 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hi, I'm Glenn Martinez of Olimana Gardens and I've gotten Ms. Natalie Cash with me today. She's our farm manager. We're back up from the Big Island. We went down for a couple of weeks. We went down to teach a two-hour course and it took me two weeks to get home. So that was kind of interesting. We talked about it last week a bit and went to update you to take you a little slideshow of around their farm and what their facility looks like. Well, thank you for tuning in on Think Tech Hawaii and we're really happy that you're with us. By the way, before I forget about it, tomorrow is the last day of the fundraising. So that big November crusade, it ran over a couple of days into December. But tomorrow is the last day. We really appreciate it. If you send something in and mention it that you like Glenn and Natalie and the Olimana Gardens Aquaponics Show, we'd appreciate it. It'd be good fun. Thank you a lot. So Natalie, what's the big thing we got coming up? Yeah, so just coming back from YWAM, they already had scheduled to have an introduction of the aquaponics course, a seminar there. It's a one-day course? It's going to be from December 11th to December 20th. And it's going to be Mondays to Fridays and Saturday will be farm tours of other farms that they can go and see who's doing aquaponics. And when we were there two weeks ago, we went out and visited some other farms. There's diesel, there's our coffee farmer, Chet down the street. West has a very large commercial system. And what's really neat, you get to see the good, the bad and the ugly. You get to see what worked and what almost worked. And you get to ask them what's the best thing you ever did and what's the biggest mistake you made. So it's a very good, interesting tour to go on with those people. It sure is. And so what are they going to be covering on? Now, when you say YWAM, that's Youth with a Mission. Yes. Located in Kailua Kona on the Big Island. Yes. So it's just coming up here and understand like your deadlines are really getting short, right? Just on December the 11th, you're starting. Yes. So it's like you've got to sign up now. Yes. And anybody mentioned a cost to you? So, yeah, the cost now because early registration is already over on it. Too late for early. Yeah. So now if you register, it's still at a reasonable rate of $300. Yeah. So that's less than $30 a day or about $30 a day, nine days of hands-on training and touring farms. That's fantastic. And then what they're going to teach at the training is a lot of hands-on about aquaponic system designs and construction. So they'll walk them through trying to build their individual. So now this course being taught in like a conference room PowerPoint presentation, or is it outside? I think it's outside hands-on. I think it's going to be in the aquaponics. And they will pull on everything from little home systems up to commercial systems. Yeah. So what's the subject of the covering? Yeah. And then they're going to be evaluating the water quality and the nutrient system that comes with an aquaponics system. They're going to be selecting suitable fish and plant species for aquaponics. So they'll cover a lot of that. A lot of people think it's only tilapia. That's right. But we've got people growing trout on Maui. Yes. We have people growing catfish on this island. In fact, all the islands are doing the catfish. That Asian or Chinese catfish, they're doing in the channel catfish. So there's more than that doing it. Plus that we have a lot of people in aquaponics who are vegetarians or vegans and they don't want to eat fish and they don't want to sell fish to somebody else to eat. That's right. So they turn around and what do they raise? Koi fish or quite probably tropical fish. So tropical fish, people say, is there any money in it? Well, think about this. A little fish you can sell for 90 cents wholesale and it takes maybe 50 of them to be a pound. That's $50 a pound. But you're selling a little guys, right? So if you think about it, fingerlings that are a dollar a piece, even for baby tilapia, just being a breeder, you get a dollar a piece. How many of them does it make to make a pound? Well, a lot more than $7 and $8 a pound we sell for meat. So what else you got? And then they're also going to be talking about fish health management and plant health management. So that's a good coverage of what's happening. Because aquaponics, somebody had to raise a fish, somebody else would do the plants. The division of duties kind of thing. And I believe they're going to start from beginning of seed onto harvest. So they also talk about fish and plant harvesting. Right, right. We notice a lot of people when they build their aquaponics system do not set aside a nursery area. They think they're going to take the seed and go out in the aquaponics field and put it there. But when you do that and you have 72 and it takes up, say, a sheet, four by four sheet for 72 plants, you can do 72 plants on a little nursery tray. And when they get up about two inches big, then you move them out. Rice farmers in Japan or China, Asia, they don't go out just throwing rice seeds on the ground. They plant the rice at a nursery. Then they go out there. Each individual plant with their hand put it in the mud and they plant it. So you start it and then you move it out. So they had a pretty neat nursery operation we saw there, yeah? They sure do. And harvest day for them is on Tuesdays. So every Tuesday they'll harvest from their garden and their aquaponics. And they'll share it with the kitchen, the cafeteria there for everyone. Because they've got about 1,000 kids and 200 staff to feed, about 1,200 people, right? That they've got to feed. So you and I eat lunch and dinner there many days, didn't we? Yeah. By the way, if you're attending the workshop and you go over there and get breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all five bucks a piece. One of the biggest bargains in cafeterias. That's right. And that's your guess rate if you're attending any function there. So Natalie and I were over there and Natalie was whipping on their salads. All you can eat. All you can eat salad, yeah, you couldn't go wrong. So there were good meals and they had special food meals for people avoiding gluten, et cetera. So they were able to handle different diets. So that's pretty good. What else you got on your list there? And that will cover and it's going to be open to the community people. Right. Not just the college kids, but anybody in the community that wants an introduction to aquaponics. Yeah. So this is from the beginner up to somebody be practically producing a reasonable amount of food, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, let's show them some pictures of it. We have a few slides for you. We'd like to show you the campus and looking around their farm. So if we could pull those up, that would be fantastic. And I'll just comment on a few of them. Now this is the entry coming into the farm. When you drive up, you have flags all the way around in a circle. And when we got there, the week we were there, there were 43 flags flying, representing the students from those countries and that. And so the flags go up and down as students come and go and that. And so then this is the scene where you come into the front entrance to the farm area. So you've got a typical college campus and on the side you have this natural farm. And there they've got goats, pigs, you know, the whole menagerie. Chickens, ducks, the whole thing. And of course you go rattling into the aquaponics. Yeah. And now this is the show there. The little typo there says December 10th is actually the 10th of Sunday. It'll start on the 11th and it'll go all the way through on the 20th. But grow it, build it, share it. You can go up online. You give us a call at all amount of gardens. We'll hook you up or you can go to the YWAM site and check it out. These are neat little signs they have around. We're going to do this on our farm. They do a board. It says lift when you pick it up inside there is the printed pages, protected from the weather in the sun, not bleaching out all the color. Kind of a clever reuse thing, all made out of scrap wood. And these people are big time into reuse and recycling, right? Yes. Reuse in the buckets. And notice they put them up on racks and they keep things clean. From their cafeteria. Right from their cafeteria. So they recycle from the cafeteria. Yeah. So they bring over the less and come back to empty bucket. This is a cute little home system. So it's two by four and you can drop in the plastic trays and it got bio-filled. The fish tank is right underneath. It's shaded as you can see. See the little white pipe? That's one of our airlifts. This kind of old Olamama when you go there. To me I was real proud to see so many of my airlifts integrated in their systems. We've been going there for years. And that's great. This we set up the very first day. They had a 30 gallon octa-contain. We got a couple of cement blocks. We put it on there and I took a shot back and I sucked the water out of it. The air out and the water goes right up. And then we would put a hose in there, blow and let the water go down. So it's like an elevator up and down. The fish swam up in there within five minutes because we moved them into cold water and they didn't particularly weren't happy with that. And they ran up into the top there where the water was much warmer. So good fun. So there they swim around. You see the little white pipe going in there? A little distorted in the water. But the fish got used to it. I would stick my hand down. You see a few pellets there going up? Very rarely did a pellet make it to the top. That's right. A hundred little rascals. They just did it. Great. But it's a great way to say. This is a commercial setup. This is a couple there, Cindy and Terry, that were hosting me. They were there. You see the little crane on the side with the black tank there. And down the red buildings down at the bottom, those are where the fish tanks are. 5,000 gallon fish tank. Some couple of 600 tanks. So there are multiple systems here. So you can skit your feel for what you like to do. But if you want to discover it. Now when I went down there for my two hour workshop, one of my biggest things I do is teach making compost tea. Oh, that's the charm. That clear jar there in my hand. Natalie ate all the cheeseballs in that jar for me. She just threw herself under the bus for me on that. And what we do, you've got the blue drum has clean water in it. And then I set this in there and I turn it on with a little 25 watt pump. And it will fill the jar up just so full and then it will automatically back flush. Fill it up to that height and then back flush again. And I'll put in that little sack you see hanging there. We'll put in a couple of handfuls of castings. And the casting is just a rich, it almost looks like coffee grinds. And there's no stink or odor to it done in track flies or anything else. And then the next slide you'll see here. We come up. There ought to be a slide here. There you go. That's the compost itself completely done out. That's all the kitchen waste. Keep in mind they deliver the salad to their cafeteria. They take back all the garbage. It gets composted and goes back into the farm. So here now you see how the water is dark in that jar now. That was on the first flush. First fill up it is like chocolate milk. That drains down into the 55 gallon. And each flush it just gets darker and darker. We do that for 12 hours. And what that does is give me all my micronutrients. And this is what they'll be doing at the workshop that we've been promoting for them. Is I went there to teach the teachers. That's Terry on the right and his wife Cindy right next to him. And then there's another fellow over behind Alan. They're all instructors or professors there at the college. So all of my students were teachers. How's that? That's great. So I teach teachers. They were really attentive. And setting them up for their workshop to be able to give these classes. And they were really interested too in what you were doing there to help them. Yeah. We just kept extending day after day after day. As long as our bed and breakfast was available. They kept being interested. And I kept wondering if we're going to run out of things to show them. But every day I would surprise them with something. So we go there. We get there as early as nine in the morning. And we come home nine at night. So it was just half a day. 12 to 12. You know, nine to nine. So it was good fun. Yeah. It was. And it was very good for them also. And it was really appreciative that you was able to spend that quality time. We were. And we used that sketchbook, right? Right after this break, we're going to share the story of the sketchbook with you. So stay tuned to Think Tech Hawaii. We're going to take a little break and be right back. Public awareness. Think Tech Hawaii is volunteer chief operating officer and occasional host. And this is Niki. For the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. Here, thanks. Think Tech will run only during the month of November. And you can help. Please donate what you can so Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming. I've already made my donation and look forward to yours. Please send in your tax deductible contribution by going to this website. www.thanksforthinktech.cozbuff.com. On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30 plus weekly shows, thank you Mahalo and Sheshe for your generosity. Hi, Glen here of Olamana Gardens and Natalie Cash, our farm manager. Now, after the break, we always like to talk about our favorite tool. The tool of the week this week is a little drawing program software called Smart Draw. It's on the internet, go up, Google it. And when you do it, what you'll find out is a web-based program. You can use it for free and try it out, you know, no limitation on it. Except when it prints out, it says you're using the free version. But it's a little $10 a month subscription type of thing. And I wanted to share with you, when we were down in YWAM, that I had a sketchbook and we make sketches. We go to meal, we did sketch it. When I come home, I have to transfer all those sketches into CAD drawings. There's a little bit of glossy. You can't see too much detail in this distance. But these are, we went through about 18 different designs and inventions. And so when I got to take those sketch pads and also the photos that we took and then sit there and draw them up so that somebody can make them again. Because so much of what I'm doing, I'm just holding in my head and my head's getting full. You know, the fact is, a fellow came up and gave his phone number to me. He says, can you remember? I said, yeah, but I think I just lost my social security number. You know, you only hold so much. But this is a great little program, a little $10 program. You've got to find something you can get to work with right away. So it's kind of manual, but it's way better than a kitty program. But it's not quite up there with AutoCAD or the big boys. But I just don't have the tolerance to go through the learning curve. And also I like to just color it quickly and I just want it to communicate where somebody can feel like they can go out and build it. Yeah, and the colors work really nice with that. The other advantage is we're kind of a mixed marriage office in that we're Macintosh and we're Windows, right? And we're iPads and we're Samsung Notebook. So we are finding ourselves going through these web-based programs so that we can be on any platform, any sketch pad, and I can pull up that and run it. That's it. And so it really does work for it. But we had a couple of little cute videos of YWAM. We'll try to pull those up for you and just show you around there a little bit. And let's see what we have up here. We're going to take pot luck here. See what we have. Ah, that's my little upside down a crib. And you see I sit it on the center block. I stuck the white pipe up there. I sucked the air out and the water went right up. It's good fun. Let's see what else we have here. We can go back through the pictures. You have more pictures? Yeah. Oh, two more videos. Let's see some videos. I like videos. Yeah. By the way, we got home. I went out and bought an oxy and Natalie did the next day. Now this is the water coming back into the fish tank overflowing. And when it flows, it just flashes. And those flashes only go a few inches in the water. And what we show is how to hook up a drag into it. And basically that would be a T where the water is going in. Now this one is a pump. See the water going up there in the clear of the very top? We're pumping the water 25 feet high on there. We left them with. And that's with just a 40 watt pump. And that's the water coming out of a concrete tank. What do you call that? Cistern? Yes. Cistern. And so that's the only water pressure. And they only had about five feet of water. So it came into five feet. And then my air takes the air and went up. When you see it there right there, that's at about 20 feet. We extended another five feet higher before we left. And the lady there with the hose, the green hose is hooked to the cistern. And the water comes out when she holds it up. It stops coming out when she matches the level of the tank. And the red hose, well the water pumps all the way to the top, comes out of a one inch pipe, fills up the two inch pipe. And at the bottom, we had like 10 psi of water pressure. And you can wash your car with it. You can take a shower with it. So it's called a tankless tower. So there you go, good fun. So she's showing one there, that it's all the pressure she gets out of it. There I am on my way, where are they? And then she's got her other hose. And so they can test with the hose and see what they can get and what kind of pressure they can get out of it. And so it's when we're in the Philippines, a lot of times that pipe will just be holed up in a coconut tree. Hurricane comes along. They just lay it down on the ground. They learned to fill it full of water. Yeah. So it's very interesting what you can do with local materials. Keep in mind wherever country we go, we have to build out local materials. So our stuff has to be able to adapt it really fast. Yeah. You should have more pictures. Do we have some more pictures? Do you have a few more slides around on the farm? By the way, when we were there, we not only were at the YWAM, we also went over to a fellow named Wes. He has three Kekies. And I asked him, how many kids do you have? And he looked at me like, wow, you're not too smart. Three. Three Kekies. That's the name of his farm. How's that look? So these are the team makers that we're showing there. And these we have in our patent books. We sell them on our website for $50 or so. But you can go up and get them. And you're welcome to make your own. We gave up all of our patent rights on it. We just sell manuals and books. But any of our designs are quite free to take it, make them, sell them, start giving lessons to other people. I don't have time to teach every user. So we like the other people to help. This is a sample up with a 55-gallon drum. And that's called an H siphon or a bridge siphon. It's an unbreakable siphon. It'll siphon the water out of the blue barrel, but not go below the bridge. That's that horizontal pipe you see between the two white ones. Here's a drawing of it here. And this is used in that little smart draw program. And so when the fish tank is full, the water will go over and you can pump it out. And on the right-hand side, the brown going up, that's one of my airlifts. The airlift can run dry, no harm, no foul, where a mechanical pump or water pump would die. This is how we start the siphons here on the bottom and the middle there. You just touch it with a vacuum and it sucks the air out and the water up and you see it in that clear pipe. And it just runs and runs. So you see that metal tank there to the right of me? It's really hard to put a hole in the side of those tanks. So we need to siphon the water out into the barrel and then put the pump in there and pump it out. And that way, when you go up to your fish tank and you want to net up your fish tank, otherwise the fish will hide behind the tank and every other obstruction in there. You want to keep all that stuff out. Now this was a cute little thing we came up with. This is a clear water pickup and a siphon. You put it over the three inch drain hole at the end of a float bed and if you take it and touch a vacuum to the green part there at the top, kind of hard to see against the building. But when you do it, it sucks the air out and it creates a siphon. And we were able to drain a four foot wide, 40 foot long bed right there. So that's in place and when we sucked the air out the water goes up and not one single man could pick it up. You grab a hole up. You could not pick up a five gallon bucket of water run upside down. And so this is showing how to use the jigsaw and set it at a bevel and angle and then that bucket will sit right in the center. So it's a clear water pickup that things that are floating on the surface can't go down the drain. Because only the holes at the bottom let the water in comes up making you turn and go out. So this is us going from they have about five or six different little systems set up. We went from system to system tweaking it, making suggestions and then ask them why they were doing what they were doing. Now sometimes they do good, better and best to show good, better and best. And sometimes they actually just show bad. And so sometimes we do system like this one. We do re-engineering for that class. They're going to put a T-siphon down on this and we put a dragon tail. In fact, Natalie and I worked on this modifying that little section you see there. We took it off and put a dragon tail right up to the, within a half hour getting on the airplane coming home. Worked right up to the last moment. Good fun, right? But great people. But these Y-wammers, they go out, around the world they go out. This one they're going to build an A-frame here. Mission-oriented. Because we go to a third world developing country. You're not going to be having things fancy. So here we are. We threw a couple of beans up on a brick. And then we put some pallets on it. And you see me stressfully there, supervising. I give the ladies fair opportunity to do a day's work here. So they use scratched plywood put on top of the pallet. So it's dead level. They put the plywood down. And then they're going to put a one inch frame four by eight foot on it, or four by ten foot. And then they put the plastic, waterproof plastic over. And then there's a drain right in the center. And what we're going to do is we're going to set up a PVC frame on this. And they'll put the blue board on each side. And they'll have about 300 holes on it. And they will grow an amazing amount of plants. Twice as many plants is on the flat. So you see there, that blue board you see on the left, it'll be set up on top of it. And they'll drill two inch holes on four inch centers. So you do the math on a four by eight sheet of board, what size you're going to have there. And they were really excited about the A-frame gland because they're running out of space to grow their lettuce being flat on top of the water. That's right. So what we do is we come into where somebody has a float bed, we take off that foam, we put the PVC frame, we take up that foam, put it right back up on the left side, we reach up to the next bed and we put it on the other side. And within a couple of hours, we double the production of a farm. Just for the price of the PVC frame sitting up on top of their beds. And so people are really getting off on it and enjoying it. And once they build a sample, that's about it. We connect to the stage left and we come back, the whole place will be converted to it. So we did Jamaica, no San Juan, Puerto Rico. The two brothers had 10 rows, each 100 foot long. And at the end they were used up valuable greenhouse base with two 5,000 gallon fish tanks. And we converted them. Their beds were 4 foot wide and 2 feet deep and 100 feet long. That works out 5 6,000 gallons of water in each one. So each of their beds was equal to one of their fish tanks. So they were able to shut down the fish tank, put the fish in the beds and then we sprayed the water up on the plant. And so they were able to compact the 10 beds into 5 beds. Now a really happy store. That was a real good one for us, right? We got there at 11 o'clock in the morning, by 4 o'clock in the afternoon we doubled it. So here you see this is a cute one here. This is a pump hooked up to 55 gallon drum. We pressurized the drum just 2 psi of air from a little aquaponics pump and we're going to pump the water up on a 50 foot hose so I can pump water sideways and then that they actually had me take that blue ladder you see there on the right, put it on that platform I'm standing and climb up on the top where it says do not stand here and they got me up there and shooting the water out the top. It did not matter what the height was, it pumped it up at the same volume. That's awesome. And they could not believe that a 40 watt pump and no burping no bubbling, no burbling. You see the water coming out at the tip. So these are the hands-on workshops. So there I am teaching them and boy they asked me what I do for a living and I said well I take big pieces of pipe and make a little piece of pipe but sometimes I feel like the magic guy you know the show or the kids show with the balloons it makes a dog, it makes a rabbit well we take the pipe and we'll make one thing and then somebody will ask a question we'll just knock it apart and make another thing and here this is that tower the tankless tower and that one inch pipe you see coming down that's a return back to the the cistern okay and so that way it's running all the time it's always full of water but you're not wasting any water it's just going around and it's being aerated in aerated water it tastes a whole lot better than unerated water so here we are we strapped it to the front gate there we strapped it up there's Terry up there with the screw gun I'm throwing my weight into it as you see they're holding it and we did that we put it up about three or four times right we made it longer we made it better and we threw it up there and this was kind of the final thing at 25 foot high and that thing just really pumped and if we don't let the return go back we can pump water right out the top so we can go much higher I think in Umigete, Philippines agricultural college we went 34 feet high at 450 gallons an hour up on the roof of a two-story building for a nursery fish tank down on the ground nursery on the roof so this is some of that smart draw some of the drawings to show you there this is interesting the bucket on the left has a little 12-volt build pump you see the water only came up a couple of feet up and the solid will just stop well the next bucket on the right I added on a Glenn Turi you've heard of Venturi from the Italian well this is a Glenn Turi and we add the air in coming in that red part there to a check valve that's to keep the water pump from pumping water into my air compressor and then it will shoot it up and we can take water up to 30 feet high a little shot back I would not try to farm today without a shot back when I'm around little school children I actually don't want them to handle electricity around the water so we use a kayak pump here I am in my Jamaica reggae hat my hair grew dark that day but that is Terry and Cindy most of the life of a couple that we're in our company t-shirt Mad Hot Steep but I don't think I've ever had such a really interesting couple to work with well that's about it you've just talked all the way through the whole show now well thanks for tuning in to Think Tech Hawaii we do appreciate it don't forget the fundraising tomorrow's the deadline put a plug in for Glenn and Nat we'd appreciate it speaking up and making a donation that's it for us Glenn and Nat we're out of here thank you