The Long And Winding Road

The Long And Winding Road was Originally Posted on September 8, 2008 by lavarock

(I may have used this title before, but what the heck, the trip continues)

I used to be a disc jockey in Kentucky. This was a real DJ job, not a DJ in a club. I played music, commercials and hosted an imfamous “Swap Shop”. For those not in rural areas, the swap shop is a radio program whereby local residents call up and attempt to sell anything from cars, to beds to even chickens and roosters. Think of it as a radio-based classified ad.

To get from college to the station I had a very long and windy road to follow. Thus I really identified with the Beatles song by the same name (The Long and Winding Road). My life also seemed to follow a long and windy road..

At the condos today I was talking with guests about moving. They say that they have lived in the same house for 30 years and expect to die there. In contrast, I have lived in so many places that it takes 5 minutes to remember all of them, and it is possible that I will miss one or more. I was born in New Jersey and lived in various places in the states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia and finally Hawaii.

I have worked in the construction business, washed dishes in a restaurant, built equipment for satellite TV, the phone company, ham radio operators, written inventory systems,managed a large computer room and many other jobs. I can’t even remember some of the jobs. I have only been on a couple of job interviews in my life and been lucky enough to be hired for most jobs I’ve applied for.

So besides the ride to work, my life has been a long and winding road too.

My current job is coffee farmer and although I came into this with no prior knowledge, I seem to be doing OK. I did things a bit backwards compared to other people in the business. I started with designing the label and deciding what bags to put it in. Before long I had created my website, created a shopping cart and started tracking sales. All at the same time I was clearing macadamia trees and brush from my land and preparing to take the next step. That is to design and plant 5 acres of coffee where the mac nuts used to be. The property had some coffee on it, but this would be a major investment.

I hit a number of challanges along the way. Who can get rid of 500 trees and how? What steps are needed to clear the land, lay out the rows and get them planted. In fact, just determining how many plants per acre took me a while to decide. There are two types of pruning. Both use different calculations and make a difference in how the farm is run.

I was able to acquire a contract to conserve water and it helped me offset some of the cost of setting up water catchment tank to irrigate the plants. I finally had the land prepared, the tanks installed and holes for 1500 initial trees punched into the rock. I had started hundreds of trees from seed, but over time and during many false starts, many of them failed to thrive (so to speak). Then the land got overgrown with weeds and I have twice paid for a guy to bring a flail mower down here to clear the area. That is over a thousand dollars each time by the way. In a attempt to do much of that clearing myself, I purchase a Cub Cadet garden tractor, but have had a number of challanges and will have to return it for some other manufacturer I guess.

Then I got the dreaded postacrd from the lessor, wanting to visit the farm to see the progress. I was hoping to have amber waves of leaves waving in the breeze by now. In reality, I have holes covered with weeds. My land here is leasehold whereby I own what is above ground and borrow the ground itself. It is a common land ownership here in Hawaii. You CAN buy land here and own it outright, but leasehold allows you to have a lot of land for not much money. You must farm it though.

I left my previous job kinda kicking and screaming. I was offered an early retirement and if I did not take it, they would have let me go. I ws not ready for retirement and was not ready to make the move to Hawaii, but decided it was now or never. I know of others who had plans to do things after leaving, but never did. A co-worked was amazed that I up and left, but agreed that they were impressed that I was following a dream. I often joke that Hawaii is famous for dreams. In the movie South Pacific there is a song whose lyrics say “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”. The Maryland lottery ads followed a similar theme that “You have to play to win”.

So I moved all over the east coast, changed jobs often and ended up creating a dream of moving to Hawaii and following that dream. I found land, starting working it and about used up all of my savings.

Then I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I cashed in my investments and borrowed from my retirement funds (without penalties by the way). I have holes ready for plants and a new influx of cash. I have the paperwork ready to show the inspector and will move ahead with the planting. Soon I will see thousands of trees spout and be fed with freshly captured rainwater.

In 2 or 3 years I’ll have a ton or more of coffee cherry and when processed and roasted, will be looking to have each of you scout out stores and restaurants who will sell and serve the coffee that had taken years to come to fruition.

So as you can see, and without exagerating, it has been a long and winding road to get where I am and the journey is not yet complete.

I have held off giving tours here, but with the new water tanks and crops in the ground, I’ll have lots to show off. Soon I hope to have a wet mill where I can pulp and dry coffee. I hesitate to build that now (even if I had the money) but with my current part-time job in town, I am not able to process coffee here on the farm and work up in town. Just drying coffee requires you to be here for days in a row to rake the parchment and measure the moisture of the beans. Pull them off the deck too soon and they can mildew in storage. leave them to dry too long and they will dry up. In either case, they won’t roast right.

So frogive me if I don’t get blogs written often enough, but know that there is still work going on here and soon, very soon, this part of the trip will be done.