Category Archives: Food Security

Food Security, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability, The New Ahupua‘a

The New Ahupua‘a

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I spoke at the Hawai‘i Island Food Summit this past weekend, which was attended by Hawaiian cultural people, policy makers, university researchers, farmers, ranchers, and others.

The two-day conference asked the question, “How Can Hawai‘i Feed Itself?”

I felt like a small kid in class with his hand raised: “Call me! Call me!”

I sat on one of the panels, and said that our sustainability philosophy has to do with taking a long-term view of things. We are always moving so we’ll be in the proper position for the environment we anticipate five, 10 and 20 years from now.

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I told them I had a nightmare that there would be a big meeting down by the pier one day, where they announce that food supplies were short because the oil supply was short and so we would have to send thousands of people out to discover new land.

I was afraid that they would send all the people with white hair out on the boats to find new land—all the Grandmas and Grandpas and me, but maybe not June.

Grandmas and Grandpas hobbled onto the boats with their canes and their wheelchairs, clutching all their medicines, and everybody gave all of us flower leis, and everyone was saying, “Aloha, Aloha, call us when you find land! Aloha!”

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I spoke about where we want to be in five, 10 or 20 years. We know that energy-related costs will be high then. And that we need to provide food for Hawai‘i’s people.

We call our plan “The New Ahupua‘a.”

In old Hawai‘i, the ahupua‘a was a land division that stretched from the uplands to the sea, and it contained the resources necessary to support its human population—from fish and salt to fertile land for farming and, high up, wood for building, as well as much more.

Our “New Ahupua‘a” uses old knowledge along with modern technology to make the best use of our own land system and resources. We will move forward by looking backward.

• We plan to decouple ourselves from fossil fuel costs by developing a hydroelectric plant, which will allow us to grow various crops not normally grown at our location.

• We are moving toward a “village” concept of farming, and starting to include farmers from the area, who grow things we don’t, to farm with us. This way, the people who work on our farm come from the area around our farm. We will help them with food safety, pest control issues and distribution.

• We are developing a farmers market at our property on the highway, where the farmers who work with us can market their products.

• We will utilize as much of our own resources for fertilizer as possible, by developing a system of aquaponics, etc.

This “New Ahupua‘a” is our general framework for the future. It will allow us to produce more food than we can produce by ourselves. It is a safe strategy, in case the worst scenario happens; if it doesn’t, this plan will not hurt us.

It is a simple strategy. And we are committed to it.

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My assessment of how we came to be here and where we need to be in the future is this: In the beginning, one hundred percent of the energy for food came from the sun. The mastodons ate leaves, the saber tooth tiger ate the mastodon and we ate the tiger and everything else.

The earth’s population was related to the amount of food we could gather or catch. And sometimes the food caught and ate us. So there were only so many of us roaming around.

Then some of us started to use horses and mules to help us grow food. As well as the sun, now animals provided some of the energy for cultivating food. We were able to grow more food, and so there were more of us.

About 150 years ago, we discovered oil. With oil we could utilize millions of horsepower to grow food—and we didn’t even need horses. Oil was plentiful and cheap; only about $3/barrel. We used oil to manufacture fertilizer, chemicals and for packaging and transportation.

Food became very, very plentiful and we started going to supermarkets to harvest and hunt for our food. Hunting for our food at the supermarkets was very good—the food did not eat us and now there are many, many, many of us.

But now we are approaching another change to the status quo—a situation being called “Peak Oil.” That’s when half of all the oil in existence is used up. Half the oil will still be left, but it will be increasingly hard to tap. At some point, the demand for oil—by billions and billions of people who cannot wait to get in their car and drive to McDonalds—will exceed the ability to pump that oil.

Food was cheap in the past because oil was cheap. Five years ago, oil was $30/barrel but now it’s over $80/barrel. Now that oil is becoming more and more expensive, food is also going to become much more expensive.

In the beginning the sun provided a hundred percent of the energy and it was free. Today oil is becoming very expensive, but sun energy is still free.  The wind, the waves, the water—they are all free here in Hawaii. It’s the oil that is expensive.

For Hamakua Springs, the situation is not complicated at all. We need to use an alternate form of energy to help us grow food!

With alternate energy, we should be able to continue growing food—and maybe local food can be grown cheaper than food that is shipped here from far away.

I told the Food Summit attendees that we farmers need to grow plenty of food so that others can do what they do and so we continue to have a vibrant society. If we don’t plan ahead to provide enough food, and as a consequence every family has to return to farming to feed themselves, it would be a much more limited society. People would not be able to pursue the arts, write books, explore space. We would have way fewer choices – maybe only, “What color malo should I wear today?”

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Some of the speakers from the conference were videotaped and are up on the Kohala Center’s webcast, if you’d like to listen.

There is also an online slideshow of photos from the Food Summit.

There was a feeling going through the Food Summit’s crowd that we were a part of something very important and very special. What I found different about this conference is that people left feeling that this was just the beginning.

We are going to take action.

Eating Locally, Food Security, Music, New York City, Sustainability

Farm Aid

Last night’s Farm Aid concert took place in New York City.

Remember Farm Aid? The first annual Farm Aid concert, organized by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp, was in 1985. Since then, the musician Dave Matthews has also joined the board. The nonprofit organization (mission: to keep family farmers on their land) has raised more than $30 million to “promote a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture.”

I enjoyed this New York Times article for quotes like this one, from Willie Nelson.

For Mr. Nelson, Farm Aid’s ideals are a reminder of his childhood in Abbott, Tex. “We had organic food and didn’t know it for a long time,” he said. “It tasted great, and we only know that we grew it out in the back garden, and we had a lot of great potatoes and tomatoes and all our own vegetables. Then I left home to go on the road and I couldn’t find that food any more.”

The article goes on to say that there will be no “factory-farmed junk food” sold at the concert. All food offered at the 25,000-capacity venue will be from family farms.

“People have to take over their own food supply,” Mr. Nelson said. “They have to make sure whatever they eat is healthy and do whatever it takes to do that: shopping locally, farming locally, consuming locally.”

And I liked reading this, too, which is something we talk about here a lot:

Why New York? The city brings renewed news media attention to the long-running event, of course. Farm Aid was also invited here, said its executive director, Carolyn Mugar, by an assortment of environmentalists, politicians (including the mayor’s office) and chefs. Over the years Farm Aid has become part of what’s known as the Good Food Movement, alongside organizations working from various angles to roll back industrial farming and promote organic and sustainable food production — and consumption. While the city itself may not be farm country, it’s full of people who eat.

“Farmers are never going to survive if they don’t have as allies the people who want this good food,” Ms. Mugar said. “New York has a huge density of eaters and a density of people who are doing excellent things. There are restaurants, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture programs, even people who are growing food in the city and teaching people how to grow it.”

The Farm Aid website talks about how to find Good Food, as the organization defines it. Worth checking out.

Food Security, Government, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

Looking to the Future

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Yesterday, the House of Representatives’ Agriculture, Economic Development & Business and its Tourism & Culture committees visited us at Hamakua Springs. First I gave them an orientation and then we took them on a tour of the farm.

The overriding theme of my orientation and tour was a look at how we are positioning ourselves for events that will happen five or more years from now. Along that line, our main topics these days are 1) food security and 2) decoupling ourselves from energy costs.

I included this note in the booklet we prepared for each member:

It will take all farmers—big and small, conventional and organic, rainy-side, dry-side, low elevation and high—to make Hawai‘i secure in its food supply.

As our contribution to the food supply, we have chosen intensive hydroponic production. From 15 acres we produce more than 2 million pounds of tomatoes. We have 600 acres, which we own. Land is not a limiting factor.

We think that the decreasing supply of fossil fuels is opening up a great opportunity for all of us here in Hawai‘i. We have the prospect of using our natural resources to generate electricity.

In our case, we are developing a hydroelectric plant. And we plan to utilize the “free” electricity we generate to replace as many internal combustion engines as possible. We could install labor-saving devices, such as conveyors. We could even install pumps for water filtration, temperature control, etc. We could probably duplicate many of the conditions at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) with our “free” electricity.

But our main stumbling block is financing. It is true that there is a 100% state tax credit for some energy projects. And it is so attractive that we know we could easily get investors who would jump at the chance to be a part of a “guaranteed” investment. But then the value would flow to the investors, not toward our goal of producing cheaper food.

Perhaps funding a state farm loan category specifically for renewable energy would work. This would, in effect, be betting that oil prices rise, making the payback of the loan safer as time passes.

As oil prices rise, renewable energy sources become more attractive and local farmers utilizing these resources would become more competitive and produce more food on less land. This is doable.

Hawai‘i’s lack of food security — our extreme dependence on imported food — may truly become a crisis as fuel prices continue to rise. But our concentration in the present on developing renewable energy sources can only pay off in the future as we both remove ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, and ensure that Hawai‘i will always have easy access to the food we need to feed our people.

Company News, Eating Locally, Food Security, Sustainability, Water

The Law of Survival

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As I’ve written before, I am increasingly worried about the fact that more than 70 percent of our food here in Hawai‘i is imported.

Recently, in the Hawai‘i Tribune-Herald, someone wrote that the Law of Comparative Advantage dictates that whenever we can purchase goods cheaper outside of Hawai‘i, we should. I majored in business, so I am aware of this law.

But first and foremost I am a survivor, and the Law of Survival is to “Always keep your options open.” And in order to keep our options open, we need to produce MORE food locally, not less.

The Law of Comparative Advantage is an intellectual exercise. The Law of Survival is, well, “the law of survival.”

And so this is our Law of Survival plan:

Hamakua Springs Country Farms is in the process of developing a hydroelectric plant. We will utilize water from a flume on our property, and then use that free electricity to replace that of the public utility. With our excess electricity, we plan to replace diesel- and gas motor-driven machinery with electric-driven vehicles. We also plan to use electric, motor-driven conveyors and other such labor-saving devices.

Then—by offering cheap electricity and cheap water, which we also have in absolute abundance—we are working on teaming up with farmers who specialize in products we do not.

We can offer technical expertise, in terms of disease and pest control, as well as technical and structural help in obtaining food safety certifications. And if these farmers meet our high standards, they can market their products with us under the Hamakua Springs brand.

In addition, we have a parcel of land on the highway where our farmer-partners will be able to sell their products in a farmers’ market-type setting.

We are actively working on these aspects of our “Law of Survival” in order to make our islands more sustainable in terms of food production.

In the State of Hawai‘i, what we need is for farmers to produce food on all islands at all elevations, both on the wet side of the island and the dry side. We need farmers to work together so that the whole is stronger than the sum of the parts.

We need to overcome the inertia of “it’s always been done this way.” And we need legislators to help us so we can act upon the Law of Survival, rather than intellectualize about the Law of Comparative Advantage.