As I mentioned in a previous post, while I was at eHelp my offsite time was focused on researching Energy, Internet Communication Technology (ICT), and beginning in 2004, Agriculture as emerging sectors.

After working intensely with supporting the then-new RoboDemo community, I decided that eLearning and Blended Learning were killer apps which couldn’t be ignored.

So my grand NorCal plan evolved. Take active duty, soon to retire military vets and train them in a California industry - vineyard management. Vets2Vines was born. And now Ag is the new hot trend. Like I could have planned it any better.

Here I am, positioned with both Renewable Energy and 40 acres of prime, irrigation subsidized Northern California property. The agriculture boom is still on - MarketWatch

As oil flirts with $120 a barrel and corn shoots up over $6 a bushel, it’s clear that demand is real for both commodities, and yet there’s also a bit of froth in those prices as well. How much of it is speculation?

…I have been hearing for three years that corn price couldn’t possibly go any higher. I heard that argument at $2.50, $3, $4.50 and $5. Now here at $6.20, the same bearish absolutes are being spouted from all over the place and my indicators tell me that it’s simply not true.

How much is that in real dollars?

The average bushel to acre breakdown is 183:1. Math says this year will be $7.50 per bushel. That’s a little under $50k for the property. Only half to a quarter what winegrapes would bring.

Then again I don’t have to string all those wires and posts for the vines. And wait 4 years with stranded costs while the vines grow. And do forward contracting to lock in the client. Lowers risk if you make money year 1 instead of year 4. 

Ethanol is what’s got farmers all excited. And the market’s guaranteed.

It doesn’t have to come from corn, either.

Sugar is the New Oil

Sugar beets were Solano County’s prime source of cash crops twenty years ago. According to a recent National Geographic I read, Brazil’s ethanol comes primarily from sugar cane. Sugar beets, sugar cane… Jimmy Smits says it best: Sugar is the New Oil.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday was A Very Bad Day. This week has been tough as well. Unfortunately I’m having to become an expert in virtually every single thing I’m doing because the ‘experts’ who I hire are completely incompetent in business. Welcome to construction / construction financing / engineering in California. Flakes run the show.

In fact, I’m catching up on my blogging is because since this April Fools Day I’ve been on hiatus while ‘other people’ decide to pull the trigger on my next round of financing.

Whatever.

April Fools Day. What a day to get the final sign-off from the county office for the project.

All of my issues seemed to gain perspective when I watched this guy’s story and listened to the Rich Dad - Poor Dad series creator talk about the resilience it takes in order to make it when, first you’ve made colossal mistakes and second, when everyone around you is criticizing you.

So at least I’m better off than this guy. In a lot of ways, but mainly because I didn’t make the colossal mistakes.

If all I have to do is weather this current storm of boredom and the potential of financial death by attrition, that’s doable. Bring it on…

Saving us from ourselves…

And then there’s this… Bailout backlash - Apr. 23, 2008

“There’s a huge segment of the country saying, ‘We don’t want our money used for a bailout,’” said Brandon.

“A third of the American public rents,” Brandon pointed out. “They’re saying ‘I’ve been saving for a mortgage for years. I could have jumped in on a subprime loan too. Now I’m going to have to pay for a government bailout.”

I happen to be one of those renters who saw this market correction coming, and I’ve been trying to position myself properly for the opportunity.

No, I didn’t go into flipping homes. Although one of my contractor advisors is a guy who did have three or four homes he was in the middle of flipping when the music stopped and everybody grabbed a chair in the California housing bomb.

I wanted to keep on renting when everyone else was buying homes higher and higher. As Kiyosaki said in the clip, the concept of buying in a high market is looking to make money on the ‘bigger fool’. After all, if all your friends are talking about it at the cocktail parties, you’ve just gotta get into it, right?!? Meh.

Thinking of it as a sabbatical from my software, training, and wireless background I decided to work on my strategic side of business in early 2005.

It started with a family project.

Back in 2004 when gas was $2 a gallon, I was researching the soon to be sudden Hubbert’s Peak which we now seem to have slam-danced into. The best part of this construction was that it would be energy efficient, and be an example of a rural wind farm done under $10k.

Below the fold I’ve just got more to say, so don’t go there unless you just have to have the real scoop on how tough the past 18 months have been.

Read the rest of this entry »

sip,structural insulated panel,construction,energy efficiency,solano county

I was recently asked by a friend how the construction project was going. Another blogreader asked how much I was involved.

A picture is worth a thousand words…

(jump beneath the fold for more)

Read the rest of this entry »

california,real estate

Luckily, this doesn’t impact the 21st Century Farm Project too much since we were appraised as a commercial property and only had a 5% appreciation value considered rather than the residential appreciation at 20% per year.

It does explain why Anthony Olivier may have printed his own currency when MadCap Software moved recently. It’s rumored that the savvy timing netted MadCap more than just a bigger space.

Quoted from California Real Estate Market Outlook Worse in 2008:

“We’re in a major slump here,” said Jas Deepak, a real estate agent with Help-U-Sell Affordable Homes. “It seems like it’s a freefall in this market.”

Deepak estimated that prices in the Fairfield area have fallen 10 to 15 percent from 2006, and last week only 10 homes were sold out of 1,300 on the market. Last October, about 30 homes were selling each week. Deepak is the agent for a nearly 1,500-square-foot ranch home on the desirable west side of Fairfield for $369,000. Four months ago, the property was listed for $415,000. If the price is reduced any more, it will be a “short sale” in which the seller must ask the lender to accept less money than what is owed.

Solano County,green homes,green homebuilding,energy efficiency,sip,structural insulated panel

Here are a few pictures from today’s work. We had 20% of the first wall completed earlier this week and after taking Tuesday and Wednesday off, we hit it hard today, getting an entire wall done before lunch and then taking on the tallest peak of the second story…

How cool is this view?

The hills in the background are from the ‘mountains’ separating Solano County from Napa.

Today’s progress:

.

solano county,green building,SIP Construction,structural insulated panel,construction,green homebuilding,energystar,energy star

Rain, rain, and more rain

The construction for the third phase of the 21st Century Project is running into a few delays with the monsoon season hitting NorCal.

No worries but it has kept me busy jumping through hoops since the traditional building materials we’re using for the conventional framing are composite and need to be covered against saturation by rain.

While the SIP panels are also composite, they’re treated for outdoor exposure while the glulam materials have to be gently tucked in nightly with a tarp covering, then awakened just as gently by removing the tarp so the ground moisture doesn’t evaporate and condense like a solar still and drip onto those composites.

That’s to explain this week’s delay in posting…

I haven’t worked this hard since…

I’ve been pulling 14 to 18 hour days to hammer this project into the ground. We are three weeks past our initial September scheduled start and the weather is becoming a factor.

I’ve lost two and a half inches off my waist and put on three pounds of muscle. I haven’t worked this hard in twenty years since I was 17 going through Naval Aircrew training. Here’s that aircrew comparison framed properly thanks to this site:

Aircrew graduates leave knowing drown-proofing techniques like treading water, floating and making it to that life raft, even if it’s a mile swim away while wearing between 45 and 50 lbs. of flight gear.

…The air crew warfare designation is one of the toughest pins to earn. The Navy plans to keep it that way because of the reputation that the air crew wings have earned in the aviation community.

“The air crew training program’s reputation has allowed pilots to trust air crews without question,” said Ellenburg. “The pilots never second guess the enlisted air crew’s decisions.”…

The marines (and Jamie Foxx) aren’t the only ones who say… Ooh-rah…

The hard part was Friday when I decided to do a full day and then come back to overnight since the surprise rainstorm had interrupted us prior to locking everything up. Driving back to the site I was very tired, and two lane roads are no joke when there is fog and so forth.

Not so jovial section

This morning there was a serious reminder to me about driving tired I passed by a fatal single-car accident about a mile away from the project site.

The guy departed the highway into a field and evidently wasn’t wearing his seatbelt as he was ejected from the car, a red SUV that was obviously traveling a high rate of speed as it flipped and was airborne (no mud marks) for about fifty feet. The coroner’s van was just pulling up. From what I could see as I passed by (recounting my Private Investigation background) lividity hadn’t set in yet, therefore it was recent. And very very unfortunate.

It was a reminder to me to put safety once again first. No more driving tired, crew rest is back on the books for me.

My thoughts and prayers were, and still are, with the man’s family. Up until today I would have easily said I’m going to finish this project by the end of the month unless I’m dead. Not after seeing that. I’ve got far too much to live for.

Saturday two of my workers left early because of a death in their family. Sunday morning I see a guy stretched out in the middle of a field. There’s always that old superstition about bad news / deaths occurring in threes.

I’m not looking forward to Monday all that much. I think I’ll fly home to San Diego rather than drive.

construction,energy efficiency,structural insulated panel,sip building,energy star,green construction,green homebuilding

I’m just so excited about this. We have put up 80% of the first floor as of Saturday night. It’s a race against weather, so we’ll be putting four hard days in this week starting on Thursday.

For my normal readers: don’t worry, this is a short segment I will return to my analysis of the Technical Communication space shortly. I’ll be posting up a help file regarding the inside story for this job later this year.

From Thursday you can see the bare concrete. We did about four hours work on the lumber connecting to the concrete Thursday afternoon…

After eight hours on Friday things looked like this:

And this…

At this point the walls are about 40% up on the bottom section.We finished up another 40% on Friday, and the walls are plumb and looking set. We have one small corner to finish - about ten feet on the last two walls and then we start on the second story.

SIP,construction,Energy Efficiency

Some pictures of the job site… In NorCal.

Nothing about Tech Comm today, I’m just having a great time putting up the SIP panel construction. Saves about 60% on energy, and is part of the Vets2Vines project.

Measure once… Wait, measure twice, cut once…

Before the pour…

They just trucked it in, we offloaded it in three hours.

They look like oreos on the side. OSB on both sides, EPS foam in the middle. For those construction or energy geeks out there, R40 is a good thing, and this is true R40, less breaks in between meaning you don’t lose insulation in the framing.

Job site chaos… We are about to start erecting the panels today, and should save a month or so in framing and other chaos.

More later as we finish. I guess you’d say we’re doing our part, social responsibility and all that.

Green Veteran is an oxymoron. Two actually.

Taken one way after all, how can one be Green (new and inexperienced) if they are a Veteran (older and experienced)?

Taken another way it exemplifies a divide between political parties.

After all, most military people are Red-State and most Greens are Blue-State (or Ralph Nader fans). Conventional Wisdom does not consider a Red-Stater being an avid proponent of renewable energy. I describe myself, an Independent voting person, as a Green Veteran.

Red State | Blue State | What’s a Green Veteran?

After careful analysis for the past six years I believe energy is the next dot com and also the glaring strategic vulnerability that must be developed. We must become more self-reliant, period. For a lot of reasons, national security ranking the highest. I am agnostic to political parties in obtaining this goal. There is no Big Oil to me, only Big Energy.

My initiative to address this is Vets2Vines. Training active duty veterans in preparation for their eventual departure into civilian life. Retaining them in California and offering a smooth transition into an agricultural supervisory position that helps keep that management and leadership knowledge here in Cali. Getting farmers and vineyards to embrace renewable energy by seeing the cost savings.

This morning I met with Mike Reagan, the Solano County Supervisors Board Chairman today for about half an hour - unexpectedly. This was my first time meeting him; in the past I’ve dealt with his staff and just advised them of what we wanted to accomplish because I thought that was adequate for my stage in the game.

Today I had thought that would continue; after all, it was an afterthought to stop in once I was finished with my stop into County Planning / Building Resource Management. Sort of like being asked to give your elevator pitch of your project completely impromptu yet it went quite well.

Mike Reagan - Renewable Energy Visionary & Rural Use Advocate

It turns out that Mike is also a Green Veteran. I didn’t ask which party he votes; if he has served his country, is for national security, and for green power he’s a Green Veteran and that’s all that matters to me.

Mike was a zoomie who got in about the time I was born as an enlisted guy who went Officer. In the Navy we call those guys Mustangs. He used to run things over at Travis AFB located in Fairfield.

Mike Reagan has some great ideas and good resources to share and he’ll be an asset going forward. Check out his 80 ideas he wants to work on in his next 5 years as an example.

Read the rest of this entry »

SIPs and Me | Construction Innovation | Techies Gone Wild

Yesterday I was up in the Sierras talking with SIP Home Systems (SHS) and had a meeting with their president, Tom Frantz. I was there just to straighten out some issues I had with the construction plans for my project but it was nice to see we had some common ground in our vision going forward.

Tom is an ex-techie who has some really high goals for their construction market. SIP construction already provides about 60% energy savings over standard home construction, making it a no-brainer to target energy efficient construction projects using SIPs - Structural Insulated Panels. Think EnergyStar with very little hassle and you will begin to get the picture.

Tom told me yesterday they’re looking into solar energy production. Vets2Vines will be focusing on the vineyard management, however it will be powered nearly 100% by wind, and I’m excited to see the SHS concept going solar. Very complementary to the wind and energy efficiency and Tom’s no slouch at finding the best bang for the buck. I don’t mind drafting behind SHS one bit; less research and dealmaking for me, and I can put together the best package possible for the agricultural clients.

What I would really like to accomplish with Vets2Vines would be to provide an agricultural incubator - something that would showcase renewable energy and other cost saving approaches for the aggies.

Read the rest of this entry »