Bananas

Yellow Bananas

Richard Ha writes:

Kindergarteners from Kaumana School came to our farm on an excursion Friday. Tracy took them on a tour to see what we do here on the farm.

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First, she asked them, “Does anyone know which way bananas face when they are hanging on the tree? Up or down?”

Some of the children answered “UP!” enthusiastically and an equal amount shouted “DOWN!” Some just yelled.

There were maybe 70 children, in several groups, each with an adult teacher or volunteer in charge. They were well behaved, walking in double lines and holding hands.

Tracy showed them how a worker removes the hands of banana from the stalk with a special air tool. And they got to see how the bananas are trimmed, washed and then weighed and put in trays of forty pounds each.

After learning how the bananas are carefully packed into a box, being careful not to bruise them, the children got a banana break. Each child received a banana.

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This was the most enthusiastic bunch of banana eaters I have ever seen. One kid ate three bananas. I wondered out loud, Are they always this hungry? Kris, my daughter-in-law and one of their teachers, told me that they do get hungry around mid-morning.

All of us on the farm were flattered that they liked our bananas so much. But I’m pretty sure any food at all would have been just fine for these little bundles of energy.

Our workers like when we have schoolchildren visit and they make a point of having the farm in top shape, looking clean and neat. They should be proud of the good image they present to the kids. I know that I am proud of the farm at these times.

After their banana break, the young children went into the coolers to look at the tomatoes that were ready to be sent to market.

They saw small, medium, large, red, and yellow tomatoes. They saw loose tomatoes, tomatoes attached to the vine as well as tomatoes packed in plastic clamshells. But, most of all, they liked getting to stand around in the cooler getting cool.

From there they walked to the tomato packing house, where they saw how the tomatoes that are harvested into plastic trays are brought up to be washed and disinfected and then packed into the containers that are sold in the supermarkets.

While they were looking at the tomatoes being packed, the lettuce came in and everyone went over to see how that was done. Tracy explained that the Chef Select has three different lettuces, so that Mom can make a colorful salad with just one container of lettuce.

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It reminds me of when Tracy took her first group of first graders on a farm tour more than 10 years ago.

We were wondering if farm tours would help us market our bananas. So she explained all about bananas and how Kea‘au Bananas (our name at the time) were the best.

And at the end of the day, hoping that her message had gotten across, she asked the children: “Now children, when your mommy goes to buy bananas at the market, which ones will you tell her to buy?”

They all replied in unison, “YELLOW BANANAS!!!” I am still laughing at that one. We no longer try to sell bananas to kindergarten and first grade kids, but we still love to have them visit.

Uncategorized

Not A Grape

Richard Ha writes:

Two weeks ago I concluded that I need to do more than just exercise in order to keep losing weight, and I said I was going to devise a routine to control my calorie intake. But before I put this plan into effect, I got sidetracked.

Then last week I realized that it was after I stopped loading the delivery van four times per week, with several hundred boxes each time, that I started having a hard time losing weight. Since I like to exercise more than I like dieting, I decided to increase my exercise volume and intensity instead of making a calorie intake plan.

And that brings us to this week. My weight is 196.2 now, and I lost the half pound I wanted to lose this week. But I am now exercising six days per week and losing much less weight than expected.

On four days, I exercise 30 minutes twice a day at a low heart rate of 110 or so. On the other three days, I do 30 minute sessions. On one of those days, I do three or four intervals of 150 beats per minute, and the other two sessions are done at 130 beats per minute or so.

This is improving my resting heart rate, which is now 53 beats per minute. When I’m not exercising regularly and am out of shape, my resting heart rate is usually in the mid-70’s. A low resting heart rate is an indication of an efficient cardiovascular system—a strong heart takes fewer strokes to move a given volume of blood around. I am trying to lower my resting heart rate below 50 beats per minute.

Several days ago, when I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for a flu shot, it was 57. This is pretty good since I usually can’t relax enough at the doctor’s office to get my heart rate down below 60.

But for the amount of time I spend exercising, I am losing very little weight. So I am going to try a routine that Leslie is finding successful. Her routine involves eating a reasonable breakfast and a reasonable lunch. Then, around 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. or so, she allows herself a pre-planned snack. After a reasonable-sized dinner she brushes her teeth and doesn’t eat anything more that day. “Not a grape,” she told me. It is working very well for her and makes a lot of sense to me.

I plan to maintain my exercise program and copy Leslie’s eating plan. I need to figure out the amounts I can eat on that plan to accomplish my goals.

Current Affairs, How We Do It

We’re Clean

Richard Ha writes:

E. coli is in the news again, as green onions and now lettuce are now suspected of harboring the bacteria that made many people sick at Taco Bells on the East Coast. This has happened many times before.

We are making sure it doesn’t happen because of us.

Several years ago, we voluntarily became Food Safety Certified. Every year our operations are inspected, and the inspection protocol addresses and eliminates conditions that allow the E. coli bacteria to contaminate food products.

Some of the issues addressed:

There are no domesticated animals allowed in and around our farm.

We use city water for processing and spraying.

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Our irrigation water source is fenced and otherwise protected from contamination by wild animals. We test the water source quarterly for E. coli and it has never tested positive. We are in the process of voluntarily testing even more frequently than that. We want to make sure our workers, as well as our customers, feel confident about our procedures.

We provide toilet facilities for all our workers; and soap, wash water and paper towels are provided for them.

Our employees are trained in food handling, food safety procedures and personal hygiene, and classes are documented.

Harvest bins are cleaned, sanitized and then documented. Harvest bins are not allowed to be in contact with the ground. Any fruit/vegetable that falls on the ground is discarded.

We are glad we voluntarily became Food Safety Certified. We always want to be proactive and in the forefront of food safety. We want our customers to rest assured that we are trying to do the right thing at all times.

Losing Weight

Loading vs. Losing

Today’s weight: 196.7 lbs. This week’s target weight was 192 lbs. I am 4.6 lbs. behind schedule. This week I lost .4 lbs.

I am putting too much pressure on myself in expecting to lose one pound per week. And so I am changing my weight loss goal to a half pound per week. Next week I hope to be at 196.2.

When I started losing weight on May 23rd of this year, I weighed 214.6 lbs. I have lost 17.4 lbs. since then.

Back in mid-September, when June and I went to the Tomato Fest at Carmel, we stopped loading the van for the Kona route ourselves. It took two hours each day to load the van and we had done that four days a week for over 15 months. It just occurred to me that I started having a tougher time losing weight sometime after we stopped loading the van.

I need to increase my activity to help make up for not loading the van. I think I’ll exercise twice per day on four days of the week, and up my calories exerted from 500 on those days to 1,000. I still enjoy exercising much more than dieting.

Alan Wong, R&D

Germinating

A couple of days ago an idea just came to me: Why don’t we dedicate a couple of our growing houses solely to Research and Development for our partner-in-good-food Chef Alan Wong?

Most of the time we focus on growing what we think might be popular in the supermarkets. But here we will plant things strictly for fun; just because we’re curious and because Chef Alan might be able to use them in his restaurants. He will make suggestions and we’ll try other new and interesting things as well. He is excited about this project and so are we. This is going to be great fun.

Today we started looking at what we could plant. How about long, short, round, striped and mini eggplants to start? What’s a tomatillo, exactly? Let’s try all the types. What about peppers—hot, sweet, long, mini, chocolate, white, whatever. Colored beets. Asparagus—thin, stout, purple, green and white. All things bean. Different colors and textures. Whatever else strikes our fancy.

Tomorrow we start germinating seeds. I’ll post here periodically about how our Chef Alan Wong R&D project is coming along.

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

Losing Weight

Back in the Saddle

Richard Ha wrote:

Today’s weight: 197.1 lbs. This week’s target weight was 193 lbs. I am 4.1 lbs. behind schedule. This week I lost 1.2 lbs., instead of gaining 2.6 lbs. as I did last week.

When I started losing weight on May 23rd of this year, I weighed 214.6 lbs. I have lost 17.5 lbs. since then.

I must admit that I was worried I had lost control, as my weight fluctuated wildly for a week after Thanksgiving. At one point I had gained more than 4 lbs. I think it has finally settled down. I have had to admit that I was not going to continue losing weight just by exercising. So now I am trying to devise a new plan I can follow without too much effort.

The thing that causes me the most problems is being too hungry in the evenings. This seems to mostly happen when I miss meals or if I don’t eat enough earlier in the day. When it happens, I tend to overcompensate and eat too much at night. I’ll need to devise a plan to control this tendency.

But all is not lost. My resting heart rate is down to 54 beats per minute. I increased the intensity of my exercise in the last two weeks so that every other day I do short intervals where I raise my training heart rate to over 150 beats per minute for a few minutes. I do this at least three times during a 40-minute session. One of those days I’ll just take it easy and go for more than 90 minutes. The other three days I try to maintain 125 to 130 beats per minutes for 30 minutes or so.

I know I’m in better shape now because I can walk up inclines much faster and longer than I could just a few months ago. If I exert myself, my heart rate returns to normal much faster than it used to. These are all good signs that the extra training intensity is working.

Last week Rodrigo and I rode our mountain bikes up Banana Hill for the first time in a month or so. This time I was able to carry on more than a two-word conversation during the early part of the ride. So I improved from last time.

Rodrigo coasted down Banana Hill, and got to the bottom, much sooner than me. I thought that since I’m heavier than Rodrigo I should roll faster. This time I tried to coast as fast as I could. But still he got to the bottom much quicker than I did.

Christmas and New Year’s will be challenging in terms of weight control. But I feel I know what to expect now and just need to do a bit of planning so I don’t lose control. I’m a lot more confident that I can maintain, or even loose, weight during the holidays now, having just gone through Thanksgiving.

Our Employees

Next in Line

The first time I called Farm Manager Kimo Pa, in order to try and interview him, he was standing in a river fixing a water pump. When I tried him again later, he was driving a load of bananas and tomatoes to the airport.

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“My job is to make sure the operations are running smoothly,” he told me. “Anything and everything that comes up, I jump in there and make sure I accomplish whatever it is that needs to be accomplished.”

It’s why, he told me, they wear t-shirts to work instead of aloha shirts. “We’d just get them dirty,” he said. “You never know what will come up on the farm. There are a lot of moving parts to this operation.”

Thirty-nine-year-old Kimo first worked for the company, then called Kea‘au Banana, back in 1988 when he married Richard and June’s daughter Tracy. Then he went into the construction industry for awhile. When construction slowed down in the early 90s, he came back to do construction work with Richard.

“I was building things at the farm on the weekends,” he said, “and then it was full time. Then he had some plans to do new packing houses and I did all those, and then I got back involved with the farm.”

Kimo said he always wanted to get into business. “I thought I was going to become a building contractor. But then I ended up doing this, and I enjoy it. There’s never a dull moment. It’s always a challenge to figure out an answer; not the way everybody else is doing it, but trying to do it better and different in methods of growing, processing. We’re always trying to improve the wheel.”

With Kimo as farm manager and Tracy working in the farm’s office, the couple is “the next generation” and will take over when this generation retires.

“Kimo will take over after me,” said Richard, “and I’m fortunate to have such a strong transition plan in place. It has nothing to do with the fact that Kimo is my son-in-law. He’s been the farm manager for several years now and has done an excellent job.”

“And more important to me was knowing how he would treat the employees,” he said. “I’ve watched him in action for many years and he treats all the employees fairly.

“Beyond that,” said Richard, “he embraces change. He’s always looking at least five years in the future and he believes, like I do, that if you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards.”

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I asked Kimo about working with his father-in-law and he talked about how much he’s learned from Richard over the years. “He’s really an inspiration in guiding us in the right direction,” he said. “I really enjoy working with him and the challenges he comes up with. He’s not the type to sit back and relax and watch the world go by, and I’m not either. I want to be proactive, accomplish things, improve things. We get along perfectly. We kind of think alike.”

Kimo told me he is at the farm seven days a week. “Whatever time I don’t spend on the farm, I spend with my family,” he said. “I guess you could say that family time is my hobby.”

He has three children, ages 23, 17 and 14, and even two grandchildren, who are 3 years old and 9 months.

“I like working the way we have the farm set up, with family (working there),” he said. “It’s good because I’m a family type of person. It gives you more drive to work even harder.”

And then I just had one last question: Does he eat a lot of vegetables?

He does now, he said. “Until we started growing tomatoes, I never ate them because I never knew what a good tomato tasted like. I’d eat a tomato in a hamburger or salad, but just because it was there; because when I was growing up my parents told me, Don’t waste food.

“Now when I eat one of our tomatoes, or our cucumbers or whatever, I really appreciate it because I know what went into it to produce the food. But also because it has a distinct, good flavor I never had before.” —posted by Leslie Lang

Uncategorized

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Richard Ha writes:

Today’s weight: 198.3 lbs. This week’s target weight was 194.0 lbs. I am 4.3 lbs. behind schedule. Instead of losing one pound, I gained 2.6 lbs. this week.

First of all, Thanksgiving dinner and all those leftovers did not help my weight loss efforts at all. I didn’t try very hard to control myself. Perhaps I should have.

And last week I wrote about that article that said red wine helps you lose weight. I tried hard to prove that this works, and if it really did work I would have lost lots of weight.

But instead I gained lots of weight. So much for that experiment. I think I’d better limit myself to one or two glasses.

When I started losing weight on May 23rd of this year, I weighed 214.6 lbs. In the last six months, I have lost 16.3 lbs.

This week I must regain control. It will take more than just exercise to continue losing weight. I need to work on controlling portion size, and limiting snacking.

My friend, who is also trying to lose weight, started following the Ha Ha Ha! weight loss plan recently. She said she liked the idea of it being so mechanical—that if she worked off 500 calories every day on the elliptical trainer, she’d lose one pound a week. That was working, but then she told me she noticed if she cut down on portion sizes, didn’t eat as many carbohydrates, and stopped snacking so much during the day and eating after dinner, the weight dropped off even faster.

She admits she got lazy about exercising, but by watching her food intake she kept losing. Maybe I should try combining that approach with my exercise plan.

I’m just the opposite of her. I love to exercise but I tend to drift when it comes to controlling calories. This week I exercised six days for 40 minutes each at an aerobic rate, and once at 90 minutes at a slightly relaxed pace. I thought this would keep me on track.

But looking back, I realize we got takeout from Hilo Rice Noodle twice, and once I ate the gorgonzola cheese hamburger at Hilo Bay Cafe for lunch. And then there was the Thanksgiving meal at Kimo and Tracy’s, plus some take home pumpkin pie.

I look into the refrigerator way too many times in a day. I think I’ll start writing down each time I open the door and what I did. I’m afraid to guess how many times a day I open the refrigerator door.

I guess I should be happy I didn’t gain more weight. But it’s pretty apparent to me that I need to pay more attention to how much and what I eat.

Tonight we go to Tracy and Kimo’s house for Kapono’s birthday. We won’t bring home pie this time.

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Thanksgiving Greetings

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!

We’re thankful to be able to say what we want, think what we want and do what we want.

We’re thankful for friends and family. We’re thankful for our workers and our partners who help us do what we do. Thank you, everyone.

Richard and June