Tag Archives: Department of Agriculture

Government

Planning Your Fruits & Vegetables

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Richard Ha writes:

I’ve been meeting in Washington, D.C. as a member of the Department of Agriculture’s Fruit and Vegetable Industry advisory committee, which was reconstituted this past year. Twenty five of us were appointed to advise the Secretary of Agriculture on issues that are important to the nation’s fruit and vegetable growers.

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We broke down into various subject committees last year and there were several meetings throughout the year to determine what the most important issues are at present. This meeting was to decide which issues we would send on to the Secretary of Agriculture and recommend for action.

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Some of the issues are: labor availability, food safety, regionally adapted plant breeding programs, backlogs of container cargo at West Coast ports, citrus greening and appropriate timely reactions to important plant diseases, and GMO labeling.

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Next on our agenda is to develop recommendations for each subject area.

This last photo was just for fun:

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Bananas

Disturbing Banana Bunchy Top Virus Trend

Richard Ha writes:

We've noticed an uptick lately in the number of banana plants in and around Hilo town that are affected with the banana bunchy top virus (BBTV). Banana farmers are constantly watching for this, and lately we are seeing more of it.

bunchy top.jpt

We brought up this disturbing trend with Scott Enright, who is chair of the Department of Agriculture. Kamran Fujimoto had been concentrating on BBTV, but recently he has been focusing on fire ants and coconut rhinocerous beetle and traveling to O‘ahu.

Banana farmers have a tradition of being proactive. Lynn Richardson, who is a veteran banana farmer, had made a BBTV page on Facebook.

We would much rather be proactive and keep the disease under control than need to seek a GMO solution. Australia has a successful BBTV control program going, but it does have a law in place that allows inspectors to go into a person's yard to eradicate infected plants.

Our banana farmers report new infections as they see them, but we have been losing ground lately and it is a big concern.

Scott Enright listened to the banana growers and he immediately assigned two people to work with Kamran. Scott is not one to fool around. He moves fast.

Big Island, Community, Hurricane

Hurricane Iselle: The Aftermath & Human Stories

Richard Ha writes:

Soon after Hurricane Iselle hit the Big Island, the Hawaii Farmers and Ranchers United (HFRU) core group called a meeting. We wanted to assess damage, and what we found was that some Big Island farmers were in desperate need.

The human stories which were told by some of the affected farmers were hard to take. One of the independent processors told about being in church on Sunday just after the hurricane and not being able to look a farmer, there with his family, in the eye. They both knew what this damage meant to the farmers. The processor told us at the meeting that it brought him to tears.

Diane Ley, executive director of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, was on the phone at the after-hours emergency meeting. Scott Enright, who is chair of the Department of Agriculture, participated by cell phone. He had just landed on O‘ahu and was driving to a meeting.

Farmers and their friends pulled together to bring agencies with resources to meet with farmers at one stop. W.H. Shipman, Ltd. made their offices available to the group for meetings. Lorie Farrell did the real heavy lifting by organizing everything. And the support agencies responded.

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We met on Tuesday, on W.H. Shipman, Ltd.’s ground, with about 180 people in attendance. Chris Kanazawa, head of the USDA’s Rural Development; Scott Enright, director of the Board of Agriculture; Laverne Omori, county director of Research and Development. So was Chris Manfredi, president of the Hawaii Farm Bureau.

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Various agencies had booths where they provided information about their programs. People gave presentations. AgriLogic, which specializes in risk management insurance for farmers, was there. One of the priorities of HFRU is to increase the percentage of farmers covered by crop insurance.

Mayor Billy Kenoi announced he is hiring DayDay Hopkins to be liaison to the farmers. That is a huge deal; DayDay knows farming. I met two county council candidates for the first time that day, Danny Paleka and Ron Gonzales, and after having short conversations, it was clear to me that both are very thoughtful and know what the spirit of aloha is all about. 

Yesterday I read in the Star-Advertiser that 287,000 Hawaii residents receive aid through the Hawaii Foodbank and its agencies. I called up Ross Sibucao, the young president of the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association, and asked him: “How many papaya farmers are on food stamps?”

He chuckled at my even asking the question. He said, “Probably zero.”

The farmers are the ones feeding the people. They do important work.

Aquaponics, Family of Farms, Food Security, Hydroelectric, Lowering Electric Rates, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability, Water

State of the Farm Report

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Richard Ha writes:

Yesterday at the farm I had a meeting with all our workers. It was an update on where we have been and where we are going.

Where we’ve been

The price of oil has quadrupled in the last 10 years, and those who could pass on the cost did. Those who could not pass on the cost ended up paying more. Farmers are price takers, not price makers, so farmers’ costs increased more than their prices.

Anticipating higher electricity prices, we lobbied for and passed a law that the Department of Agriculture create a new farm loan program that farmers could use for renewable energy purposes. Then we started to design a hydroelectricity program to stabilize our electricity costs.

Where we are today

The hydroelectricity project is within weeks of completion. With the combination of a farm loan and a grant from the Department of Energy, we will stabilize our electricity price at 40 percent less than we pay today.

The pipe that transports the water appears to me like it will last for more than 100 years. After the loan is paid off, our electricity will be practically free for more than 60 years.

Where we are going

We are taking advantage of our resources – free water and stable electricity costs – by working with area farmers to help each other grow more food.

What kind of food? Responding to consumer demand, we want to
produce food with a wide variety of nutritional content, including protein, via aquaculture.

In order to be sustainable, the feed-based protein must be vegetation-based. And since the building block of protein is nitrogen, we are looking for an adequate nitrogen source. Unused, wasted electricity can be used to make ammonia, which is a nitrogen fertilizer and, like a battery, can be used to store energy.

What does the future
look like?

Other than stable electricity, which would help us, our serious
concern is the anti-GMO Bill 79. It seeks to ban any new biotech solutions to farmers’ problems on the Big Island. The result is that the rest of the counties and the nation would be able to use new tools for more successful farming, and the Big Island would not.

What would happen is that Big Island farmers would become
less competitive, which would put even more pressure on those already at the bottom of the pay scale. It would result in higher food costs, making consumers less able to support local farmers.

The folks pushing for the anti-GMO bill have not talked to farmers, and they have no clue that this bill would make Hawai‘i less food
secure. The bottom line is that food security involves farmers farming. If the farmers make money, the farmers will farm. If not, they will quit.