 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. My name is Stephanie Mock, and I will be your host today. Hawaii Food and Farmer Series aims to talk to those who are part of Hawaii's food system, whether that's farmers in the field, chefs, restaurant owners, or all the agricultural professionals who are behind the scenes who help make farming in Hawaii possible and ultimately help comprise our Hawaii food system and food sustainability movement. Today's show is titled 808 Planner, Utilizing New Technology for Hawaii's Farmers, and today our special guest is one of those behind the scenes actors who helps make farming possible in Hawaii. She works with many different farms of all different sizes throughout the islands and she'll be talking to us today about her new project called 808 Planner and how this new project will help farmers throughout the islands and ultimately help our food sustainability movement. So, again, I'm joined in the studio for 808 Planner, Utilizing New Technology for Hawaii's Farmers, and today we have Jean Brokish, who's the Executive Director of O'ahu Resource Conservation and Development Council, better known as O'ahu R-C-N-D. And even though O'ahu R-C-N-D has O'ahu in the name, they provide services throughout the islands for farmers of all sizes, whether that's technical assistance, outreach, workshops, farmer training, or, most importantly, what we're talking about today, technology. So I'd like to take one second and offer a quick and warm welcome to our special guest, Jean Brokish. Hi, Jean. Welcome to the studio. Is this your first time? It is. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Of course. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking the time and being a huge supporter of Hawaii agriculture and all the work that you do to help support that mission. So I mentioned that you're with the O'ahu Resource Conservation Development Council, or the nickname, I guess, of O'ahu R-C-N-D. And, you know, you've been working here almost 10 years, I believe, but I thought we could take a step back, kind of learn how you got involved in agriculture as we like to talk to our guests, because there's many different avenues of agriculture of how people get involved, either growing up on a farm, education, doing Peace Corps, etc. So I thought we could learn a little bit about Jean, the person, about your time in Hawaii agriculture and how you are going to help support the future of Hawaii agriculture. Sure. Yeah, so I actually got my start. I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and I spent many, many days, years, lots of time outside with the environment, with animals, with plants. I like to say I inherited my mother's green thumb. I like to grow things a lot, and I think my experiences growing up on a farm in a rural area in Wisconsin inspired me or led me to studying agriculture in college. I got a bachelor's degree in agronomy from UW River Falls, which is a small branch university, very focused on agriculture, part of the Wisconsin system. Rural Wisconsin. Rural Wisconsin, yes. And then after my bachelor's degree, I pursued a master's in soil science from Purdue University, which led me to a lot of interesting opportunities in agriculture in a variety of roles, a variety of places, and in 2008 I made my way to Hawaii, and very shortly after that I obtained a position with O'ahu Rc&D as a project manager working with farmers in the Waimanala watershed. We had a program and some cost share financial resources to develop conservation plans for them, and then also provide financial resources for them to implement conservation practices on a watershed scale. So that was a great opportunity to get to know a very important agricultural area in O'ahu. You kind of hit the ground running then when you got here, huh? I did. You're like, boom, I'm here. Let's provide cost share opportunities. Let's make this happen. Let's make this happen. Yeah. So perhaps you could tell us, so you're executive director of O'ahu Rc&D, and you mentioned that you started off as project manager. So, you know, you climb the ladder per se, and then could you explain what O'ahu Rc&D does now? Sure, yeah. So it's the 20th year. It's a nonprofit organization. It was formed in 1997. And it really came about as one of the locally led organizations that originally was sponsored and kind of cultivated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is one of 375 Rc&D councils across the country. And it's really designed to be kind of the local arm, the connection between the federal programs and the local communities. Over the years, the federal connection has changed and morphed and really virtually disappeared with federal program cuts. But as an independent nonprofit organization, we continue to work with local communities, agriculture being a very important part of the local and rural kind of sustainability in Hawaii here. And we do a lot of outreach, workshops. We have a variety of resources that we produce both for like environmental stewardship, but also business planning, marketing, economic sustainability of agriculture. And then combine a lot of our services together through an approach called conservation planning, which is really providing technical assistance one-on-one with farmers on their site to figure out what's the best use of the resources. How can we work together and tweak some things that might improve both their profitability, their production, as well as the environmental sustainability? So this idea of conservation planning, you're talking about this technical assistance on the ground, working with individual farmers and larger operations. But can you tell me in a quick sentence, what is a conservation plan? Because it sounds great what you're talking about, but if I don't know what a conservation plan, what exactly is it? Sure, yes. It's something that's difficult to boil down into an elevator speech. I have to, I have to. I wanted you to try at least. Okay, I'll try. So basically a business or a strategic plan that is less focused on economics and more focused on your use of the natural resources. So you're doing an inventory. What are the soils on your land? What are the plants that might be growing already? What could grow well? Are there areas of erosion? Are there areas where water quality, water bodies or water quality might be impaired or inadequate sources for irrigation, for example? So it's like the strategic or business plan for managing your natural resources. So you have an ultimate goal to be economically viable as an operation, but how are you going to do that by managing your natural resources? Well, if you think about farming, we really need the soil. And as somebody who got her degree in soil science. You're a soil nerd, aren't you? Yeah, I'm a soil nerd. A good one. Soils are living, breathing systems. It's not dirt. I used to learn in college that dirt was a four letter word. Okay. Whereas soil is a natural living, alive. Yeah, it really sustains us. And if you think about farming and your business is farming, if you don't protect your soil or enhance your soil, you're really literally eroding away. Sorry, bad pun. But you're literally eroding away the foundation of what makes your business possible and successful. So I read the statistic that there's approximately 7,000 farms throughout the islands. Is there any sort of statistic or a general number of how many farms have conservation plans or need conservation plans? So in addition to the conservation plan being beneficial from the farm or managing the resources, one of the other benefits is it allows you to comply with local environmental rules and regulations. So you would think in an ideal world everybody would have one of these both from the environmental stewardship standpoint as well as our local laws. But unfortunately a lot of farmers just don't know about it. And I think with the changing local agriculture, a lot of new farmers coming on, a lot of small farms, leasing land or owning land, there's not a lot of awareness about conservation planning. And there's somewhere around 10% to 15% of Hawaii's farmers have an active or current conservation plan. They may have had one developed in the 90s or the 80s even. But there's opportunity to update that and revisit that given the new technology we have, maybe the new farming approaches that they're using. And so there's definitely room to make it easier and to sort of move the needle and get more people informed about conservation practices that they may already be doing actually. But a conservation plan and going through the process of creating a conservation plan would allow them to formalize it and document their goals and their practices. And as well as a system in record keeping, which is something that I don't, I know very few people actually love and I think it's a very difficult thing for farmers to find time in their schedules to do. But a conservation plan could help them record their practices, kind of help formalize their goals, both benefit for themselves as well as how they communicate to their partners, their customers, et cetera. And I think when I'm thinking about it too, you know, because of Hawaii's unique geography and isolation from other larger land masses, it can be difficult to get access to agricultural professionals who are able to, you know, satisfy this huge demand that we have for conservation planning. You said somewhere only between 10 and 15% have a current one. In order to get that 100%, which I think is the ideal goal, we would need a whole host of conservation planners and I, you know, especially with funding, you know, the classic understaffed, underfunded, how can we streamline conservation planning and make it available to all farmers? So I think, you know, what we're going to be talking about in our second half today is how do we streamline that process? Because like you said, there's this huge demand and many different benefits for farmers, but how do we streamline that and make it available and allow all farmers to know about this process? So what, you know, before we start talking about the new technology, what's the general process of getting a conservation plan? Like who do I call or like do I do a site visit? Where is the general standard? Sure. So for many, many years, the federal government, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the local soil and water conservation districts had a lot of employees and technical assistance available for all farmers. But through, again, those government and programmatic changes, funding cuts, their staff has shrunk greatly and their priorities have shifted and they're being basically mandated from Washington. These are the people you need to work on. These are the goals you need to work on. And so there's just more and more need in Hawaii. Again, as I mentioned, the changing agriculture and new farmers and there's fewer people to provide those services. However, there are, so there's the local soil and water conservation districts. There's 16 in the state of Hawaii. And then each county in Hawaii also has federal employees through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There's also private consultants. Maybe some planning services or planning consultants that could work with farmers to develop conservation plans. And then little nonprofit organizations like Oahu Rc&D who've been doing this for a while and provided either through grant funding, subsidize it through grant funds or do it on a fee-for-service basis. But even an army of people, I think there's really a greater need than there is the ability to provide those services. You say little but growing because we're going to be talking about how Oahu Rc&D is growing with this new project of 808 Planner and helping to fill that need for conservation planning assistance. Yeah, so we're going to take a short break and think that Hawaii's going to show some short messages and when we return we'll continue talking with Jean Brokish, the executive director of Oahu Resource Conservation Development Council. We spent the first half of our show getting to know how she got involved in agriculture, especially agriculture here in Hawaii, but now learning more about conservation planning and the need for conservation planning assistance for Hawaii's farmers. Our second half of the show will feature 808 Planner, a new development or program or website if you will, that Oahu Rc&D has developed and we'll see how farmers are currently using that new technology and how they'll continue to use that new technology into the future. We'll be right back. Stay tuned. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. Welcome back everyone. We've been talking with Jean Brokish, the executive director of Oahu Resource Conservation and Development Council, better known as the Oahu Rc&D. We've heard her background in agriculture and talking about conservation planning and Oahu Rc&D. We've talked a lot about these broad topics, these great environmental stewardship programs and entities that help support our island's natural resources, especially Oahu Rc&D. Our show today is titled 808 Planner, Utilizing New Technology for Hawaii's Farmers. This half of the show is going to be all about 808 Planner, a new technology that farmers can use throughout the state to help with conservation planning assistance and other areas of record keeping and documenting and mapping their properties, et cetera. So I'm going to turn to Jean and I'm going to ask her, what's 808 Planner? What's the elevator pitch for 808 Planner? And then we're going to talk more about how she helped develop this technology, how farmers are currently using this technology, and how the future of farmers here in Hawaii can use this technology to help their operation in the long term. All right. Well, I just want to say thank you again for joining us. And I'm just going to ask, what is 808 Planner? So as you mentioned, it's the way of utilizing some technology that is available and connecting that with what used to be a very paper process, very resource-intensive process, and connecting those and providing an online user-friendly tool for farmers to learn about their property, learn about what resources they have available, and then connect those dots with some conservation practices that could help improve the stewardship and the management of those resources on their farm. All right. So is this a website? Is this a program I download? How do I access 808 Planner? It's an online program. It's 808planner.org. You create a free account, and then once you establish an account, it's an online software app. You can do it through your laptop. You can do it through a smartphone. There's some processes, just some user information. You create a user account, put your name, contact information in there, and then you identify some of your goals. What are your resource objectives? What do you want to accomplish by using 808 Planner or through a conservation plan? And then from that, you do a quick mapping of your property and then connecting the dots with what kinds of conservation practices might be the best suited for you. So you just gave us a very quick overview, which I love, and I thought we could take this moment to show a short video so people can see the website and how you kind of move through that website and create this conservation plan and learn about practices. So let's take a second right now and check out that video. Sure. So Jean, if you could tell us as the video is going through, maybe you can read or tell us what's happening on the screen. Sure. So this is a view of the website, 808planner.org. The first thing you do is create an account. You create a free account using your email address and then after you get your password, you identify your resource objectives as it says. So there's improved air quality, reduced soil erosion, things like that. Then the next process is to map your fields and this is a pretty simple paired down mapping software where you just draw a polygon, you label it and then based on the resource objectives, it will tell you which conservation practices work best. If you want to learn about any of them, you just click the link in a little pop-up window with a picture and a description appears and then you can review your plan and the important part here is once it's finished, it can be a document for you to use to just help provide information and guidance of your stewardship, but if you want to make it formal and use it to qualify for funding, the key is to work with your local soil and water conservation district to make it formally approved and make it kind of an official document that would be recognized by the county government, the federal government, perhaps your landowners or whomever you work with on your property. So I know this is an agricultural show and we love farmers, but who else can use this kind of information and technology to benefit their operations or their entities? Sure, so large landowners, so for example, Department of Agriculture, they have a lands or DLNR has lands in their purview. They could use it, agricultural professionals employed by those entities could use it to inventory their properties, learn about it, map out some areas that are maybe more susceptible or areas that are in conservation practices. As well as just homeowners could, it's not ideal necessarily or it's not necessary for homeowners to have a conservation plan. But they may want to learn soil health techniques for their garden. Of course, right, and it provides some useful ideas on tips on like cover cropping, for example, or windbreaks. And really the idea, I think one of the benefits of 808 Planners, what it takes, what can be kind of a complicated, really opaque process of figuring out what conservation practices might work for you. And it pairs it down based on your objectives, as I said. But it also provides a very simple description and a picture for you to get an understanding of what does that mean and what would that look like if I employed something like that on my property. And I really like that it's like a user-dominant experience in the sense that farmers know their land best, right? Obviously, you know, people can provide information and additional recommendations, but ultimately they're managing the land and they know their process and their routine and schedule, and they're able to tweak that and learn about practices that fit within their schedule for economic reasons or natural stewardship reasons as well. Yeah, absolutely. This is not something that somebody creates in a back room without ever knowing the property. Ideally, the farmer is the one, as you said, the one who knows the property the best. They know where the water ponds, they know where the erosion is happening and can utilize this program, 808 Planner, to get some ideas. Oh, okay, well, if I want to reduce erosion, these are the four practices that might work for me and out of that, oh, I really like this one here. You know, this makes the most sense. So I'm going to put that in my plan and there's also the opportunity to schedule a practice so you can say, do this in March of 2018. So you start thinking about the future and how that works into your harvest schedule and everything like that. Right, right, right. And as well as utilizing it to make notes. Okay, well, I planted papaya, this is the orchard that has papaya that was established in 2013 and it kind of becomes, as I mentioned, that record keeping tool as well. So we keep talking about, you know, how farmers could potentially use it. I was wondering, are there any success stories you've had? You mentioned that it's only been out for a couple months now. So I know it's still pretty brand new and we're trying to get the word out as much as possible. But have you had any farmers use 808 Planner and find success with it? Yeah, so one idea, one benefit of using this is to just get the information out there. But really the finish line is getting farmers to go through the process, have a conservation plan, and take it to their local soil and water conservation district for approval, as I mentioned. At that point it becomes an official document that is recognized by the county for the grading and grubbing environmental ordinances as well as potential funding. And it really just went online in June, became fully fledged, workable program, it's real, exactly. And last month we had a farmer present his conservation plan to a soil and water district on Oahu and it was approved. And so that was the first farmer to make it to the finish line. First big accomplishment. It was great, yeah. And we also had a farmer on Kauai who was using it to show a landowner, hey, this is what I want to do, kind of map it out and use the document to show I'm legit, I'm real, I have a plan and was able to secure a longer lease from the landowner with the conservation plan that was developed through 808 Planner. So yeah, we've been talking about all these benefits, environmental stewardship, but record keeping and profitability and just getting it on paper. But I think a great benefit of it is it becomes a document that other entities can understand. Farmers have all these great ideas that most times live in their heads or they're trying to speak about them all the time and they can't really show it in hard copy and so this allows at least a streamlined way of I want to do X, Y and Z, I want to do it this time and they can show that, you know, FSA, they can show other potential funders or even landowners and say, listen, I am legitimate, like give me that lease and that's a great side benefit I think of 808 Planner. I know it was designed for conservation planning but you're talking about all these small farmers who ultimately need land, right? And you know, it's really hard to find land in Hawaii and if you're just like, I want to farm and don't really have a plan to show, you can develop a business plan but that doesn't necessarily show your management style or schedule so 808 Planner kind of loops all these great mapping technologies, conservation practices, but also just that record keeping, scheduling document form that other people can understand. So if people want to learn more about 808 Planner, you know, who do they contact? Who do they work with? I know we've mentioned the local soil and water conservation districts who are great resources throughout Hawaii but like we said, there's only so many planners on the islands, in-person planners, so what, if a farmer is like, oh, this sounds really interesting, what would you say their next steps are in using 808 Planner and getting a conservation plan, that end goal you were talking about? Sure, so really the first step is to go to 808planner.org and create an account. Simple. Yeah, and then from there, there's an about page that has some more information as well as a short tutorial video that you don't need to create an account to access. You can just walk through it, it provides a little more detail than the video we just watched and that just provides an overview of the program, how it works. But really the best advice is really to just dive in and give it a try and if you get stuck you can contact Oahu RCD for help. You could contact a conservation planner on a neighbor island for help, pick up the phone, email. There's a link to Oahu RCD email from the 808planner.org domain and just get started, give it a try. I mean, farming is risky. This is one way, you know, farmers are not unfamiliar with taking risks and trying new things. Oh, I like that, that sounds really nice. The original risk takers can now utilize this new technology so they can minimize their risk and have this tool in their toolbox so that they can go out there and ultimately get that end goal of getting a conservation plan approved. Absolutely, yeah, go for it. I wanted to just give a quick shout out to some of the funders as well, some of the supporters who helped us get this far, get to the finish line. Yeah, so originally we got some funding from Ulupono Initiative to do some stakeholder assessing them, getting some feedback from them about what would be useful and then we were able to acquire some funding from the state through the Department of Agriculture. Some private foundations also contributed government entities, HACD and Atherton Family Foundation, Community Foundation, et cetera. So we're really grateful for everybody who's been behind it and get at this farm. I want to see some people try it out, provide us some feedback. Continue to improve and move it forward and help our Hawaii farmers. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining us in the studio today and I'm so glad that you had the chance to talk about 808 Planner because I think it is a tool that's good for all of Hawaii's farmers, so not just here on Oahu. And again, thank you for joining us. My pleasure, thank you. We've just been speaking with Jean Broakish, Executive Director of Oahu Resource Conservation who's been talking about 808 Planner, a new technology that Hawaii's farmers can utilize to develop conservation plans and ultimately help with environmental compliance but also, you know, mapping out their operations. So I'd like to thank Jean for taking the time today to join us in the Think Tech Hawaii Studio and I'd like to thank Think Tech Hawaii Studio and staff for hosting our show today. We'll see you next time on Hawaii Food and Farmers. Thank you.