Last week the Hawai‘i State Legislature’s Senate Ways and Means committee visited us. This is the first year we’ve had legislative committees visit us and we were very happy to share with them our history, our philosophy, our present situation and our plans for the future.

I told them we started with no money except for a $300 limit credit card, which I worked hard to qualify for. But Dad had a chicken farm and we were able to trade chicken manure for banana keiki.

I told them something I learned as a former Army office in Vietnam—that leaving someone behind is never an option—and that I carry this forward to my relationships with our employees. We make sure that the most defenseless of our employees are looked out for. And we have profit sharing, so if the farm does good we all do well.

If we are anything, we are survivors. We always ask: “Where do we need to be five years from now?” And we start right away to position ourselves for that future.

I told them that what they were looking at was a result of decisions we made five years ago, back when a barrel of oil cost $30. We all knew then that China was growing fast and would cause oil prices to rise. So we set out to avoid petroleum-based costs as much as possible. But we had no idea oil prices would rise to $80 per barrel.

Today we are looking at Peak Oil, where the demand for oil will eventually exceed the ability to sump that oil. That means prices will rise even further. We are preparing for the possibility that oil will hit $200 per barrel in less than five years.

We doing that by building a hydro-electric plant. We are in the process of decoupling ourselves as much as we can from fossil-fuel based energy. We love and thrive on change. Adversity brings opportunity, and that makes life exciting. We love it!r 

I told them that we are a family farm and that our blog, HaHaHa, represents three generations of Ha’s working on the farm. I told them that without my mom—who, in the old days, worked late at night packing bananas so we could take the only trailer we owned and refill it the following day—we would never have made it.

I told them I was reluctant to tell them that story because it might appear that I was enslaving my mother. And yet I also told them that I had to admit I still buy Mom dumbbells, treadmills and stationery bikes so she can keep on working hard. She’s 82 years old now. We had a good laugh.They all knew that I do it for Mom’s health.

It was great to meet these people who will make the decisions that direct Hawaii’s future. It seemed like they were happy to see an organization positioning itself to be able to feed Hawaii’s people, in an environment of rising fuel prices, because it was the right thing to do. My impression was that they are very sharp and will do the right things for our future.