I wrote in a recent post about how much I admired Uncle Sonny’s ability to grow great watermelons in a very effective and efficient way. Over the years, I have noticed that this is a characteristic I see all the time in small farmers’ operations.

So how are we going to supply food for Hawaii’s people, in the variety that the community will need, so they won’t need to travel so often? And on the community scale, how will we have enough variety to feed the community around us?

This is how the concept of “Families of Farms” came to me. I asked myself, What happens if we lease lands and hydroponic houses to area farmers?

Our idea is that we would each bring certain resources to make the whole more than the sum of the parts. We believe that this will help each of us make more money together than if we operated independently. So it’s in all of our interests to stay together.

•    We would get effective and efficient farmers working with us. Small farmers do not waste anything. And we would get more production than what we could do ourselves
•    We would get more variety than we could do ourselves
•    We would get more young farmers into farming
•    We would bring the water and electricity resource that we have
•    We would bring our technical expertise
•    We would bring our marketing and distribution system
•    We would bring our cooling facilities

We will need to adapt to a new normal. Necessity is the mother of invention.

When oil spiked to $147 per barrel last July, the world changed.  It was such a shock that it threw the world economy into a tailspin. The financial system unwind was probably triggered by this event.

Until then, we had assumed that “big volume” was better and “market share” was everything. But when the oil price spiked, so did everything to do with agriculture. Fertilizer, chemicals, cooling, transportation and packaging – all of these things rose in price with oil.

But our selling price could not go up, because people’s incomes shrank as they paid more for gas, water, electricity as well as other oil-related components.

Knowing that oil is a finite resource and that the world’s population is growing at the rate of 70 million per year, it is clear that oil prices will eventually go up again, and probably higher than before. So we asked ourselves: What will the world look like in five and 10 years, and where do we want to be in that world?

In 10 years we expect that oil prices will spike higher than $147, but that time when it throws us into recession, the oil prices will probably not drop back to this cycle’s low prices.

And we do not expect that HELCO will have reacted to protect us from rising electric and fresh drinking water prices by putting more geothermal on line. We expect that people will try to save money by driving less. So there will be a new normal to adapt to.

Coming soon: Some of the ideas we are working on.