 Welcome to the Hawaii Food and Farmers Series. My name is Kristin Jameson and I'm here today with Sam Durham who works at a new school out in Haulah. Welcome Sam. Thank you for having me. So can you tell us a little bit about the school that you're working for? I'm working at a new school called Asia Pacific International School. We are up in Haulah. We have a big property up there that we've been just starting the school on. We basically are at a soft opening point so we've been open for two years but they're still building out the buildings and the infrastructure. We're still trying to get everything up and going but next year we're going to be more on top of it and have more students coming in. So our programs are just getting started but we've definitely been moving along. So you're the environment and agriculture coordinator. What does that entail? Our campus is very into what we call project-based learning. So they're very heavy on sustainability. They're very interested in environmental issues and global issues. Not just in environmental science but politics and humanities as well. So we work a lot with the students on our on-school farm being more sustainable on campus and in their everyday lives as well as just giving them more of an appreciation for the outdoors which I think these days is something that kids don't see as much in school. You told me this really great story before the show about an experience with a kid who had never really been outside before and the problem of the day was to dig a hole. So we have a group of 50 to 60 students that comes out twice a year from Korea from another school in Korea and the group this year came out and several of the students had never used a shovel or a pickaxe. So I took them out one day and we're gonna plant a tree and each student group got to plant a tree and name it. So they're all excited. I told them we're gonna dig a big hole. Everyone got all amped up and we get out there and I have both a shovel and a pickaxe and I say all right who wants to dig the hole. And a kid walks up and grabs a shovel and another kid grabs a pickaxe and everyone says why would you use a pickaxe to dig a hole when there's a shovel. So the kid with the shovel walks up puts it in the dirt starts jumping up and down on it and of course it's a hot dry day and we have clay soil. So the shovel goes down about three inches and he doesn't get anywhere and then the kid with the pickaxe walks up and starts swinging it and digs the hole in no time. So I think a lot of what we see too is kids get so much information these days from computer games and technology and one of the kids initially when we when we had walked down to the field had said oh I play Farmville a lot well that makes me better at farming and I was like no not quite and he ended up doing not so great in some of the activities and better than others but what we do see is the kids have a deep connection with nature when they're involved in it and learning in a classroom is always a positive in my opinion but reinforcing that outside or out in the field especially is something that most kids don't see as much of in school and even when you have a science class and you have a lab sometimes you might go outside or sometimes you're in a laboratory doing chemistry experiments things like that but the ongoing learning and the amount of connectivity that we have in our curriculum allow us to teach the kids concepts and build on them throughout their schooling and that's just it's not just in a single school year it's year after year we teach them the different plants that we grow we teach them what's in nature around us and how they integrate with each other and the interplay in the ecology. I think that's a really great kind of example of the value of project-based learning what are some of the other benefits to having this school farm program brings to your work at Asia Pacific. One of the goals of the farm is to help with you know feeding the student and staff population so it's really great the things that we grow are used in the cafeteria or are used for other school projects some of the kids are really interested in cooking so they'll cook with the ingredients that we have or some of the kids also are using the school farm to allow them to do not necessarily research but projects and other classes so when they go through science and they're learning about genetics or when they learn about you know pollution and nutrients and runoff and things like that the farm and our areas of planting and our greenhouse are great areas for them to go and have hands-on experimentation that doesn't necessarily involve just growing food to grow food but also the economics of it the ability for them to look at you know differentiation and how different things grow in different weather and that kind of thing so we connect a lot of our science concepts back to that as well as having them you know write papers go out in nature and draw things and even we've had a couple classes where they go into certain places on the campus the farm or out in the woods and they sit down and listen quietly for a little bit and then they go back and they write music about what they thought they heard while they're out there that's great so also through this project-based learning you're also able to kind of explore concepts of sustainability how do you see the farm playing into the overall sustainability of the campus the farm is a great tool for sustainability because not only are you producing food that you would otherwise buy but you end up with byproducts so on the farm we end up with you know things that didn't do well that we end up throwing away or when you pick something you have the excess of the plant so when you pick a tomato you cut the top off things like that so we can take that waste and we can use it and integrate it back into the program so we do both composting and vermicast vermicast is using worms essentially and it goes a lot quicker has a bit different of an end product but then we can use those back into the farm and essentially use our waste as an input and that also kind of gets the kids into the mode more of thinking about things that they would normally throw in a trash can better ways to get rid of them and that segues nicely into recycling plastic trying to use paper waste efficiently so we can put paper waste in our compost or in our vermicast bins and I think seeing the farm as an initial like model of sustainability allows them to understand how you can be sustainable in other places as well are there any actions you're taking to make the actual production on the farm more sustainable it's very interesting a lot of people ask us are you doing only organic farming at your school and one thing i like to explain to people is when you teach the children or the students or even adults something it's good to show them a spectrum and let them make a decision on where they want to fall on it so quite often people have workshops or they have schools that have programs and they're only teaching them organic farming or they're only teaching them a certain way and i like to go about it where there's a big diversity and you teach them the pros and cons of each and why each are important so in a global economy we can't necessarily have everyone farm organically and if some of the students eventually want to become farmers or not it's good for them to have an understanding of non-organic farming or even what we would consider unsustainable farming because those are issues in the world that will eventually be big enough for them to be able to go out and solve in their work life so when they get out of college and they go into some kind of program they can look at these as you know contributors to global warming and say oh i know how this works now i understand the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers i understand the pollution risk and i also understand that organic farming isn't perfect as well so by having these programs and showing them the full spectrum allows them to have a broader understanding of how things work and eventually hopefully in the end how to make the world a better place by you know pushing things towards more of a sustainable like mindset yeah i think oftentimes people kind of get the terms organic and sustainable mixed up so that's really interesting to hear you take on that in terms of other ways that you guys farm sustainably what do you guys do maybe to reduce the amount of water or energy that you guys are using on the farm we have a lot of different little projects going on but we run a lot of aquaponics so we have two large aquaponics systems those definitely save us water we get fish as a product out of those as well we also are to the point where we've been looking at how to reduce our water usage and we're in a place where it rains a lot up in haula so we have a natural spring on our property and initially we thought oh we can just irrigate everything with the spring water it's an artesian well so the water comes up out of the ground through a valve we don't have to pump it or anything but we quickly found out there's not enough water pressure to do that so we decided to install a solar powered pump and we put a controller on it and we have a big holding tank way up the hill and the pump comes on every day and fills the whole holding tank and then from there a gravity feeds back down to give us the pressure we need to run the farmland that we have by doing that we're basically not using any inputs and getting the water for free which is considered a sustainable source at that point we also have a lot of programs in place where we've been working towards having the kids look at the sustainability of different systems and that's not just in our agricultural program but having them measure the amount of energy that one of the buildings uses or having them look at how solar works as far as solar comes in it's dc we have to convert it into ac and then be able to use it in a normal home setting so i think the kids start to see sustainability isn't always spending a bunch of money to get some solar panels and run things there's a whole mindset to it and on top of that a lot of things that we take for granted like turning on the tap and getting water there are other ways to do it and we you know have talked about recycling water from the amount of rain we get off the roofs and things like that so and i think that's really interesting the way you're bringing classroom concepts out into the field and making them really tangible and exciting for students yeah it's we're lucky at our school because we have almost half the day for our students to work on project-based learning but the great thing about project-based learning is it integrates all the skills from their classes so once or twice a week the teachers from all different subjects will sit down discuss what they're doing come up with projects and they all work together so when the students are doing projects they're doing a write-up of the project for English they're doing math to figure out the cost of the project or some data for the project they're looking into you know the scientific principles of the project how do we do this do we want to run an experiment doing this that kind of thing and everyone kind of works together to integrate those concepts and when you get that you're looking at not just real-world application of knowledge but the real-world problem solving that they're going to need in the future across all spectrums and you have to understand that a lot of students come out with very narrow-minded sets of knowledge and to be able to integrate art and you know English and music and the ability for them to sit down and really learn how to solve problems on their own from that broad diversity and background is something that we think is really valuable in today's workforce and how do you see the students interacting with project-based learning is it something that they're really eager to do is it something they're more hesitant about is the concept of going outside and getting dirty just terrifying to some of the kids just like any school I think students run the whole spectrum so some students prefer certain things to others but what we do notice is the physicality of getting outside or the hands-on experiences of especially them getting to go on trips and see and talk about and feel and touch the things that we're learning about they tend to enjoy some of them are a little more averse to getting dirty and whatnot but once we get them out there and get them into it I think having your peer group with you and having people encouraging you and having the staff show you how to do it properly and then seeing your other you know students do it it really encourages them to open up and we've had a lot of students like when we had our new Pacific Century Academy some of the students from Korea had to clean a fish and they had never touched a dead animal in their lives so we had you know two 14-year-old girls who were very very upset about having to do this and eventually after seeing you know the other students do it they pretty much dove in there and went crazy and had a lot of a lot of fun and everyone has those barriers and when they break through them I think it's very healthy for them to understand as well that those are the types of activities that really expand their horizons that they wouldn't ordinarily go seek out on their own that's great so whenever you started at Asia Pacific it was a new school so there wasn't a farm program or even a farm setup correct correct so what was the process like to you building the farm up to where it is today um I think in agriculture a lot of the initial phase comes down to planning people don't realize how much time we spend in excel or planning things out doing you know cost analysis for different types of like fields that we could set up we looked a lot at how we're going to irrigate how we're going to power things and for the first couple months you're just kind of sitting there like okay let's test the soil let's look at how often it rains and how much we're going to need a water let's try to come up with some more data on you know the type of inputs we're going to need and then also try to be cautious about you know doing anything that's going to waste time or money because realistically when you're working with students they only have a certain amount of time to come down into the farm area so there's certain things that are better for our staff to work on and then certain things that are much more productive for the students so coming into a brand new area we were very lucky our campus has a large lower field that we use for our agriculture it's a very good soil for growing and we didn't have to do too much to get it set up but we also already had a tractor with a tiller on it and that helped a lot so once we got everything tilled up and ready basically it was just a big process of figuring out how we want to irrigate and how we're going to set everything up in the irrigation end and then planting things as a breeze you just got to put them in the ground I thought it was really interesting to hear you tell a story about how you can use learning how to irrigate yourself as a student as kind of the ones helping to figure that out yeah so there's a lot of projects that we do on the farm or even just within the school for sustainability and they start pretty often with you know one of the staff coming up with the concept and then instead of us planning it out telling the kids what to do we'll sit down and we'll actually plan it with them and let them work with us on the calculations that we're doing figure out the parts that we need to buy and things like that great so we're going to take a quick one minute break here we're here with Sam Durham on the Hawaii Food and Farmers Series and we'll see you after some short messages hello this is Martin Despeng I want to get you get excited about my new show which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond we're going to broadcast on Tuesdays 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha I'm Kawe Lucas host of Hawaii is my mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 3 p.m. we address issues of importance for those of us who live here on the most isolated land mass on the planet please come join me Fridays at 3 p.m. Mahalo. Aloha my name is Richard Emory host of Kondo Insider more than a third of Hawaii's population live in some form of association and our show is all about educating board members and owners about the responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great association you can watch me live on Thursdays 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. each week aloha welcome back to the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series my name is Christine Jamison and our guest today is Sam Durham chatting about the next generation of farmers we've been spending some time discussing his work at the Asia Pacific International School and we're going to kind of continue continue to talk about his experiences as a new farmer so helping to build the farm at Asia Pacific wasn't your first experience in starting a new farm right when I was younger I got a lease on a property for a while that was basically just unused for about a decade so when I first went in there it was again a lot of planning a lot of people think that you just go in there until the soil and start going crazy but a lot of what we do is going to be like you know getting information about the soil getting a soil survey done looking at how you want to set things up for water movement make sure that you're not going to cause problems with runoff or any pollution so I think anytime you enter a new property planning is a huge part of it and again it comes back to our ability to figure out not just how we want to do something but how we're going to make money off of doing it and making it profitable because you could figure out the best way to make it you know organic and the most inputs you could put in there and then realize that two years down the road you're still going to be paying that off and you're not going to make any money so once you're done with the planning phase it's a lot of hard work initially and I think that's the biggest thing is there's a huge push in the first couple phases where you have to get rid of all the weeds you have to deal with all the issues that come up and once everything kind of gets set down and is pretty stable then you can just kind of roll with it and that's when you get comfortable and things kind of get a lot easier and you have more time to think about from there either expanding or just kind of you know simplifying or streamlining the processes that you already have in place. What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced as a new farmer? One thing that myself and several of my friends have had a discussion about is irrigation. There's a lot of different topics that we covered in tropical plant soil sciences at UH but irrigation wasn't covered very well so when we get out a lot of places that we show up already have a system in place but both Asia Pacific and other property that I was on they had their own challenges and I think that's a big one too because it's a lot of physics it's a lot of math and you have to sit down and plan things out and if you don't do it right you spend a lot of money on pipes and valves and all this stuff and then you turn the water on and it's not enough pressure to run a field. So that was definitely one. Another one is just combating any place you're at has its pros and cons and when you're somewhere that has let's say a high pH soil or when you're looking at a place that gets excessive amount of rain like where we're at you have to adjust your practices and adjust how you do things to try to mitigate those problems and those are definitely some of the things where if you plan them out right in the beginning they don't become as much of an issue down the line but there's a lot of things you know nothing's perfect you overlook certain things and then you realize down the road oh I did it wrong so we always say like the first six months to a year when you're building stuff out on a farm that's always kind of weird and you're constantly tweaking and changing the system but about a year in you really know how things work and how it should go and from there it's a lot smoother sailing. And in terms of even acquiring the land that you had access to what do you think are some of the biggest challenges and being able for a farmer to even have land? I think a very common discussion about young farmers in general is access to land access to long-term lease on the land as well as access to funds to develop the land. So when you first come out of college you have your student loans that you're paying off you're paying rent this and that and you know some people might have access to five or ten you know acres but it's difficult for them to find the funding it's also difficult if they get the land to figure out all right now I need to buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment and supplies so there are a lot of programs in place um there's several through UH that I know of and then there's also GOFARM which is outside the UH system which tries to train new farmers and then has really good integration with post-leg program them getting access to funding. I think also Kamehameha Schools has been doing a good job of opening up some of their lands to new farmers as well as a lot of the new ag parks that are starting to be developed through I think it's city and county it might be state but the ag parks are essentially large pieces of ag land that are um sectioned off into smaller parcels for new farmers or just for people who don't have the access to money to do a large farm and they have common spaces so a common packing house they might share a tractor things like that and that allows them to come in as a new farmer or come in as someone who wants to grow something especially in Hawaii that has just come out of a school program or come from another farm and have access to those things without having to drop all the money at once. So access to land and resources are obviously important what about the educational expertise what do you think are some of the best tools for new farmers getting the knowledge that they need to be able to go out and be successful? I really think having a strong education in agriculture is important a lot of people think that they can go to one place and work you know with somebody and learn everything that they know and then go out and start a farm but there's a very large breadth of knowledge that I think is important and tropical plant and soil sciences at UH was very very good program to start in. Some people are a little averse to going to college for something like that so I think a really good alternative is Go Farm Hawaii they do a training program and once you get out of the program again they have very good support for their new farmers. What did you find especially valuable about your time in the TPSS program? TPSS was very good at giving us a breadth of knowledge across a lot of different areas that farmers aren't necessarily classically trained in so things like taking entomology the soil science aspect of it was very important as well and I think just the ability to be in that environment around a lot of other people who are very interested in it as well as going to other farms visiting farms constantly almost you know once or twice a week quite often we would go on a field trip we'd see other people's processes ask them questions you know pick their brains and just kind of experience what Hawaii has to offer to people in agriculture. That was kind of one of my favorite parts about being the TPSS program was getting to go to all these farms getting to taste the produce off their land and I always loved picking their brains and asking them questions what do you think are some of the most valuable questions to ask a farmer? I think a lot of times when you see someone's farm you want to identify what they do well and what they don't do well and everything in the middle is kind of one of those things where they're working on it so they don't quite know you know the the ups and downs of it quite yet but when you talk to someone about the issues they have on a farm you start to understand the things that are difficult for them to overcome and you can think about when you have your own land or when you work at another farm if you're going to run into those same problems and often trying to experiment with a solution when something fails that's just as valuable as when something does well if you have a failure let's say you're trying to you know reduce the amount of runoff from your field or something and something doesn't work learning from that and then letting other people know that that didn't work is just as valuable as figuring out the right answer because there's always going to be several right ways to do something so that's a big one and then also what they do do well is very important to spread the knowledge often farmers can be kind of you know keep to themselves they don't want to tell you how they do things because they don't want competition for that particular crop but in my opinion they can advance not just you know others young farmers but people who aren't in direct competition with them whether that be someone who's organic and they're not or someone who grows a different crop but has a similar issue with a certain type of pest or you know soil disease or something like that on the subject of failure given the small profit margins that farmers usually have is there room for failure can a farm survive a big failure and still bounce back i think farming is a very difficult thing because you really you go through boom and bust and it's difficult in the sense that smaller farmers aren't as well adjusted to that so when they you know do really well in a year they don't put away as much money as say a mainland farmer with 150 acres so it's harder for them to adjust nowadays there's a lot of really good programs for farm insurance and i think ag extension agency has been doing some workshops on that but for the most part i think smaller farmers are more at risk for problems whether that be a hurricane or you know if the irrigation fails when they're not there for a couple days or something like that and i think a lot of it too is why is very lucky because we have such a tight-knit community here we often rely on our neighbors for help so i've seen people have fields wiped out or people you know have something catastrophic happen and the people around them that are in the same community will come together but we'll get a hui going and they'll all come out and help and you know get everyone to fix everything and i think that's a really valuable thing in Hawaii is the sense of community that the small farmers have together we all have cookouts together we do potluck and the ability for us to be around each other pick each other's brains and rely on each other when something happens is very important. A lot of people refer to Hawaii kind of as this model for the rest of the world you know especially for setting agriculture because we have so much diversity of microclimates here that you can really study so many different types of agriculture the cases like that that you bring up really show how unique it is to farm in this place and so how do you see Hawaii in shaping the agricultural landscape of the mainland United States? I think Hawaii is a very interesting case study because we don't grow very much food here and that's actually a good thing in the sense of a case study because if we said oh we've always grown 90 percent of our own food and it all stays on island we wouldn't be a very good example for a place that is in the opposite end of the spectrum so I think the impetus for us to be a case study is that we need to see ourselves as such and move forwards towards food independence towards even just energy independence on the same lines in farming you can potentially use a lot of energy so using solar trying to become more sustainable is a good model for the rest of the United States or even for the rest of the world and in farming especially the fact that we need to convert a lot of the area of land that used to be in big ag in pineapple and sugarcane into local farms and start to adjust for the new economy and for people's new eating habits too I mean just in the past decade people have gotten really into eating organic vegan things like that and I think that's a good model for other places in the US to look at and start to understand that when you come out of big ag you can be as profitable or more profitable in small agriculture and you can fit the market better you know if somewhere grows predominantly corn that's not going to help them if there's a hurricane and they can't import food for a little bit but most places don't have that problem Hawaii is going to have that issue one day when a hurricane hits or something like that so I think we're going to definitely have the ability to show the world what's possible and I think our sense of community and our sense of responsibility towards the land is going to definitely lead the way and show people what can be done and in terms of what can be done do you think new farmers can make it in Hawaii I definitely think new farmers can make it I also have seen a lot of people come together around new farmers so their ability to work together to spread the knowledge and to kind of open up and get away from this mentality of you know we're going to grow this make a lot of money and not tell anyone how we do it but for them to you know share resources and even share markets be next to each other in the farmers market and talk and sell some of the same things I think it's a very healthy thing here well thank you so much for those motivating words for new farmers out there we've had a great time talking to you and that kind of wraps up our time here today thank you for having me on the show yeah this was the Hawaii Food and Farmers Series with Sam Durham talking about his work at the Asia Pacific International School and its experiences as a new farmer thanks so much for tuning in