Did You Feel It?

Did You Feel It? was Originally Posted on November 25, 2006 by lavarock

I received a cell call asking if I made it through the earthquake all right. My response was, “Which quake?” with the emphasis on the WHICH.

You see, the Big Island is still growing and thus, we get quakes and shutters all the time. It turns out that this friend was talking about the 4.5 quake on Thursday. It seems I missed that one! I had been in the car and never noticed… hmmm, never noticed a 4.5 quake? I certainly noticed the 6.7 we had in October! Although this Thursday quake was listed here as a 4.5 there is evidence to suggest it was a 5.0 and that .5 makes more difference than you can imagine.

On another subject, many of us coffee farmers are taking a bit of a breather before the December rush sets in. The Kona Coffee Farmers Association is testing a new sales idea for our members. We are taking out classified ads in 4 western mainland cities and directing readers to a website which has multiple farms listed there. We hope to generate some interest and sales and will track results from both the classified newspaper ads and Craig’s List entries. If this works, we will consider other cities.

A trial that I am working on will be interesting too. I think some people might like to buy a “basket” of a few different samples of Kona Coffee from different farms. I am considering going to neighbors and getting some of their coffee and offering it all together at ItsKona.Com. I hope that it will be a useful offering. If you are reading this and think it is a neat idea, let me know.

Other than that, the weather is great, I’ve had the USDA look at my freshly cleared farmland and am waiting for the engineering diagrams and specs for the water tanks. As soon as the bulldozer smoothes the earth, I will get a ground crop planted to keep the dirt from blowing or washing away. I won’t have to dig holes for the coffee plants, as the ground is already pretty porous already. I really expect to have at least 2 acres of coffee planted by March. I would like to have more, but have to do a delicate balance between how much coffee I plant and how easy it is to water it if I don’t have catchment tanks for irrigation.

I’ll keep you up to date and will be publishing timeline photos as I go.