Richard Ha writes:

Our philosophy of sustainable farming means we are always concerned about our workers, our community and the environment.

An example of this is when we sometimes have unexpected spikes in production of our hydroponic tomatoes. We asked ourselves, What should we do when this occurs? And we came to the conclusion that we wanted to support our community. But how?

We thought about teachers, and the important role they play in our community.

So we planned what we would do when the inevitable spike in tomato production occurred. Depending on the number of tomatoes we had available, we would find a school with a similar number of teachers. But we wanted to go a step further. We didn’t want to leave anyone out, so we decided we would give to a school only if we could give something to everybody on the staff.

Last week we had one of those spikes, so we went into action. We donated 97 boxes of Hamakua Springs cocktail tomatoes (that’s 776 individual “clamshell” containers) to teachers. We gave one clamshell to everybody on staff at the following schools: Kalaniana‘ole School, Waiakea Elementary, Waiakea Waena, Kea‘au Elementary and Middle Schools, Mountain View, Pahoa and Kaumana Schools.

We put a note in each container saying how much we appreciate the work they do for our keiki. We feel so good about being able to recognize these important members of our community.