Probably Should Have Been the First Post: Why The Butterfly & The Mole

So, you are probably wondering where the name came from, or maybe you have some vision of a beautiful farm filled with butterflies and a random mole.

Well, you would be way off.

The answer has nothing to do with butterflies or moles. It is us.

When Jared and I first met, we went to a premarital counselor to decide if our baggage could co-mingle since, in true military fashion, we married quickly. She explained that we process information very differently.

I am the butterfly.

I can go from thought to thought, bouncing between ideas and processing multiple things at the same time. One idea leads to another, which leads to another. Sometimes they connect. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes I circle right back around to the first one.

Jared is the mole.

Give him an idea and he needs to take it down into his "mole hole." He will mull it over, research it, question it, pull it apart, put it back together, and generally process the death out of it before resurfacing.

The counselor's point wasn't that one way was better than the other. It was that if we were going to build a life together, we needed to understand that we process things differently.

Years later, we bought a coffee farm.

It turns out she may have been preparing us for farming.

There is no shortage of decisions here. What varieties should we plant? What trees should we keep? How should we rebuild the soil? Where should the processing area go? Raised beds or patios? What about fermentation? Shade? Cover crops? Irrigation? And just about the time we think we have something figured out, the farm—or Mother Nature—usually gives us some new information.

So the butterfly starts flying.

And eventually, something gets sent down the mole hole.

Some ideas come back out looking pretty much the same. Others come back completely different. And quite a few probably shouldn't have been ideas in the first place. This process has become a big part of what this farm is.

We bought a neglected coffee farm in Kaʻū with a lot to learn and a lot of work ahead of us. Our goal is to rehabilitate the land in a regenerative and increasingly self-sustaining way, grow exceptional coffee, experiment with varieties and processing, and eventually create a place where we can share what we've learned with other people.

We don't have all the answers. In fact, the longer we do this, the more questions we seem to have.

That's part of why we're trying to document the journey.

This blog won't just be about what we planted or harvested. We want to keep track of why we made certain decisions, what changed our minds, what worked, what failed, and all the strange paths that get you from buying an old coffee farm to whatever The Butterfly & The Mole eventually becomes.

You'll probably see plenty of the butterfly and the mole ideas/plans along the way. And occasionally, Mother Nature will tell both of us we're wrong.