Nitrogen is the basis of protein production. But here in Hawai‘i, farmers have no control over nitrogen fertilizer costs.
What if Hawai‘i farmers had stable and affordable nitrogen costs, and therefore our products had a competitive advantage over imported foods? Then farmers would make money, and farmers would farm.
There is a lot going on in the area of ammonia production. Iowa State University has committed to doing research in this area.
Hawaii can build on the knowledge gained as we find a way to make ammonia fertilizer from electricity that is now being “curtailed” (thrown away).
If we can get to urea, it is a short step to blending so that it is available for most uses.
Urea serves an important role in
the metabolism of
nitrogen-containing compounds by animals and is the main nitrogen-containing
substance in the urine
of mammals. It is a
colorless, odorless solid, highly soluble in water and practically non-toxic (LD50 is 15 g/kg
for rat). Dissolved in water, it is neither acidic nor alkaline. The body uses it
in many processes, the most notable one being nitrogen excretion. Urea is
widely used in fertilizers
as a convenient source of nitrogen. Urea is also an important raw material for the chemical industry.
It’s Father’s Day, and I’m thinking about my Pop and what he always told me: “Find three solutions for every problem, and then find one more just in case.”
I’m thinking, on this Father’s Day, that it’s appropriate to talk about the “one more solution.”
Excess or “curtailed” electricity is thrown away. What if we used curtailed electricity to make fertilizer?
Three years ago, my farmer friend Steve Gruhne in Iowa was talking about the ammonia and nitrogen cycle.
Nitrogen is a building block of protein. We can take the throw-away electricity and run it through water. Hydrogen and oxygen will bubble up. Take the hydrogen and combine it with nitrogen in the air and you get ammonia fertilizer. Just think – nitrogen fertilizer made from local resources!
Pop said there are a thousand reasons why no can. We are looking for the one reason why CAN!
The other day Richard gave some of us a tour of Hamakua Springs Country Farms in Pepe‘ekeo, and its new hydroelectric plant, and wow. I hadn’t been out to the farm for awhile, and it was so interesting to ride around the 600 acres with Richard and see all that’s going on there these days.
Most of what I realized (again) that afternoon fell into two
broad categories: That Richard really is a master of seeing the big picture, and that everything he does is related to that big picture.
Hamakua Springs, which started out growing bananas and then expanded into growing the deliciously sweet hydroponic tomatoes we all know the farm for, has other crops as well.
These days there are farmers leasing small plots where they are growing taro, corn, ginger and sweet potato. These farmers’ products go to the Hamakua Springs packing house and Hamakua Springs distributes them, which speaks to Richard’s goal of providing a place for local farmers to farm, wherethere is water and packing and distribution already in place.
The water wasn’t running through there the day we were there because they’d had to temporarily “turn it off” – divert the water – in order to fix something, but we could see how the water from an old plantation flume now runs through the headworks and through a pipe and into the turbine, which is housed in a blue shipping container.
This is where the electricity is generated, and I was interested to see a lone electric pole standing there next to the system. End of the line! Or start of the line, really, as that’s where the electricity from the turbine is carried to. And from there, it works its way across the electric lines stretched between new poles reaching across the land.
He asked the children who were along with us for their ideas
about how to landscape around the hydroelectric area, and also where the water leaves the turbine to run out and rejoin the stream.
“We could do anything here,” he said, asking for thoughts, and
we all came up with numerous ideas, some fanciful. Trees and grass? A taro lo‘i? Maybe a picnic area, or a water flume ride or a demonstration garden or fishponds?
There are interesting plans for once the hydro system is operating, including a certified kitchen where local area producers can bring their products and create value-added goods.
Other plans include having some sort of demo of sustainable
farming, and perhaps ag-tourism ativities like walking trails going through the farm, and maybe even a B&B. “The basis of all tourism,” he said, “is sustainability.”
Hamakua Springs is also experimenting with growing mushrooms
now, and looking into several other possibilities for using its free
electricity.
As we stopped and looked at the streams we kept coming
across, which ran under the old plantation roads we drove upon, Richard made an observation that I found interesting. In the Hawaiian way, the land is thought of as following the streams down from mountain to sea. In traditional ways, paths generally ran up-and-down the hill, following the shape of the ahupua‘a.
“But look at the plantation roads,” he said, and he pointed
out how they run across the land, from stream to stream. The plantation way was the opposite. Not “wrong” – just different.
Richard has plans to plant bamboo on the south sides of the
streams, which will keep the water cool and keep out invasive species.
At the farm, they continue to experiment with raising
tilapia, which are in four blue pools next to the reservoir.
June with a full net
The pools are at different heights because they are using gravity to flow the water from one pool to the next, rather than a pump. Besides it being free, this oxygenates the water as it falls into the next pool. They are not raising the fish commercially at present, but give them to their workers.
Everything that Richard does is geared toward achieving the same goal, and that is to keep his farm economically viable and sustainable.
The hydroelectric system means saving thousands per month in
electric bills, and being able to expand into other products and activities. It means the farm stays in business and provides for the surrounding community. It means people have jobs.
This is the same reason why, on a bigger scale, Richard is working to bring more geothermal into the mix on the Big Island: to decrease the stranglehold that high electricity costs have over us, so the rubbah slippah folk have breathing room, so that we all have more disposable income – which will, in turn, drive our local economy and make our islands more competitive with the rest of the world, and our standard of living higher, comparably.
When he says “rubbah slippah folk,” Richard told me, he’s always thinking first about the farm’s workers.
This, by the way, is really a great overview of how Richard describes the “big picture.” It’s a TEDx talk he did awhile back (17 minutes). Really worth a look.
It was so interesting to see firsthand what is going on at the farm right now, and hear about the plans and the wheres and whyfors. Thank you, Richard, for a really interesting and insightful afternoon.
We had a lot of visitors one day last week. All, like us, were very excited about the possibilities surrounding ag and energy at the farm. Agriculture and energy are inextricably intertwined.
The visit was arranged by Matt Hamabata, Chief Executive Officer of the Kohala Center, of which I am a board member. He brought researchers from Cornell University, as well as representatives from UH Hilo and Kamehameha Schools.
From UH Hilo, Cam Muir and consultant Greg Chun. From Cornell, Max Zhang and Robert J. Thomas. Matt Hamabata from Kohala Center. From Kamehameha Schools, Mahealani Matsuzaki, Neil Hannahs, Giorgio Caldarone, Sydney Keliipuleole, Llewelyn Yee and Marissa Harman.
This reservoir supplies all the irrigation water for our vegetables. The water comes down from an intermittent stream. Soon, the water pumps that move the water and pressurize the lines will be electrified from the old plantation flume.
See the blue tanks in the distance? That’s a tilapia experiment, where we oxygenate the water by using falling water rather than electricity. This is another way to leverage the abundant water that falls on the farm: We get 2.3 billion gallons annually on our 600-acre farm.
Construction of the head works: connecting up the old part of the flume with the new part. (Left) James Channels, produce buyer for Foodland Supermarkets and (right) Kimo Pa, farm manager at Hamakua Springs.
We took them up to the head works, where the old part of the flume system joins up with the new. As we looked downslope, someone mentioned how amazing it is to think that the sugar people moved the sugar cane to the mill by portable wooden
flume structures that they moved from field to field. We were standing about three miles upstream of the sugar mill.
Next we went to the hydro turbine shack to see where the water we borrowed 150 feet upslope is returned to the flume after energy is extracted. From there, overhead lines take the electricity to our packing house.
The turbine before
The turbine after
We have a vision of lining the south side of the flume with native trees. Their shadows would fall across the flume and suppress invasive species at the same time.
Back at the packing house, I told them about diversifying our produce mix. A papaya farmer wants to work with us, producing and labeling non-GMO papayas. Also, I visited an organic farmer in Opihikao yesterday. He is interested in getting heat-sterilized coconut coir to use as media for his certified clean ginger seed business. I told him I will keep him in the loop.
Later, Laverne Omori, the new Research and Development Director, came by with County Energy Coordinator Will Rolston. Vincent Kimura, of the INNOVI group, was at the farm helping us install an ozone food sanitation system. The beauty of this system is that we won’t have to use chemicals for sanitation treatment.
The only thing left over will be plain water.
Here’s a “before” picture with some previous visitors, Claire Sullivan and Steve Carey from Whole Foods.
And this short video shows “after.”
We want to use the electricity we get from the river to help area farmers produce more food. The bottom-line, inescapable fact is that if the farmers make money, the farmers will farm.
Science is great, but there are kids now that go to the
supermarket and think that’s where food comes from.
For me, it all goes back to Uncle Sonny and all the layers of technology that have cropped up since then.
When I first thought about farming, I spent hours and hours
talking to Uncle Sonny Kamahele down the beach at Maku‘u.
I’ve written about Uncle Sonny here and here. He was my Pop’s
cousin, and I learned the basic principles of farming from him.
I had just graduated from UH Manoa with an accounting degree.
I had cost benefit volume analysis and market share on my mind.
Uncle Sonny drove to town once a week. He did not have
electricity or running water, but he always had a stack of U.S. News & World Reports with the current copy on top. He made his living farming watermelon by himself.
One day he told me that he needed to open up a new plot of land because he could not stay at the same place for too long; he didn’t want to get a virus or a wilt of some sort.
Over the days and weeks, I watched him cut grass in the new plot with a sickle and pull it into a roll, and then cart the grass out of his plot in a wheelbarrow. When he wasn’t doing that, he would take a hoe and remove the roots of the grass, because he knew that otherwise it would regrow.
The other types of weed were dormant seeds of broad-leaved weeds that would germinate and pop up. Uncle Sonny would remove these with a hoe, only on dry days, without disturbing too much of the soil. After awhile the seeds would stop germinating.
Uncle Sonny knew that certain weeds could continuously regrow if the roots were not removed, and that others only grew from seed. I noticed that, after awhile, hardly any weeds grew in the new plot, and I thought about how amazing that was.
The lessons I learned from Uncle Sonny? Know what your problem is. Also: no waste time.
My grandma Leihulu lived with us for several years as I was growing up in Waiakea Uka. She grew taro and made poi, and she did the same things as Uncle Sonny. She always had a stack of California grass smoldering, even when it was raining – they were weeds she’d removed the same way he did. It was second nature to her. It was just her lifestyle.
Whenever I see a plot of ground that’s clean like that, it’s pretty obvious to me that they did that with a hoe, and that that is somebody that knows what they’re doing.
As Uncle Sonny got older, he started using pesticides, but because they cost money he was very very careful with them. It saves that part where you have to go and hoe the weeds out and go and pull the seeds out. It saved him a lot of time. It wasn’t very many years later that he started to use Roundup.
When I started farming, we were using skull & crossbones types of poisons like Paraquat. When we switched to Roundup, we didn’t have to use that anymore. It made spraying herbicides so much safer for the farmer.
When you use a chemical like Roundup in conjunction with a 100-hp tractor, you can do 1000 times more than one human can do. That means you can produce that much more food. But now that herbicides kill everything, you start losing that knowledge; you don’t have to know what the old guys knew.
When Uncle Sonny used herbicides, he always stuck the leaf into it and saw if it worked. If not, he’d add a little more.
He followed the instructions, but he never relied on the instructions for the final result. He knew the formula, but he checked to make sure the result was what he wanted. It showed me that he knew what he was doing. He knew why that particular spreader was in there, and checked the proportions for sure. Not that he doubted, but if he wanted it to work very well, he’d check it himself.
I haven’t seen anybody, not anybody, do that. But I think it was common knowledge with the old folks.
We are so far removed from our food now that we don’t really have a connection with why we’re doing what we’re doing. But we need the basic knowledge. You’ve got to know why you’re doing what you are doing.
With every question that seems to stir up controversy (geothermal, the Thirty Meter Telescope [TMT], etc.), the way I see it is to ask: "What would Kamehameha (or the old Hawaiians) do?"
The old Hawaiians lived in harmony with what the land/sea provided them, making sure they took care of their resources and making sure they were not depleted.
Would the old Hawaiians bring oil from distant lands to meet their energy needs? Or would they take advantage of what the land and the gods provided them (geothermal, solar, wind, hydroelectric)?
The old Hawaiians were famous for their star-based navigational skills. If they had the chance to further understand the universe from the top of Mauna Kea, would they pass on that opportunity? Or would they take advantage of the privileged location they were given by the land/gods to learn more about the universe?
I think part of the problem is that people underestimate what the old Hawaiians would do in today's technologically advanced world, and many think that they would still live like they did prior to the arrival of Cook.
I don't think that is the case. They were incredible wise people from an environmental point of view. They understood that by living on an island their resources were extremely limited and that their environment was very delicate.
Because of modern-day technology, we tend to forget that. It's easy for us to go to the grocery store and buy tomatoes from California, peaches from Chile and Atlantic salmon. We turn on the switch and expect the light to come on, because we know that there will be a ship/plane coming over to deliver our goods; goods that were not produced here from the land.
People see geothermal or wind as an intrusion to the environment, but have no problem with burning fossil fuels that are brought in from thousands of miles away.
They worry about the impact that a geothermal well may have on the air quality, but never think about the consequences that an oil spill from a tanker would have on our corals and the life around them.
People see the TMT as an intrusion into sacred land (regardless of the telescopes already present) but fail to see the wonderful opportunities it will provide to local young future Hawaiian scientists to be in the lead of space exploration.
We can learn a lot from the ways of the past: An understanding of the real value of our local resources, and how delicate our environment is. Combining that understanding with advances in technology will lead the path to achieving, or at least to moving closer to becoming a sustainable community/culture.
Aloha.
Rodrigo Romo was a member of the second Biosphere 2 crew. He is currently VP of Engineering for Zeta Corporation, where he is involved in water conservation projects. He lives in Hilo with his family.
Every organism, organization and even civilization needs surplus energy or it goes extinct.
When a mama cheetah catches an antelope, for instance, she needs to get enough energy from consuming that antelope to take care of her kids.
Let’s say all the antelopes are very skinny, and the energy she gets from eating a skinny antelope only gives her enough energy to make one more sprint, and that’s all.
That would be described as an "energy return on investment," an EROI, ratio of 1-1. She has no excess energy available to do anything but catch her next meal. That would be a very scary existence: She would have to catch an antelope on every single sprint, or her species would go extinct.
But if the antelopes got fatter, and the cheetah could make two sprints from eating one antelopes, we would call this an EROI of 2-1.
When the cheetah could make five runs from eating one antelope, things would be starting to look better (EROI 5-1). She would have energy left over to do more than just survive. She could spend time washing and playing with the kids.
At an EROI of 10 to 1, she could send the kids to grad school; things would be wonderful.
At an EROI of 30 to 1, the cheetah population would start to grow. The cheetahs would move into condominiums and take vacations in Hawai‘i.
So what does this mean in real life? Here’s some history.
In the 1930s, we could extract 100 barrels of oil from the ground by using the energy we got from one barrel of oil. That’s an EROI of 100-1.
By 1970, we were only getting 30 barrels of oil from the use of one barrel (an EROI of 30-1).
And in 2013, it’s around 10 barrels of oil (EROI 10-1).
Tar sands is around 5-1.
And biofuels are less than 3-1. Some biofuels (for example, alcohol from corn) are barely more than 1-1. You can see why putting our money and efforts into biofuels hardly makes sense.
Especially when you realize that geothermal, as we have in Hawai‘i, appears to have an EROI ratio of 11-1. It’s also significant to note that this rate won’t change anytime soon. The Big Island will be over the “hot spot,” which creates our geothermal conditions, for 500,000 to 1 million years.
A bunch of things are happening right now. They look very different, but see if you notice what they all have in common.
We are just seeing the tomatoes start to produce more in spite of the dark, wet weather. It’s the third week of February; and last year, too, our tomatoes’ rate of production started climbing in the third week of February. That gives me a good feeling, because I’d been looking around and anticipating this.
All around I see growth. Avocado trees everywhere are choke with flowers right now. The ‘ulu are starting to develop on the tree; the ones I’m watching are about baseball size right now. Everything’s growing and producing around us.
We spent Saturday in Kona at a get-together for Armstrong Produce and its farmers. We stayed there for several hours, talking story with everybody.
I was sitting next to Timothy Choo, a chef from Sodexho, which does food service for UH Hilo. Sodexho is a huge supporter of local products, they go out of their way to buy locally, and we had a big conversation about it. Sodexho is supplied by Suisan, also a big supporter of local products.
I was also talking to Troy Keolanui, manager of OK Farms. Ed Olson owns that farm, 200 acres of many kinds of fruit and other trees, and we help distribute their produce under our Hilo Coast brand.
They are located behind Rainbow Falls, and they have a tent, with chairs in it, where they can sit and look at the falls. They purposely set it up behind some bushes so it doesn’t disrupt the more common view of Rainbow Falls, the one that tourists look at every day.
Then we drove back to this side of the island and went straight
to Puna. Chef Alan Wong was there, and he was throwing a small dinner for the farmers he buys from here.
Alan Wong and I started talking about the Adopt-A-Class project. I
said, “Why don’t we do a broader Adopt-A-Class project this time, in Puna. We’ll take the whole district and go to each of the schools there, including the charter schools. Everywhere there are elementary school kids.”
He’s into it. When we did this in the past, Alan Wong gave a class at Keaukaha Elementary School where he showed the kids how
to use tomatoes, and passed tomatoes around and had some of those kids eating, and loving, tomatoes.
Then yesterday, the folks from Zippy’s came by the farm. They’re going to open up a restaurant at Prince Kuhio Plaza soon and we’ll be supplying some of their products. Zippy’s has a strong “support local” program. When you go into any Zippy’s restaurant, you always see signs about which farms they get some of their products from. Zippy’s also uses local beef. It’s a corporate decision to support local growers.
Do you see the common link among all these things? Everybody’s coming at it from a different point-of-view, but the common
denominator is that we are so lucky to live here in Hawai‘i!
It’s all about local food and making ourselves food-secure. Our tomatoes are thriving and plentiful; where else in the country can you grow tomatoes throughout the winter? Other food is growing all around us.
Armstrong Produce distributes the products of many local farmers and producers. So does Suisan. Sodexo buy that local food.
And Alan Wong, too, is very interested in supporting local farmers and teaching local school kids. He’s very aware of the movement to be self-sustaining and is always reaching out to teach kids about where they come from, how their parents used to live and how we can live now. He’s all about helping people be grounded, and he comes at it with the training of a very high-level chef.
People are really helping each other out. Everybody has to make money, but they’re looking after the next person in the chain. If you’re the farmer, you’re hoping that your wholesaler is caring about you and not just the retailers. Everybody is look after everybody else.
It’s the only way I can figure out that we can help our own workers. Because, of everyone, who’s going to protect the workers? I’ve got to do everything I can to protect them.
There’s a big circle of sustainability around us, and it’s one that’s getting bigger and bigger. It’s really incredible, though it’s easy to get caught up in our busy lives and forget to notice.
I took Mom to Hamakua Springs to get a few tilapia for her dinner.
While we were there, we looked at some of the things we have going on.
Corn
Hamakua Springs bananas
Hydroponic lettuce, with special procedures to control slugs
Sweet potatoes
Zucchini
One thing that strikes me is how much water we have running through our 600-acre farm. We must maximize its usage.
Water Supply will build a new reservoir adjacent to this one and bring electricity right through the farm to the new well, which is right behind this reservoir
I really want to raise tilapia when the price of oil goes so high that bringing it in from Asia is prohibitive.
Tilapia for Mom. These are the small ones, to fry crispy.
And, while doing that, we want to demonstrate how Hawaiians were self-sufficient in ancient days.
Then while we are at it, we want to reforest the streams with ‘ohi‘a, koa, bamboo, kukui, hapu‘u, etc.
Also, how about aquaponics with tilapia and taro?
How about a certified kitchen to make lomi salmon, poi and other things where we and other farmers can add value?
What about classes for at-risk students?
Maybe a permanent imu.
Events set around food?
How about showing how food was produced then and now – ancient and modern?
Mom and I always have these kinds of conversations. I like it.
