Expensive Equipment
20 January 2008
Growing Kona coffee is expensive. Even though Kona coffee
is considered a gourmet coffee and commands a higher price than almost
any other coffee the profit margin for growing Kona coffee is still
surprisingly small. Our largest expense by far is labor. Every
single Kona coffee bean is picked by hand without the help of any giant
combines or fancy machines. That doesn't mean we don't need any farm
equipment, quite the contrary, we could easily go broke buying all the
fancy machines we need.
Being on an island in the middle of the ocean makes finding and purchasing
farm equipment a challenge. Mail order works fine for smaller items
such as grafting clips, sprayer parts or seeds for the garden. Larger
items are more difficult because the cost of shipping heavy equipment quickly
becomes prohibitive. Mail order also has issues when you don't know
exactly what you want. Catalog pictures don't really show how well a
fertilizer spreader will or won't work
on the farm.
There are a few vendors in town. We have a Walmart and Home Depot that
work great for things like cheap work boots, leather gloves or new
shovels. Finding specialty items is a little more difficult. Even
Home Depot's best weed whacker isn't really designed for constant
farm use and Walmart is totally useless for finding things like
commercial coffee grinders, certified scales or coffee bag sealers.
One of my favorite local vendors is Emmerich at Captain Cook Trading
Company. He has no employees, no showroom and no cash register. He
operates from a tiny warehouse located between the alcohol abuse center
and a granite cutting shop that is so noisy he has to wear earplugs all
day long. I usually call first because if I don't there's a good
chance he won't even be there. None of that matters though because
when it comes to browsing through specialty coffee and macadamia nut
processing equipment, Captain Cook Trading Company is pretty much the
only show in town.
We recently stopped by Emerich's place to purchase some more bags for
our 2oz. coffee samples.
While there I had to stop and admire all the
other equipment I want to purchase. A good macadamia nut cracker would
be nice. I also need a large floor scale. He has coffee roasters the
size of a barbeque and of course a large variety of coffee pulpers.
I got Emmerich to show me one of his fancy coffee pulpers. I've looked
at it a couple times before but wanted to see it again. It has a
pulper, criba, demucilager, two electric motors and an auger all
designed into a single compact frame with a single 220V power supply.
Unfortunately this model is too small for our needs but it's still fun
to look at. Well, I found it fun to look at. Valerie and the girls
waited patiently in the car until I was done drooling on all of
Emmerich's fancy equipment.
Besides selling equipment, Emmerich also does a lot of macadamia nut
business. He cracks, roasts and packages his own mac nuts. When I got
there he had several trays of macadamia nuts that he was in the middle
of processing. I resisted the temptation to sneak a sample while he
was looking the other way.
Maybe some day we'll get our own macadamia nut processing equipment.
Even though we plan to replace most of our mac nut trees with coffee
we'll still have enough mac nut trees left that it may be worth
purchasing some processing equipment of our own. That's rather low on
the list though, there are plenty of other items we need to purchase
first. No matter, when the time comes I'm sure Emmerich will be happy
to show me all his macadamia nut processing equipment. Again.
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