Richard Ha writes:

Our banana farm and the packing house had their annual Food Safety inspections Monday. We are waiting on a lab analysis of our irrigation water and some residue tests of our bananas, but I’m confident we will pass.

We look forward to these Food Safety inspections because we always learn about trends in the industry. Then we expend a lot of effort to make sure we keep ahead of the curve. We strive to be good partners with our customers, so we try to make sure their future concerns are taken care of ahead of time. We want them to feel confident that we are on top of things and that we will do everything possible to ensure there will be no surprises.

For the first time, we sense a real crisis brewing in the leafy green vegetable industry. Many businesses were hurt badly during the recent spinach/E. coli problem. And now there is a lot of hand-wringing about what to do next and how to do it.

We saw this coming more than two years ago, and set out at that time to put ourselves in a position of safety—for ourselves, and for our customers. That is why we do hydroponic vegetable production: we believe this is the best system for us to ensure that we have the safest lettuces, green onions, herbs and watercress.

Our leafy greens are all grown indoors, so they are protected from the rain. We do not grow in soil or in compost because that can be a source of E. coli contamination. We use county water for any spraying we do. And we test our irrigation water for E. coli every month.

After our inspection Monday, I thought to myself that this is a “new day” in agriculture. I felt there was something going on that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Then Tracy told me about her lunch at Café Pesto. She, Kimo and Craig Bowden of Davis Fresh Technologies (the Food Safety Certification company) were preparing to order when they overheard a conversation at the next table. The customer asked where the spinach was grown, and said that if it came from California he didn’t want it.

That’s when it came to me. There is a crisis and it’s due to industrial agriculture.

Consumers can no longer be sure what farmer grew any particular crop. There is hardly a multi-national banana company out there with a third-party Food Safety Certification. This is because their fruit might be branded by a poor farmer barely making ends meet who is packing the bananas in a tub of river water and then driving it down to the docks. No one knows, because it all ends up under one large brand; one name. Same with lettuce and spinach grown under the large brands. Consumers don’t know the farmer.

So let me just reassure you by saying it straight out: We are the farmer who affixes that Hamakua Springs sticker. We grow every single piece of produce we sell!