Category Archives: Sustainability

Government, Sustainability

Canary in the Coal Mine

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When it comes to the islands’ food supply, Richard told me, Hawai‘i is the nation’s “canary in the coal mines.”

It is widely agreed that in Hawai‘i, where we are so dependent on imported foodstuffs, we have just seven days’ worth of food in the state at any given time. Seven days!

Should there be a shipping interruption, Richard predicted, supermarket shelves would be bare within two days—because we know from experience that in emergencies here, many people panic and hoard.

This all came up when Richard testified Friday before the state’s Water, Land, Agriculture and Hawaiian Affairs committee. That’s a committee chaired by Sen. Russell Kokobun that is working on issues related to the state’s sustainability to the year 2050.

It was Andy Hashimoto, dean of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, who brought up that we live in this precarious situation with only about seven days of food available and the rest in transit.

“He couldn’t have said it most starkly,” said Richard. “If something happened to us down here sitting in the middle of the ocean, the rest of the nation would have a wake-up call,” he said. “They wouldn’t starve to death; they’d have a wake-up call.”

Friday’s testimony was informational, Richard said, to bring Senator Kokobun and his committee up to speed.

“I wanted to talk about something that is not usually voiced,” Richard said. “My objective was to say that we need to grow food wherever we can grow it. Dry side, wet side, high elevation, low elevation, geographically on every different island.” It’s the way Hawaiians used to work the land, and something that has changed drastically in modern-day Hawai‘i. “We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket.”

“Normally,” he said, “you go to business school and you’re pushing volume. If you’re going to sell Vienna sausages, you need to sell millions of cans at a profit of two cents a can. If something goes wrong in the process, you’re sunk. That’s why you need to diversify every way you can.”

Others testified about different pieces of the “pie.”

Eric Enos, who runs Ka‘ala Farm in Wai‘anae, also talked about traditional Hawaiian agricultural ways. He talked about relating the taro lo‘i, and the traditional ahupua‘a (land division) system, to our modern-day life. This is a goal at Ka‘ala Farm, where they work the land educate students about people’s relationships to the ‘aina (land).

Dean Okimoto, president of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau Federation, testified about designating certain highly productive lands as “important agricultural lands,” referring to legislation that the Farm Bureau introduced last year.

Sen. Clayton Hee brought up that this is a tough issue, though—pointing, for instance, to Campbell Estate’s plan to build 1100 houses at $500,000 each. Hee asked what types of incentives the legislature could offer landowners to keep land in agricultural production instead of development.

And Derek Kurisu, vice president of KTA Superstores, talked about his grocery store’s commitment to local farmers. He said once they commit to a farmer, they support him or her “through thick and thin.”

This is encouraging, Richard said, as it is hard for small farmers to weather ups and downs without such support.

He said there was a time where buying local produce was only price-driven, but that consumers are responding to KTA’s long-time support of local farmers. “People are starting to see that KTA has been successful with what they’ve been doing.”

“I saw it in action when we went with Chef Alan Wong to Hualalai Resort for a cooking presentation,” he said. “The audience was mostly people with two or more homes who were staying at the Hualalai Resort for the season. They let us know that they wanted to be contributing members of the Big Island community. They made it known that they shopped at KTA because they support the local economy.

“I took that to mean that KTA has been successful in spreading their message that shopping at KTA means supporting the local economy,” he said. “I was impressed.

“They’ve been supporting local for a long time and it’s evidently working. They have lots of customers and they’re full all the time.”

Looking at the big picture, Richard said that our dependence on large-scale, industrial agriculture is happening all over the nation.

“Industrial agriculture is dangerous,” he said, “because it can’t always support you. It’s only as strong as its weakest link. For instance, say you’ve got this one multinational brand and they have hundreds of farmers. If one farm is not doing something the way it’s supposed to be done, it jeopardizes the whole brand. People throughout the whole nation start wondering about the whole brand.”

Overall, though, Richard said he is optimistic.

“All this stuff—the slow food movement, chefs wanting local fresh food products—it’s all related and it’s all encouraging,” he said. “In the last few years, I feel it’s changed quite a bit. I don’t know how far it can go.

“On our side, we know the consumers want to support local. We want to give them value so there’s reinforcement for supporting local; so it’s worthwhile for them. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure we give value with our product.”

It’s all food for thought. — posted by Leslie Lang

Food and Drink, Sustainability

Slow Food

Richard showed me an interesting and thought-provoking article by Alice Waters of the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley. It’s called Slow Food Nation and here’s the gist of it:

“Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven’t acknowledged the full consequences—environmental, political, cultural, social and ethical—of our national diet.”

It’s a fascinating article, where she talks about fast food and how it impacts society and character, about “slow food values,” the family farm and the family meal.

Food is so basic to our existence and it can and should be enjoyable, a part of our simple rituals; something we put thought and positive energy into. These are not new concepts to Richard and Hamakua Springs, where it’s always about taste, environment, community and sustainability.

Water’s ideas will resonate with me for a long time because they make a lot of sense. Have a look at the article and see if you agree. — posted by Leslie Lang

Hydroponics, Sustainability, Water

Beyond Organic

Richard Ha writes:

At Hamakua Springs Country Farms we agree with the intentions of, and almost everything else about, organic farming.

But instead of organics, we have chosen to grow our produce hydroponically. That’s a technique that uses soil-less culture to grow plants instead of dirt–it’s a “clean and green” growing method many people don’t know too much about.

Let me tell you a little bit about it, and about how we made this careful decision to grow our vegetables hydroponically.

Though we have some of the same philosophies as organic farmers, we take them a little further. And we think we are actually more sustainable than organic farms. For instance, we have food safety certification, which is not a requirement in organic farming. It’s not a requirement in what we do either, it’s a voluntary effort, and it’s an important part of our sustainability efforts. It’s a benefit in marketing our products. But its most important benefit is in allowing our people to work in a safe and sanitary environment. Taking care of our employees is part of our sustainable farming philosophy, and we take sustainability very seriously.

Part of our farming philosophy is to sustain the community we live in. To this end, we donate a lot of our produce in this community. We take care of the environment (as, of course, do organic farmers). And we try to work with our workers as a team. We deliberately try not to follow the sugar plantation model where management and workers were often working at cross purposes. To us, management and workers cooperating and working together as a team is logical and sustainable.

Another point organic food proponents make is that organic foods taste better. But there’s really no way to quantify that. And, interestingly, as an organic farmer you’re constantly looking for seeds that are disease-resistant, so you will be able to fight off disease with the limited tools available to you. So you’re always in a quandary—are you going for the best-tasting produce? No, you’re going for the ones most pest-resistant.

At Hamakua Springs, we constantly focus on taste. Our first priority is always to find the tastiest product possible, and then we figure out what it’s going to take for us to grow that crop.

When you farm organically, there are, of course, a lot of restrictions, such as on the kind of chemicals you can use. For instance, organic farmers frequently have to control weeds manually. It’s very labor intensive.

To look at the bigger picture, if we were all to go organic, our population would have to spend a lot more time at farming. Many more people would have to be growing food in order to feed everybody, which wouldn’t allow as many people to be productive and creative in other ways—like trying to go to the moon, going up on the mountain and looking at the stars, teaching in the university; that sort of thing.

Using hydroponics, we have a little more leeway than organic farmers in what chemicals we can use. But we are very cautious, and conscious, about chemicals. We always use the least toxic ones first. After all, we eat this produce, too, and we feed it to our children and grandchildren.

As an example of our caution: we don’t use organophosphates. Those are a group of chemicals that have been in the news over the last five years or so. The USDA and EPA were trying to determine if they are safe, and they came to the conclusion that it depended on the dose. They didn’t ban organophosphates. But because they are controversial, we made a commitment not to use them.

The other reason we don’t use them is because they harm some of the beneficial insects, the ones that help control pests on our crops. We would much rather figure out how to get the beneficial insects to help us with pest-control, so that’s what we do.

On its website, the Hawai‘i Organic Farmers Association lists 10 reasons (as provided by the Organic Trade Association) to buy certified organic products. I’ve listed those 10 items, and added some reasons to go a step further and BUY HYDROPONIC:

1. Organic Products Meet Stringent Standards. Hamakua Springs Country Farms follows stringent safety and hygiene procedures and goes even further by voluntarily being “Food Safety Certified” by the third-party Davis Fresh Technologies.

2. Organic Food Tastes Great! At Hamakua Springs, we select varieties solely for taste, not just because of their disease-resistance qualities.

3. Organic Production Reduces Health Risks. We are Food Safety Certified.

4. Organic Farms Respect Our Water Resources. This is something we are very serious about at Hamakua Springs. Because we grow our vegetable crops hydroponically, we meter the water and fertilizer we use very precisely. This conserves our water resources and also helps us avoid over-fertilizing, which lessens the risk of run-off into streams.
5. Organic Farmers Build Soil. We plant our tomatoes using coconut fiber, a renewable resource approved for use in organic farming.
6. Organic Farmers Work in Harmony With Nature. As do hydroponic farmers. We believe in sustainable farming and have won national and international awards for our sustainable farming methods. For instance, Hamakua Springs was one of six finalists in the country for the Patrick Madden award. Tomatoes and cucumbers normally don’t do well at Pepe‘ekeo due to the area’s high rainfall and disease pressure. But we have been successful here because we developed ways to protect plants from the rain.

7. Organic Growers Are Leaders in Innovative Research. We are innovative farmers who always look beyond the status quo. We seek to keep plant pests and their predators in balance, and our success at this helps us avoid chemical usage. We do not use organophosphate-type chemicals. Instead we rely on soaps, oils and insect growth regulators to control insects, as well as other techniques such as physical barriers, crop rotation, strategic mowing, temperature control, oxygenation, etc.

8. Organic Producers Strive to Preserve Diversity. Diversity is good. We work on supporting beneficial insects at our farm as well growing a diverse mix of vegetables. One of our goals is to repopulate our farm with native species, especially around the stream banks and other unfarmable areas.

9. Organic Farming Keeps Rural Communities Healthy. We strongly believe in sustainability, which, in our book, includes the health of our communities. This is one reason we donate a lot of our product to charitable organizations.

10. Organic Abundance? Foods and Non-Foods Alike! We think of abundance in these terms, too. For instance, growing our hydroponic food locally is sustainable in more ways than immediately meet the eye. The fuel that it takes to import organic produce from distant countries overrides the benefits of growing them organically. Growing crops sustainably in Hawai‘i also protects our food supply from shipping interruptions in the future.

Buying organic lettuce that was grown on the mainland and beyond, for instance, does not contribute to a sustainable society for us living here in Hawaii. The money spent to buy that product goes out of the state, instead of staying here to support the infrastructure that could help Hawai‘i become self-sustaining in terms of food production.

Buying Hamakua Springs Country Farms products always contributes to sustainability.

These are some of the many reasons we have chosen, and prefer, hydroponic over organic techniques in growing our tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers.

If you have any questions or comments about our farm or our philosophies, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Bananas, Hamakua Coast, Sustainability, Water

Why We Moved to Pepe’ekeo

Richard Ha writes:

In the early 90s, we just grew bananas and were located at Kea’au, where the risk of our farm being hit by Banana Bunch Top Virus disease was high. We decided we needed to develop another farm, in another location, to help spread the risk.

But where? Sugar plantations were closing down and we had alternatives. We could move to Waialua on O’ahu, and that is the advice we were given. It was close to the major market.

There were several alternatives on the Big Island as well. Finally, it came down to Waialua or Pepe’ekeo. Waialua had the obvious proximity to the Honolulu market and it came with a functioning, low-elevation well. Pepe’ekeo had abundant rainfall and not perfect but adequate sunlight.

On the principle of sustainability, we chose Pepe’ekeo due to its free water and adequate sunshine.

Fast forward to 2002. We had developed a new banana farm at Pepe’ekeo and we were looking to diversify even more. But what type of farming would we go into?

There were signs then that China’s strong economic growth would be using a tremendous amount of energy and so it was safe to assume that energy prices would rise. Again, on the principle of sustainability we decided to go into a form of hydroponic production that would take advantage of free sunlight and abundant water supplies. We planned to use the highest tech procedures in a low tech structure. The rationale is: why put in air conditioning when you can orient the house to let the breeze pass through?

Fast forward to 2006. Gas is more than $3 per gallon. In addition to China’s growth, other factors are pushing energy costs higher than we had expected. We are happy that we decided to move our farm to Pepe’ekeo. And boy are we happy we did not go into a high-energy system of production.

There are three streams and three smaller springs on the nearly 600 acres that we bought. The sugar plantation here had been authorized to use six million gallons of water per day from these streams. In addition, the Pepe’ekeo area was, in the past, supplied with drinking water from a large spring that is located on our property. Now it’s just used for back-up in case of emergency. The county is now drilling a back-up well for the community, and the spring and infrastructure will soon revert back to us. This will be another large source of water.

We find ourselves here in this position by following the principle of sustainability. We use it as our primary guiding principle in our business. Whenever we come to a fork in the road, we ask ourselves: “Which fork will take us down the road to a sustainable future?” This has given us a good and dependable compass to follow.