Honolulu Star-Advertiser columnist Lee Cataluna mentioned Hamakua Springs in her column yesterday.
Farming inspires fantasies but requires viable funding
by Lee Cataluna
One artist’s rendition of Maui’s future shows golden fields of watercolor crops stretching from the central plains all the way up to the foothills of the West Maui mountains. The houses and buildings and highways that already exist aren’t quite there in the imagined future, blurred out like an aspirational ad.
That’s an image from the Maui Tomorrow report, which is different from the plan by Community Organic Farmland Initiative. An artist’s rendering for that plan shows blond children climbing fruit trees, a woman in a blue dress cradling a harvest of leaves in her arms, surfboards, happy turtles and a rainbow stretching across a houseless, building-less Central Maui. Next to that childlike image is a depiction of the alternative: farmers in hazmat suits, a helicopter spraying poison over dusty fields, ugly condos and factories looming in the distance.
The fantasies are darling. The reality, though, is that precious little former sugar land in Hawaii has successfully been diversified for other crops, and it’s not for lack of trying….
She writes about how we need funding for farmers and farming. She’s right. Farming is tough. It’s serious business, not for the faint of heart or of dreams of apple pie and haupia all day long.
But if one is determined, uses modern scientific methods and keeps track of the pluses and minuses, it can be very rewarding and even profitable under specific conditions.