The island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua is formed from two volcanoes joined at the bases by a narrow isthmus. One of these volcanoes, Concepción, is active with periodic eruptions of smoke and ash. The other, Maderas, hasn't erupted for ~40,000 years, and has a small lake in its crater. Ometepe is home to about 35,000 inhabitants who make their living either doing or supporting agriculture or, in recent years, tourism.
The top third of Maderas is covered in a tropical montane cloud forest, where moisture gathered by winds from the lake is captured by the trees, feeding five year-round streams. Below the cloud forest is a savanna forest, that is seasonally dry. From the late 1800s through the 1960s, this area was used for coffee production. A direct hit on the island in 1972 by Hurricane Irene-Olivia devastated the cafetales, and the 1979 revolution effectively ended coffee production as markets were embargoed and production shifted to food for a wartime economy.
In 1988 I visited one of the farms on Maderas that had been converted into a cooperative made up of formerly-landless workers who had lived there for generations. I was part of a small group from Bainbridge Island in Washington State that was seeking an alternative to the rhetoric and reality of the semi-declared war then underway. One of the many outcomes of that visit was a decision by the Bainbridge group to import and sell coffee from Ometepe. You can find out how that led to clean drinking water for a third of the island's population here*. That decision probably saved coffee as a crop on the island but the annual production is small and parts of the savanna forest are increasingly being cleared and used for annual crops.
Our 21 acre (8.4 ha) property is in this zone, officially designated as a buffer zone to protect the cloud forest. For the past ~40 years it has been used as pasturage. We hope to work with Nicaraguan and international schools to facilitate agroforestry research with residential programs and ongoing projects. We also hope to induce other owners of land in the buffer zone of the volcano to emulate us by offering them state-of-the-art processing facilities for coffee, cacao and citrus that can help them (and us) keep more of the value-chain for these products inside the country. The planned roof area for buildings needed for these activities is about 1k m^2 (to correct my earlier number). In place of roofing we're planning to use solar panels (search for "solar carports" to get examples). Adding batteries and Autobidder may be politically challenging but we're going to do it if we can.
A major part of our technology effort is around the production and application of biochar, or artisanally-produced charcoal. We are designing kilns to produce biochar and harvest the heat to dry our ag products. Our goal is to sequester 60 tonnes of biochar per hectare over a 20-year period. At present we've invited farmers to plant corn and beans to reduce soil compaction, and we've begun planting our mid-story trees, inga edulis, and have our top-story, samanea saman, in the nursery. We're also working with members of the local community to improve a primitive road to the farm.
What does this have to do with Tesla? Apart from panels, batteries and Autobidder, and apart from one or two of the Cybertruck reservations being for use on the farm, I'm having nagging deja vú of a time in the '80s when old guys (like I am now) came into my computer store. They'd say "I didn't work with this stuff in my career, but I need to know about it now so I can keep up!" I feel the same way about AI-vision, neural networks in general and how they will impact our project.
*Full disclosure: I am an officer of the 501(c)(3) Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association. If you somehow find your way to a part of the web site where you can acquire some of the aforementioned coffee I will not personally benefit, unless you count being gratified. Further disclosure: It appears the story of changing coffee into water isn't so easy to find on the web site. Over the first decade of coffee sales in the 1990s the profits provided materials and engineering and community members provided tens of thousands of hours of labor to create nine gravity-fed water systems that now serve more than 15,000 people.
The top third of Maderas is covered in a tropical montane cloud forest, where moisture gathered by winds from the lake is captured by the trees, feeding five year-round streams. Below the cloud forest is a savanna forest, that is seasonally dry. From the late 1800s through the 1960s, this area was used for coffee production. A direct hit on the island in 1972 by Hurricane Irene-Olivia devastated the cafetales, and the 1979 revolution effectively ended coffee production as markets were embargoed and production shifted to food for a wartime economy.
In 1988 I visited one of the farms on Maderas that had been converted into a cooperative made up of formerly-landless workers who had lived there for generations. I was part of a small group from Bainbridge Island in Washington State that was seeking an alternative to the rhetoric and reality of the semi-declared war then underway. One of the many outcomes of that visit was a decision by the Bainbridge group to import and sell coffee from Ometepe. You can find out how that led to clean drinking water for a third of the island's population here*. That decision probably saved coffee as a crop on the island but the annual production is small and parts of the savanna forest are increasingly being cleared and used for annual crops.
Our 21 acre (8.4 ha) property is in this zone, officially designated as a buffer zone to protect the cloud forest. For the past ~40 years it has been used as pasturage. We hope to work with Nicaraguan and international schools to facilitate agroforestry research with residential programs and ongoing projects. We also hope to induce other owners of land in the buffer zone of the volcano to emulate us by offering them state-of-the-art processing facilities for coffee, cacao and citrus that can help them (and us) keep more of the value-chain for these products inside the country. The planned roof area for buildings needed for these activities is about 1k m^2 (to correct my earlier number). In place of roofing we're planning to use solar panels (search for "solar carports" to get examples). Adding batteries and Autobidder may be politically challenging but we're going to do it if we can.
A major part of our technology effort is around the production and application of biochar, or artisanally-produced charcoal. We are designing kilns to produce biochar and harvest the heat to dry our ag products. Our goal is to sequester 60 tonnes of biochar per hectare over a 20-year period. At present we've invited farmers to plant corn and beans to reduce soil compaction, and we've begun planting our mid-story trees, inga edulis, and have our top-story, samanea saman, in the nursery. We're also working with members of the local community to improve a primitive road to the farm.
What does this have to do with Tesla? Apart from panels, batteries and Autobidder, and apart from one or two of the Cybertruck reservations being for use on the farm, I'm having nagging deja vú of a time in the '80s when old guys (like I am now) came into my computer store. They'd say "I didn't work with this stuff in my career, but I need to know about it now so I can keep up!" I feel the same way about AI-vision, neural networks in general and how they will impact our project.
*Full disclosure: I am an officer of the 501(c)(3) Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association. If you somehow find your way to a part of the web site where you can acquire some of the aforementioned coffee I will not personally benefit, unless you count being gratified. Further disclosure: It appears the story of changing coffee into water isn't so easy to find on the web site. Over the first decade of coffee sales in the 1990s the profits provided materials and engineering and community members provided tens of thousands of hours of labor to create nine gravity-fed water systems that now serve more than 15,000 people.
