Tour Davey's SEED Campus with Dan Joy

Dan Joy, executive vice president and assistant to the president, gives a tour of Davey's Science, Employee Education and Development (SEED) Campus that will open in 2025. Dan takes us through the campus and shares information about each area, emphasizing how it will strengthen safety, training and research in the green industry. You can watch this podcast in video form to see the property come to life. Watch the YouTube video, Tour Davey's SEED Campus with Dan Joy. 

In this episode we cover:  

• An inside-scoop into the SEED planning process (2:27) (12:21)
• SEED training facilities (3:10)
• Grove of white oaks and canopy walk (6:24)
• Estimated SEED campus completion date (7:20)
• East research area (7:41)
• SEED golf course (8:51)
• Non-energized utility lines (9:40)
• Using real-world training scenarios to advance safety (11:02) 
• Davey bog (11:54)
• Tree research plantation (13:56)
• Gold LEED certification (14:59)
• Dan's feelings about the campus nearing completion (16:26) (16:56)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

Watch this tour on Davey's YouTube channel, Tour Davey's SEED Campus with Dan Joy. 

To learn more about the SEED Campus, visit our webpage, Davey.com/SEED.

Check out our past Talking Trees SEED Campus episodes here, Progress at Davey's SEED Campus and Sustainability on Davey’s SEED Campus.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

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Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because, here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer.

Hang on tight, tree lovers. I have got a unique podcast for you today. This one was recorded live in a van driving through Davey's under-construction SEED campus. SEED stands for Science, Employee Education and Development, and when completed will be an amazing state-of-the-art facility for training, research, and much more. You can also watch a video I made of our ride using the link in the show notes. You'll hear every little bump and turn on this fun look at the new campus.

This is the first time I've ever done a podcast and video mobile in a van. I'm here with Dan Joy. He's Executive Vice President of the Davey Tree Expert Company. Dan, what are we going to see?

Dan Joy: Today, we're going to go do a tour of our new SEED campus that we're developing here in Kent, Ohio right across the street from our corporate headquarters.

Doug: This is your baby?

Dan: This is my baby, yes.

Doug: Tell me how long you've been working on it.

Dan: I've been working on the SEED campus since probably 2018 when we started on the master plan.

Doug: This is the Arboretum?

Dan: Yes, it's our front door. As we enter into the project, you will drive right through the center of the Arboretum.

Doug: Tell me about that giant sugar maple. I don't think I've ever seen one that big.

Dan: That giant sugar maple was here when we bought the property. I'm guessing, I don't know for sure, but I would guess it's in the vicinity of 50 to 60 years old. It's one of the largest ones I've ever seen. We very specifically have not allowed it to be pruned or elevated up. We're just trying to let it get to its natural state. Then we did just have a vote from our employees across the country trying to identify a tree that we would make as an anniversary tree for our 45 years of employee ownership. That sugar maple won the contest.

Doug: [chuckles] Tell me a little bit about all the planning that's gone into this, how big this area is. This is huge.

Dan: We bought the golf course in 2016. It was 178 acres. Then a year or so later, we bought an additional parcel just to the south of it that was an old elementary school with the city of Kent that gave us another nine acres. All told, we're about 186 acres for the complex. By the time we got done with setbacks and wetlands and all the things that we had to avoid, we landed at about 80 acres of land that we could develop.

Doug: We're coming up on a huge building here. What are we going to see?

Dan: This is our training center. It has a lot of things going on in it and we'll get up closer to it and talk through it. It's anchored on one end on the west end here by a barn that originally sat up towards the front of the property. We dismantled it shortly after we bought the property and stored the timbers for about six years and then put it back up, re-raised it here about four months ago. It'll serve as an anchor to the building for a big event space. We can hold about 220 people in there at roundtables. We envision it being used for big corporate meetings, events, annual shareholders meeting, graduation ceremonies from training events, that sort of thing.

The other thing about the barn, on the interior, all the original timbers are exposed. We did have those timbers dated by Ohio State University and they determined that they were harvested in the vicinity of 1890. All hand-sawn white oak timbers, which aligns very well with the start of Davey Tree in 1880, so it just seemed like a no-brainer to save it and repurpose it.

Doug: Is it, I know it is, exciting for you to see it come this far?

Dan: Oh, absolutely. I'm thrilled. We've got over 100 workers on site on a daily basis, so change happens fast here. If you're away from the site for a couple of days, you come back and there's a lot that's happened just in a very short period of time.

Doug: What has driven you crazy about this project? Because I can't imagine putting something this big together. There's got to be something that drives you crazy at some point.

Dan: What drives me crazy is even though we're moving at record pace, it still isn't fast enough for Dan.

Doug: [laughs]

Dan: I would like to see it done yesterday because I'm just so excited to get it in use. That's probably my biggest frustration, is it takes time and everything's got to go in its sequence and you can't get ahead of yourself.

Doug: These buildings are huge.

Dan: Yes. The total building is about 70,000 square foot. Through the center of the building, the second floor will be all office space for our researchers, educators, and trainers. The first floor of the center part of the building has got some classrooms out the back, video training studio, photo studio, an archives collection space, all climate-controlled. Then the other far end of the building is an indoor climbing training center to be utilized for our arborists to get acquainted with their ropes and saddles and knots and experiencing starting to get off the ground. Then they could graduate out to the real trees after they receive some initial training inside.

Doug: What else is on-site?

Dan: We've got this great grove of white oaks that were here from the golf course that we naturally planned around to be able to preserve them. They'll serve as a great second stage of training. Once you get acquainted with your gear inside and off the ground a little bit, you can graduate out to the real trees here. We're going to be adding an enhancement to this grove, what's known as a canopy walk. It's an elevated sidewalk that is going to originate over here on the other side of these woods in that open space and then find its way across this row of trees and a suspension bridge across the road out into this center of this magnificent group of trees. We've got a 50-foot tower up with some spokes that you could walk out on into the canopies of the trees.

Doug: When is this all going to be done?

Dan: We have a countdown going in the maintenance building. There's 209 days and, let's see, three hours left until our annual shareholders meeting, which is scheduled for May 20th. Our goal is to hold that in the barn in 2025. Now we're entering into what we refer to as East Research Area. The large area out in front of us will all be dedicated to turf research. We'll be getting some fencing up around this to keep the wildlife out of our research projects that are going on inside there. Then up here on the left, we've got greenhouses being constructed. There's a center head house, which is where all the work and potting takes place. Then there are four individual greenhouses, two on each side, coming out from the center building. Each one of those is individually climate-controlled so that we can have four different environments going on at any given time for the researchers. They're starting to frame in the greenhouses now as we drive by here.

Doug: Tell me the excitement you're hearing from your researchers.

Dan: Mr. Herms, who I know you spoke with quite frequently, is just over the top about this. There's nothing like this, according to Dan, in the research world in our industry, not in the private sector or in academia either.

Doug: I'm seeing what looks like what was left of Okno's.

Dan: Not left at all. This is all totally redesigned. We did dedicate this space right here to golf. Our commercial division does have a golf course maintenance division. We maintain approximately 25 courses across the United States. The golf course, we brought in a professional golf course designer, a professional shaping company that did the grading. We did all the seeding and we're doing all the growing ourselves, but it'll be utilized for turf research, best practice training on golf course maintenance, and, of course, employee fun. We do want it to get played because that puts it in the most real-life situation of what we have to deal with out in the real world.

The next feature of the campus is what we refer to as our non-energized right-of-way or basically will be power lines without any energy running to them. We've got three basic training areas designed in here. The area to the right with the single poles running down this existing tree line will be set up with wires that look just like a typical distribution line running through any neighborhood across the United States. Then the space to the left is a course that's designed for some specialized training we do called Lines Under Tension, primarily for storm response. When you get into storms where the storm brings down trees laying on top of the lines, we can recreate that scenario over here and then teach our people how to properly and safely get those trees off of the power lines.

Then the last section of the course down here is for our DRG asset management group. They do a lot of work for the power companies, basically doing inventory of things on the poles and hulls all hanging on their poles. These will just get loaded up with just anything that could possibly be attached to a utility pole and be utilized for training of identifying those objects and doing inventories of them.

Doug: Dan, from doing the podcast, I know how important safety is. We've talked about researchers and their enjoyment of what's going to be here, but how about the people that are doing the training to have this, where you can actually duplicate real-world experiences?

Dan: It's just a tremendous resource to have. Historically, this type of training just takes place on the job site. We haven't had this resource available to us to be able to bring people in here and get them trained up prior to them getting out to the work area. We think it will have a huge impact on our safety and quality of our work, the efficiency of our work. There's just so many things that are going to be beneficial from the campus.

Another really nice feature to the property is our own Davey bog. We just, in the last couple of weeks, did some pruning and thinning along the front of it here to try to open up the vista to it. A couple of fun things we're getting ready to do. We'll be doing a controlled burn here in December to take out the invasive species that are starting to penetrate the bog. In addition to this off-season, during the dormant season, we're going to be constructing a boardwalk out over the top of the bog with an observation deck out towards the center that could be utilized by our Davey Resource Group, Natural Resources Group, for education and training purposes for the work that they perform across the country.

Doug: In the planning of a project this big, are there evolutions and changes as it gets built, or does it stay exactly as the plan was?

Dan: There's always changes. There's always last-minute things that come up or needs that you forgot about, but we really did a pretty thorough job of vetting that out when we went through our master plan process in 2018. There was probably a group of a dozen executives along with reaching out to all potential end users and really vetting out, what do you want, what do you need, what would you like to see, and got all of that into the master plan. For the most part, we're executing the master plan to the T. At some points, there were considerations of staging it out for five or six years and taking a little bit longer time to construct it and implement it. At the end of the day, it was more economical to do it all at one time. It obviously fit in better with my retirement plans to do it in two years rather than five.

Doug: What is that to the left?

Dan: Off to the left is a tree research plantation. We've got 550 plus or minus trees out there. It's all irrigated, very sophisticated irrigation. They're all undergoing various types of research. It could be drought stress. It could be fertilization studies. It could be insect disease control methods or products. We planted it over a three-year period, three different blocks so down the road, when we have to replace it, it won't be all at one time. Typically, according to Mr. Herms, these trees will have a 10 to 15-year life cycle of research, and then we'll basically just tear them all out and start over again.

I love this little alley we've got coming down through the center of the research area. It was an old cart pass from the golf course that we basically just re-graveled and saved it and put the research area around it. One of our goals when we started off with the planning process was for the building to get LEED certification credits. We started off with targeting the lowest tier, which was silver. We're going to end up getting to gold certification. A big component of getting to that level is the fact that we are doing solar. We have about a two-acre solar field here that will provide us with a net zero site. Basically, we will generate as much electricity out of the solar panels as the entire site uses on an annual basis.

Doug: Why were you the man for this job?

Dan: That's a great question, probably better answered by Pat. I was in charge of our commercial division and always in my whole career was that big job guy for Davey Tree. My career just took me into places where I was engaged with construction sites and large projects and managing large projects. It just lent itself to being prepared to take on something like this.

Doug: Once your swan song is complete here, will you come back and play golf?

Dan: Absolutely. I'm actually applying for the starter's position.

[laughter]

Doug: Is it bittersweet in any way to see it get to the end?

Dan: No, it's just very gratifying is what it is, to see areas getting their final seeding and actually getting the grass coming up. This research area has been my favorite spot on the campus for the last two years because it's the only place it's done and it looks good. At this point now, we're starting to button up some corners and getting other areas complete. It's not bittersweet, it's just very gratifying.

Doug: Let's talk about how proud you are.

Dan: I'm super proud. I couldn't have scripted a better way to end my career than to have the opportunity to come over here and do this. I couldn't have dreamt for anything better.

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Doug: I was blown away by what I saw today, and it was fun to get the tour from Dan. Don't forget, you can watch a video of our tour by just clicking on the link in the show notes. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Do me a big favor. Subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss one of these cool episodes. If you've got an idea for a show, maybe a comment, a couple ways to reach us. Send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S @D-A-V-E-Y dot com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas might be on a future podcast. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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