amino acid, Hawaiian spirulina, and EM1), Vermichar (worm castings and charcoal), and FAABBchar (fish amino acid, bokashi, and biochar). And they make amended soil.

Russell, Dragon Heart’s Farm Manager, clarifies that for the home gardener, the amended soil he and his farm team create is fertile enough to grow more than a few crops (cycles)—from seed to fruiting tomato, for example, which is often a 90 +/- day cycle. Filling your garden container with Dragon Heart Farm soil can ensure a flourishing stomach story at your home.

In a way, then, plants have stomachs, too, in that they love nutrition to eat. And how we amend (nutrition-ize) the soil becomes their mealtime. Consider, then, how effective Dragon Heart’s plant nutrition product GrowFAAST is for a garden. For plants, during a specific growth phase, thriving occurs with a tailored nutrient (amendment). Comparing a food plant to a human baby helps when we see mashed avocado as optimal for infant growth because the brain needs fat to grow at this stage of life. In a similar way, GrowFAAST feeds a plant for optimal growth during the stage when producing vegetables. GrowFAAST can also provide ongoing nutrition to grow leafy vegetables.

After a walk through several acres of Dragon Heart Farm, Russell arrives next to 30 or more tall blue barrels, another specific location where waste becomes fertility. Inside the barrels, fish skeletons, with some flesh still on, are fermenting (breaking down) with brown sugar. Several months later, the tap on the barrel bottom is opened and voila—liquid fish amino pours out.

Tyler first drives the barrels empty to Kona, then fills them with fish bones, guts, tails, and heads that are recycled—saved from disposal—after the fish leave Blue Ocean Mariculture, a Kanpachi fish farm (http://www.bofish.com) in ocean waters off the Kona coast. The other key ingredient in GrowFAAST arrives from Cyanotech’s spirulina, a Hawaiian blue green alga, that becomes dust in the air when produced (https://www.cyanotech.com). Once vacuuming the spirulina dust particles, the Kona company then sells the spirulina “leftovers” to Dragon Heart Farm, or they would otherwise go to the garbage bin.

Dragon Heart Farm Manager, Tyler Russell, holds a fish skeleton that remains in the compost.

A healthy meal regenerates our bodies as the stomach ferments nutrition in so many ways. Likewise, amended soil sequesters (holds purposefully) chemicals such as carbon, drawing down from the air its negative role in global warming. Eating food, then, from thriving soil influences nature, the current and future healthy environment. This is what we mean by regenerative farming—to generate further and again what nature intended.

Tyler and Brooks encourage you to stop by Dragon Heart Farm and bring your table scraps. Grateful compost worms can then morph more “waste” into fertile amendments for soil to grow nutritious food—in other words, the story in our human stomachs is ever ongoing.