 Welcome to Stan the Energy Man here on ThinkTech Hawaii, Stan Osterman, coming to you live and direct from Oahu on the main island in the island chain with all the people and all the problems. But we're talking, our guest today is coming to us from the big island where there's not as many people and probably not as many problems either, at least if we're spread out so they don't bother everybody, but it's a great place. But anyway, I was just thinking we're going to be talking about farming today and agriculture and electric agriculture. And so we'll be getting into that. But as we lined up our guest today, he said he's from Waimea on the big island as specifically compared to Waimea on the island of Kauai, which was always confusing for the US Postal Service. So for many people, they refer to the area around Waimea as Kamuela. And I've often wondered why Kamuela doesn't show up on any maps when you go looking for it. And I found out why a few months ago, and this is a little Hawaiian trivia and history that a lot of people don't know. The two post offices, the one on Waimea in Kauai and the one on Waimea on the big island, the two postmasters got together one day and said, look, we got too much of our males going to the wrong island and it gets delayed and everything. So we need to figure this out. And so the postmaster in Waimea on the big island, his middle name was Kamuela. And so they said, OK, well, the Kauai guys will keep the Waimea post office name. And the big island post office in Waimea would be called Kamuela. And so there's no Kamuela district on the big island. If you look for the sign of the town, you won't find Kamuela. But if you go to the post office, it says Kamuela post office. That's how they kept the two cities or the two towns in Hawaii separated for the postal service. So our guest today is Mr. David Donald, who is a high tech. I'm going to call him an electric farmer on the big island with interesting background. And so David, welcome to the show. He's he's from Waimea slash Kamuela on the big island. And he's going to tell us a little bit about what he does. But Dave, could you start off by just telling us about your background a little bit and how you got into coffee farming? Hello, Austin, thanks for having me on. I don't know if you can hear right now, but we're in the middle of a rainstorm. So I don't know how it's going to affect the audio. It's OK. Good. So while my background, my background is from the music industry and then the television and film and commercial industry and then 3D computer animation, digital special effects and internet and all of that. And in my later years, I discovered farming and the story in short is that when I'm currently living in Waimea, there was a two foot tall tree, a little bush, and I asked somebody, I said, what is that? And they said, that's coffee. And I said, how old is it? They said, it's 25 years old. And I said, well, I was going to be tall. And they said, well, you know, coffee doesn't really grow well in Waimea. And that's all they had to say to me. And six months later, that tree was six feet tall and flowering and fruiting for the first time. And the seeds from that tree have grown four thousand plus trees here on the farm in La Mela. And so that's how I got into the cup through serendipity. And it just happened that the farm that was graciously offered to me to run this experiment was off the grid and they already had solar panels and blue ion batteries installed here. And so my interest was how to preserve that and expand on that. And so I just started investigating what equipment was available, electric sprayers and various other types of battery operated tools. So all by power tools that I have and all the tools that I use to weed whack or trim or cut or prune or whatever. If they're power tools, they're running off of batteries which are charged to our solar system. So that's the really, I want to say, pure way to generate your power. And that's off of your own renewable energy resource being solar. And, you know, I'm actually interested. I know Paul and I are talking to some folks kind of in your neighborhood about doing some hydroelectric off of some old irrigation flumes. And so it'd be neat to see some farmers using the irrigation flumes for hydroelectric as well as some solar and maybe even some small scale wind. I'm not really into the big, large scale wind, but some of the smaller turbines are actually pretty cool. But so last two weeks ago or three weeks ago, I guess Paul came to visit you and and he brought the Toyota Mirai over there to to not necessarily to mate with your tractor, but to at least to have a date with your tractor. And so there's the two rather unique vehicles on the Big Island of Hawaii. They're both electric powered, when the tractor is battery powered and the car is hydrogen fuel cell powered. But it's kind of we see it as the starting point of electric farm equipment and electric transportation on the Big Island. So can you tell us a little story about your tractor and how you charge it? You know, and what do you fast charge it or just use a regular charger or slow charger overnight and things like that? Sure, I'm laughing because a lot of me know farm lots is considered desert. Desert is defined by less than 10 inches rainfall per year. And apparently we're getting those 10 inches right there. That's we speak because it's just boring. So a friend of yours, Mitch Ewen, who heads up the hydrogen initiative over at HNEI. It's also a very good friend of mine, and he's visited the farm and kept a close eye on what I've been doing over here. And I started talking to him about hydrogen fuel cell powered tractors and and that spun off into a discussion about electric tractors because there are, I think, two fuel cell powered tractors available, but they're not commercially available. The companies have produced them, but they're not selling them in the marketplace. But actually it was because of Mitch, he did the research. And as you know, he's involved with hydrogen power buses and that company is US hybrid that makes those fuel cells. And one of their partner sister companies was Selectract. And so Mitch said, Dave, let's check this out. And so I he was instrumental in doing the research and forwarding me to the company. And from there, I dealt with the company. And what was really decisive factor was they made a small form tractor and the width of the tractor is 48 inches. So that was crucial because it meant that I could have 10 foot center roads and, you know, the tree branches will grow out and you may sweep some of them aside. But nevertheless, you can get down fairly easily down a row of coffee trees and with a sprayer mounted on the back of the the tractor driven by the PTO of power takeoff. You can apply micronutrients or natural insecticides like soap. There's various USBA organic soaps that you can apply or neem oil. It's one of my all time favorites to deal with various types of insects and invasive insects. And if you try and do this in farming with a backpack or with electric sprayer, you're basically going to be doing it seven days a week. And in fact, case in point, I had an electric sprayer and it got some point to grow so big that I was spraying seven days a week. And then I bit the bullet and I bought a gasoline powered little sprayer, little barrel top sprayer. And that reduced it down to two days for this particular drill. Now with the electric tractor and the sprayer on the back of it takes me 20 minutes. Wow. So it was a crucial moment in being able to manage the farm. And once you have the insects and the nutrition under control, then you back right off the spraying because nature takes its course. Healthy plants to deliver healthy fruit and send off insects. Well, that's that's a huge time saver to go from virtually seven days a week down to just 20 or 30 minutes a day for for setting up your your spraying. I'm sorry to turn up the volume here because I can't hear a thing now. It's so loud because of the rain. The rain is just unbelievable. It's just torrential. What a time for this to happen. Well, get all the rain out of your system now, because I'm coming over to healer tomorrow and I don't want to get rained on. Anyway, so you're your own how you use the tractor for other things, obviously. But so on average, you know, do you just like when you're when you're done using the tractor, it came with its own little charger unit and you just plug that into your your battery slash solar panel system. And yeah, so the tractor can be charged using either one 10 or two 20. I'm using one 10 and, you know, they say overnight. But typically it takes if you drain the battery down 20 percent, which is what they recommend. It takes around seven to eight hours to charge back the full strength. And it uses the same type of connector that you would have for an electric car, for instance, for your home. And that plugs into the tractor. And the other end is the regular one 10 plus. And it's it just everything's powered by the solar systems. Yeah, the solar panel system. So it's very straightforward, very simple. I use the tractor. It's got a front end loader so we can use the bucket to move our gang material compost around. You can use it to back grade, if you wanted to. There's various kinds of implements that you can put on the PTO or you can tow. It's extremely well made, it's very solid. Depending on the operation, it's low power, so it's perfect for my operation. They make two larger models that are far more powerful and much wider and longer. And the thing I have to be most careful with in this tractor is because it's got a very narrow wheel base. And a lot of mellow is great because it's fairly flat. But where other coffee farms are, like in South Kona or Hamaquah or even over in Katmou, you're soaked through this. So it's not a tractor farm. You got a high center of gravity and a narrow track. It's easy to fall over. When you're fully loaded with 100 gallons of water, that's 1,300 pounds or more. Exactly. So you've got the farm set up on solar panels and lithium ferrous phosphate batteries to store for overnight charging and things like that. And when the sun comes out, the solar panels run stuff around the farm and charge the batteries up. And that seems to work pretty good for you. Oh, it's phenomenal. I mean, we're powering the entire farm. So we're powering this. There's a home on the farm and then there's a 100 foot long barn. And in that barn, there are refrigerators and a bunch of electronic devices on trickle chargers. And the tractor has two batteries. You know, it has the LFP, the lithium ferrous phosphate that's the main battery, but it also has a little 12 volt battery for the starter, the starter, you know, and I always keep a trickle charger on that. OK, it's sort of standard procedure with me. I always keep trickle chargers on all my vehicles. Yeah, all my 12 volt. Yeah, even even the Toyota Mariah has a 12 volt battery in the trunk to run instrumentation and stuff, otherwise your fuel cell won't kick in. And the traction battery has it. You still need that little 12 volt kicker for running instrumentation and stuff. So your coffee farm, you know, according to Paul, you're kind of unique in that you you specialize in kind of I want to call it high end coffee or specialized coffee varieties that actually command a pretty high price. Is that a really good business model for you? And would you recommend it for some other maybe some other crops like vanilla or cocoa? Or are there other crops that could do the same kind of business model as you? I think there are. Yeah, the term in the coffee industry is specialty coffee. So if folks might be more familiar with wine when they go to a store, a wine store or grocery store, they'll see points, you know, 90 points, 92 points, whatever on a bottle of wine. It's on a scale of 100. The same thing for coffee. And once your coffee is scored by professionals above 80 points, it's considered specialty coffee. And I was fortunate enough to have that the coffee from that one little tree that grew all its cakey, scored higher than 80 points. And and so the value rises exponentially. And there's a very strong market, primarily in Asia, but also in the Middle East for high end coffins. In fact, the current record to date is for coffee selling at just over four thousand five hundred dollars per pound for green bean. And so of course, that coffee score is extremely high, probably in the mid to high nineties. And I'm not there yet, yet, but I will be. But you know, farming is a big concern because I'm told that on the island of Hawaii, we import 92 percent of our food. And so as you know, the ships in the plane stop coming, what do we do? Well, Hawaii Island is very fortunate where it's a big island. There's four thousand square miles. We have a lot of energy resources with sun, wind, geothermal, ocean, and we have large ranches. We have a lot of cattle, a lot of sheep. We have pig, we have poultry. So and we have, of course, the ocean. But farming has gone by the wayside because the return on investment for the labor involved has diminished greatly. So that return on investment, that ROI is key. And with something like specialty coffee, you're entering into the realm of what we call HVAP, high value agricultural products. And you mentioned a few others, cow, vanilla, wasabi, medical marijuana. There are a number of agricultural products that enter into that realm of age back. And so when you know, I'm in the process of expansion right now. And as we expand, we're dedicating some land to fruits and vegetables. And we're doing it in two ways. Partially, we're just dedicating some land to it. But also we're using some trees as shade trees grown amongst the coffee trees, because coffee is an understory tree. So it requires a forest around it to grow crop. And and so that's the way we can get into what we call double crop where you get the crop from the coffee, but you also get an additional crop. And the increase in soil amendments, primarily for us, which is compost, all the compost, all the pulp and the husk from the coffee, as well as coffee grounds and some other natural ingredients that we mix in, horse manure. That increase of soil amendment and water is minimal, yet you can get double crop depending on what you're growing. So that's a way of, you know, I may not solve the entire problem, but it's going to put a dent in that 92 percent. Well, let me let me ask you this. It'll put a dent in it because right now gasoline is still like five bucks a gallon. What about when gasoline and diesel go to eight, 10, 12 dollars a gallon and farming that makes farming that much more expensive if you're using internal combustion gas engine equipment. So you're sitting there as the guy with the only guy on the big electric tractor. I think there's somebody on a Wahoo that has one. I have a friend that runs a friend that runs PVT land. He has the only electric bulldozer on the island. And that's that's Steven Joseph. And but if you guys like those, the price of the electricity is probably going to stabilize out well ahead of fossil fuels in terms of transportation or farm equipment. So do you feel like you're kind of on the cutting edge of the way you're going to have to run your farms just to stay into that return on investment realm, whether it's with specialty crops or whether it's with just the crops that we need every day, you know, doing that, doing the complementary agriculture with parsley and trees, you know, that increases your yield. That increases your return on investment. So are those the kind of techniques we need to actually start looking at now for the future? I think so. You know, I I mean, because of a low ROI and food production farming, we're not encouraging 20 year old, 30 year old, four year old, even 10 year olds to get into it. So a lot of the the parents and grandparents who own viable farms right now on the island of Hawaii. Those farms, in some cases, are being sold off and subdivided and turned into homes and the land's not being used for farming. And and that to me is a great shame. And and but it's understandable because farming is not for anyone. You know, I spent most of my life behind the desk and now I'm extremely active, walking in the fields every day, I walk miles every day. And I love it. I mean, it's it's just been really fantastic for me personally. And and that love, I believe, is translated into the quality of the product that comes from the plants. You know, there's there's a farm here in Wainia. The family is the Hirabara family, Kurt Hirabara is my friend. And they're quite famous. And the produce that they grew was just extraordinary. I mean, some of the best fresh vegetables I've ever had in my life. And Kurt has passed on now and his employees have carried on the farm and they're still producing and they still produce magnificent quality. But it's because of the love and the passion they have for farming and they put into it now. They're producing, in a sense, high value agricultural product because it's a very high quality level of vegetables. And so they sell to all the high end resorts and restaurants and I'm hoping they do quite well. And you know, but that's that's just one example. I'm sure there's other farms that are also producing high end fruits and vegetables. I'm not familiar with a lot of this. As you drive through the farm lots here, I'd say minimum 50 percent of the land is fowled, if not more. So when you see that much and the farm lots, it's almost 700 acres. So when you see half of that just fields, you know, it's it's striking, it's striking. And this area is is it's very unique because it's it's flat, you know, it's level. So it's a good place to farm. Yeah. Well, you know what? We we have to really focus on several things. Number one is our energy, which in my show is mostly about. But we also include in that energy food, because that's energy for people. And so we we think the farming, sustainable farming piece is really important as part of the holistic sustainability picture for the state of Hawaii. And and our goal, along with a bunch of other organizations, is to get folks to understand the full spectrum of sustainability, including agriculture. And we think that you've taken the big step with the electric tractor is was pretty monumental. And I think it's one of the things that's going to make the difference in the next few years. Well, don't forget that it requires energy on planes and ships to bring food in. Yes, a lot. And a lot of time and the food arrives not that fresh. So growing on this island, encouraging farming on all the islands is very, very important because we save energy in that respect as well, that we don't have ships and planes burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere bringing our food to us. And and because we have so much biomass in the islands here, we can create a lot of compost. And we certainly have enough animals to add to that compost. And so we can create really good fertilizer and it's volcanic soil, so it's fairly rich in the first place. So, you know, we don't have to depend on chemical fertilizers, which takes energy to produce and then more energy to transport over here. And we can produce our food with our natural biomass and our natural maneuvers and as compost and we can save a lot of energy. We have to start harnessing the sun more. I don't want to talk too much about the utility companies, but we really need to start becoming more independent. Yeah, you don't you don't have to beat up the utility companies. I do that for you. I've got me and my friends beat up. But we don't want the utility companies getting upset at the farmers. Let us take the heat for that. But, you know, hey, believe it or not, we're already at the end of our 30 minutes. And I just want to do a couple of really quick notes when we say the term PTO, that's power take off. That's that's it's kind of like an external drive shaft that comes off the tractor that helps turn extra equipment. It's common to other big trucks and tractors and things. And what was the other acronym that you used? Power take off and map. Yeah. High value agricultural products. Exactly. So I try and explain those acronyms when they pop up. But, you know, sorry, they come in sometimes and I don't catch them until after the fact. But hey, David, thanks for being on the show today and thanks for what you're doing on the Big Island and moving agriculture forward, especially with electric equipment and the specialty coffee. You know, I mean, I think a lot of farmers would probably really get into that kind of farming if they understood that they could make a significant amount of money off of it on a relatively small farm, not these mega farms like you see on the mainland. And it's not tourist dependent. It's an export product. So, you know, that's another thing is we don't have to increase tourism just to sell our product at farmer's markets. It's something that we sell through export. Exactly. Well, Dave, thanks for for being on the show today. And it was a pretty much a moon launch getting us set up this this week. But I'm glad we made it and it came off really well. So thanks for your time today. And I'll let you get back now that the rain's hopefully subsided and you can get back on your tractor and get some work done. But thanks for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Well, come visit us then. OK, well, I'm heading your direction tomorrow for a couple of days. I got to help Paul move. OK. All right. All right. So until next Tuesday, the Sustain the Energy Man with David Donald from the Big Island signing off. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.