HECO has come up with a rather ingenious model to solicit biofuels for running its electrical generation equipment for the Big Island. It works like this:

If the farmer growing the product for biofuel needs a higher price than the current market price – which is way too low – HECO will raise the return to the farmer by raising the cost of electricity it sells to the farmer.

Also, to create demand-pull in the market place, HECO will promote “green” fuels. The message will be:

“There’s more to life than just money. Support expensive green biofuel – it’s a quality-of-life issue.”

It’s brilliant! By far the most ingenious agricultural production/marketing model I’ve seen yet!

Some farmers are old enough to remember The Great Liliko‘i Glut of the 1950s. Farmers were told to grow liliko‘i and “they” would buy it all. Practically every house had a liliko‘i trellis or two. When the promoters could not buy the liliko‘i, everybody made liliko‘i juice. People who are my age and live around Hilo know a lot about liliko‘i.

In the early 1980s, it was The Great Cacao Rush. A company came into town saying they would buy the entire local production of cacao, which would be used to make extra special chocolate for the ultra-high-end market. All the farmers had to do was buy certain “special” seedlings, which only the company happened to have.

Although the HECO idea for biofuel production is brilliant, I think that farmers would prefer that HECO grew the biofuels crop themselves, and that farmers get the exclusive right to provide the really, really special rare seedlings from a farmers’ co-op (made up of all the farmers in the state) at a pre-determined, kind-of-high price – with an escalator that moves up with the electricity bill. Payments, by bank draft, would go straight into the co-op’s bank account, six months prior to planting.

This way, the farmers would make money. And as we all know: “If the farmer makes money, the farmer going farm.”