Continuing Neglect of Soil Threatens Productive Agriculture Lands in Hawai`i

For the better part of the 20th century, sugar cane and pineapple plantations together sustained Hawai`i’s agriculture industry and supported entire towns. But those long years of intensive use have taken a toll on Hawai`i’s soils.

“In most of the sugar lands the topsoil is gone, the nutrients are gone, and the soil life is gone,” says Burt Smith, a soil scientist based in Waimea, Hawai`i, who has studied the impacts of Hawai`i agriculture on soils for some 20 years. “In some areas below the fields, there are rich accumulations of soil, but in most areas, it is on the ocean bottom.”

The degree of loss “borders on the criminal,” Smith said in a recent interview with Environment Hawai`i.

“Sugar cane agriculture in Hawai`i required that only enough nutrients to get the plant to about 14-16 months of age were to be applied to the field. When the plant began to be under nutrient stress, it would then convert its carbohydrates into sugars. When the cane was harvested the nutrients that had been applied went with the plants to the mill and from there wherever the waste ended up. Consequently, when the last harvest was made the fields were left devoid of most nutrients.”

Whatever little topsoil remainded after a century of sugar cultivation was almost all lost when mechanical harvesting began in the years following World War II, Smith said. “The constant tilling, fertilizing, and herbicide applications effectively reduced all soil organisms to very primitive forms. There were no earthworms in sugar cane fields and in most cases they are still absent.”

Pineapple was no better. “Only relatively few plants do well under extreme acid conditions; pineapple is one of them. Pineapple plantations deliberately reduced the soil pH to control nematodes,” he says.

Samir El-Swaify, a soil scientist at the University of Hawai`i, explains how soil loss has been disguised by tilling methods and the near-constant addition of chemicals. “Agriculture has been too successful for its own good,” he said in an interview. Production rates have remained high despite soil loss, he said. At most, production on eroding lands dips only slightly, “perhaps one or two percent over 20 to 30 years,” he told Environment Hawai`i.

With the dramatic declines of sugar and pineapple cultivation over the last decade, both the state and the federal governments have taken steps intended to keep agricultural lands in production. At the state level, the Legislature established the Agribusiness Development Corporation (ADC), which was intended to encourage the growth of new large-scale agricultural enterprises. Meanwhile, through the efforts of Senator Daniel Inouye, the U.S. Congress established the Department-of-Defense-financed Rural Economic Transition Assistance-Hawai`i program, also known as RETA-H. But should the state’s plans for a more diversified agriculture industry fall perfectly into place, the effect on Hawai`i soils could be even more devastating than what was seen in the heyday of plantation agriculture.

“Replacing ailing plantation-crop industries (sugarcane and pineapple) with smaller-scale and more diverse annual, orchard, or pasture crops is expected to have profound impacts on the natural resource base and environmental quality,” writes El-Swaify in a report prepared for the International Soil Conservation Organization Conference held earlier this year.

“Models predict that annuals grown with conventional practices would be considerably less protective against sediment loss than were sugarcane and pineapple. Orchards and short-rotation tree plantings are also vulnerable during highly exposed early stages of tree growth, after full canopy development shades out groundcovers or understory vegetation, and during and following harvest operations.”

Lackluster government support for soil conservation measures as well as imperfect tools with which to measure soil loss further complicate efforts to manage agricultural lands properly. And the lack of support extends to studies of soil erosion as well.

Because agriculture was so successful, says El-Swaify, “you couldn’t get politicians excited about soils… We have to work with what excites, and that is water quality.” In the 1990s, research focused on the big picture — the destination of sediment, or non-point source pollution. Most of the money for soil research then came from grants in non-point source pollution.

“The strategies are the same,” he said. “In order to reduce sediment, you have to keep it at the source. But erosion cannot be equated with sediment.”

Worldwide Degradation

Hawai`i is not alone in its problems with soil loss. In January, the UNESCO Courier reported that the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization predicted that 2.5 million square kilometers of farmland could be useless by 2050, as a result of soil loss.

In the United States, 2 billion tons of topsoil are lost each year to erosion, writes Scott Russell Sanders in an article in the March 1999 Audubon. The cost of this loss, he says, as measured “in lost productivity, silting of reservoirs, pollution of waterways, is $40 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

In Brazil, “Soil degradation began there four centuries ago, when Europeans arrived and deforestation began,” soil scientist Jose Peteira de Quieroz Neto has been quoted as saying. “It gathered speed in the 19th century as coffee and sugar plantations spread, and since the 1970s, the growth of export agro-industry has ravaged the environment.” (Peteira de Quieroz Neto is quoted by Sophie Boukhar in her article, “Soils in Torment,” which appears in the January 1999 issue of UNESCO’s Courier.)

“We switched from small subsistence farms to big, highly mechanized estates,” Peteira de Quieroz Neto goes on to say. “Farm machinery sales rose 2,000 percent between 1975 and 1996. All this threw the soil’s biological structure and processes into confusion and increased soil erosion four or fivefold. Today, between 200 and 250 million tons of soil are lost each year in the state of Sao Paulo alone.”

The Netherlands-based International Soil Reference and Information Centre estimates that erosion affects more than 20 million square kilometers worldwide. According to the FAO, at least 12 million of those 20 million square kilometers have been damaged by human activity in the last 50 years. Overgrazing, deforestation, poor farming methods, and collecting firewood account for most of the erosion.

Examples of erosion in other countries are presented in “Shrinking Fields: Cropland Loss in a World of Eight Billion,” a July 1996 World Watch paper by Gary Gardner.

“Erosion affects more than a third of China’s territory — some 3.67 million square kilometers. In the Guanxi province, more than a fifth of irrigation systems are destroyed or completely silted up by eroded soils,” Gardner writes. In Russia, “Eroded area increases by 400,000 to 500,000 hectares each year, and now affects two-thirds of Russia’s arable land. Water erosion has created some 400,000 gullies covering more than 500,000 hectares.” And in Haiti, he writes, severe erosion eliminated 6,000 hectares of cropland per year in the mid-1980s.

Triple Whammy

“Eroded soil does triple damage — to the land from which it originates, when in transit, and where it deposits,” wrote Paul Bartram of the University of Hawai’i’s Hawai`i Environmental Simulation Laboratory in a 1976 report, “Available Information on Sediment Yields and Methods of Estimation Applicable to Kane`ohe Drainage Basins.”

Some soil erosion is natural and even necessary to maintain soil productivity. However, erosion can lead to the loss of topsoil, which contains most of the nutrients and substance needed for crop growth. Eroded soils also lack organic matter that provides the porous structure necessary for root growth, air, and water movement.

Sediments produced by erosion can and have damaged the marine environment of Hawai`i in particular. “One ton of soil from Kunia that makes its way into Pearl Harbor causes more turbidity than one ton of soil going into Laguna Bay [in California],” El-Swaify says.

Recently, soil erosion has beed associated with global warming. “Soil gives off large amounts of carbon dioxide. When human activity causes erosion or soil loss, the soil is no longer rich enough to store carbon, and carbon dioxide is either released into the atmosphere or carried directly to the sea,” Boukhar writes.

Each country has its own story, its own reasons for the degraded state of its soil. Hawai`i’s story begins in 1778, after the islands were first discovered by Europeans, according to El-Swaify, a professor and soil scientist at the Department of Agronomy and Soil Science at the University of Hawai`i’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. El-Swaify has published many scientific papers on erosion in Hawai`i and other tropical areas. In 1982, he and co-authors Edgar Dangler and C.A. Armstrong published “Soil Erosion by Water in the Tropics,” which describes the evolution of erosion in Hawai`i:

“Following the discovery of the islands by Europeans in 1778, goats left by Captain Cook multiplied rapidly. Cattle and sheep were introduced shortly afterwards by Vancouver. A thirty-year ban on the slaughter of these animals caused an inordinate increase in their populations and the eventual destruction of the koa forest. Barren, eroded hillsides and soil slips, as well as dusty alluvial plains, became evident,” he writes.

Much of the vegetation lost to grazing had been replaced by foreign plants. However, a new cause of accelerated soil erosion was introduced to Hawai`i in 1835: the sugar industry.

In the early 1900s, another large monocrop — pineapple — etched out a significant role in the islands’ economy. In pineapple fields, erosion hazards come mainly from the access roads that make up a high percentage of field area. According to a number of scientific reports, almost all runoff originates on roads. “Because most of the runoff occurs from the road areas, it follows that most of the erosion also takes place on the roads, where frequent traffic keeps the normally dry soils disturbed,” one report states.

El-Swaify’s report notes that once Hawai`i became a state in 1959, “construction activities of all types increased, and, in turn, accelerated soil erosion.” Kane`ohe Bay and Pearl Harbor on O`ahu became receiving basins for soil lost from these activities, he writes.

At the time of El-Swaify and his colleagues’ report (1982), a relatively small proportion of O`ahu was judged to be eroding despite the considerable land under sugarcane and pineapple cultivation in the `Ewa and Waialua areas. Elsewhere, rates of soil loss varied widely, the report found: “On Molokai, much of the damage experienced in the Ho`olehua district has been initiated by excessive grazing. On Maui, in the huge Makawao area, much of the erosion is in gulches and barren areas not covered in the survey. The same situation exists in the Nahiku district [of Maui].”

A Blind Eye

In general, Hawai`i was determined to have “minimal erosion rates” in the 1980s. To many, if not most, of its residents, soil erosion was not a major concern. This was reflected in a November 1980 report published by the Hawai`i Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts, which surveyed public opinion on the most pressing issues facing agriculture. At that time, sugar cane and pineapple together occupied 85 percent of all cropland acres in production.

The survey was undertaken by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service) and the state’s 15 Soil and Water Conservation Districts. They polled all those people who attended 21 meetings statewide in 1978. When the results were published, demand for more land and water for agriculture far exceeded any concern for soil preservation.

The fact that soil erosion didn’t crack the top six agricultural issues did not mean that erosion was not a problem. “Although soil erosion seems to be increasingly under control and improving,” the report stated, “there are still several problem areas” — primarily on sugar and pineapple lands.

If an intense rain storm occurred when sugar and pineapple lands were being prepared for replanting, the report stated, the lands were most susceptible to severe erosion. “The annual sediment yields for sugar cane and pineapple lands are estimated at 4.5 and 4.2 tons per acre, respectively,” the report said. “These rates are higher than for all other land uses, with the exception of developing urban land. The average rate for pasture land is 1.6 tons per acre.”

Abandoned croplands and overgrazed steep mountain slopes also posed erosion problems, the report stated. “There are a few critical erosion areas in Hawai`i on mountain tops, in military training areas on steep slopes where there is gunnery practice, and in some dry areas where lands have been disturbed by both man and cattle. Very little is being done to control erosion in these areas as it is not economically feasible when cost benefit ratio is considered. In these areas, if erosion were reduced, it would be chiefly for esthetic purposes.”

The report acknowledged that the productivity of land declined with loss of productive top soil, and that when sediment is deposited in coastal areas, flood plains, and wetlands, it also destroyed the productivity of those lands.

In the end, the report recommended that erosion control programs be continued, but reassessed in severely eroded areas on Molokai, Lanai and O`ahu. It also recommended that a new cost-share formula be developed to control erosion on corporate farms.

“Primarily, corporate farms are being penalized by not having an effective program for solving their conservation needs. For example, O`ahu Sugar is only able to obtain $3,500 a year in cost-share payments for controlling erosion. It is important that a new formula be considered to cover this insufficiency.”

In 1985, the U.S. Congress passed the Food Security Act, or Farm Bill, that includes some soil conservation controls to help farmers in their land stewardship.
The Farm Bill denies federal loans, subsidies and crop insurance to any farmer who plows land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The act also provides for incentive programs to encourage farmers and ranchers to conserve natural resources on private lands. One of these is the Conservation Reserve Program. The CRP pays farmers to give the land a break by taking it out of production for ten years and planting trees, grasses or cover crops to stabilize and rebuild the soil. Other efforts include cost-sharing programs in which farmers receive money for implementing conservation measures such as building terraces, sediment holding ponds, or windbreaks.

According to Bill Burns of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, Hawai`i is only now starting to participate in the CRP. Farmers can choose to sign on for what is called “continuous sign-up,” where farmers apply for monet to do a conservation project, like putting up a windbreak, or they can submit “bids” to the NRCS to take land out of production for ten years.

According to Burns, Hawai`i farmers are at a disadvantage with respect to their mainland counterparts when it comes to opting to participate in the CRP. Farmers essentially submit bids to the NRCS, stating how much it will cost them to take their land out of production for ten years and to install conservation measures (trees, terraces, etc.). Because the cost of land in Hawai`i is so much higher than it is on the U.S. mainland, the bids of farmers here are simply not competitive, Burns told Environment Hawai`i

In any case, programs sponsored by the Farm Bill have been criticized for being took weak, for treating the symptoms and not the causes of degradation, and for “bribing farms not to pollute,” according to an article in the July-August 1998 edition of Environment. The article, “Agriculture and Environment: a new strategic vision,” by David E. Ervin and others, states:

“Participation [in the CRP] remains strictly voluntary and the program’s efficacy in targeting priority environmental problems remains largely unmeasured…. It still does not provide clear environmental objectives for the agricultural sector or impose significant restrictions on undesirable farm practices. Such restrictions as apply (e.g., on draining wetlands and cultivating highly erodible croplands) hinge only on non-payment of the remaining program benefits themselves rather than separate penalties. Until recently, this made them least relevant when prices were strongest and subsidies lowest — precisely when farmers produce most intensively. These restrictions will be even less constraining in the future because FAIR [Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act, 1996] gradually lowers the subsidies and reduces the amount of land to which they apply. Indeed, in terms of the costs of environmental regulation, agriculture has come behind all other sectors in the U.S. economy.”

The 1994 Environmental Almanac, compiled by the World Resources Institute, highlights other flaws with the federal government’s efforts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides subsidies that encourage farmers to grow crops intensively, WRI states, and it pays them to plant certain crops.

“The more crops planted in this program and the larger the yields, the more subsidy money flows to growers. Some farmers derive as much as half of their income from federal subsidies,” it continues.

The Farm Bill also has discouraged farmers from planting more than one crop, it states. “Soil conservation and environmental groups, however, promote the rotation of different types of crops on the same acreage from one growing season to the next as a way to improve soil conditions, decrease fertilizer and pesticide use, and slow erosion. But USDA rules stipulate that a farmer, in order to receive federal payments for one crop, cannot, in some cases, grow others.

“Farm program payments are based on the average number of acres a farmer plants in that single crop over five years. Thus, he or she can benefit more over time by planting one crop, even if the prices for an alternate crop are higher that year.”

NRCS Aid

The agency that administers these federal programs is the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. In Hawai`i, the NRCS has about 75 employees dispersed through 13 offices on all the major islands. Much of the work done by NRCS involves providing technical assistance to private farmers and ranchers. While the NRCS has no regulatory enforcement responsibilities, “We encourage those who manage private lands to practice a variety of measures designed to conserve or improve natural resources on their lands,” according to an NRCS publication.

If a farmer wants to develop a conservation plan, he or she can obtain one through the NRCS. NRCS staff would visit and assess the land, and work with the farmer to develop a plan. If the plan were then approved by the local Soil and Water Conservation District officers and the Farm Service Association, which disperses federal funds for conservation programs, the farmer would receive a government subsidy, El-Swaify told Environment Hawai`i.

A local counterpart to the NRCS is the Hawai`i Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts, which are organized groups of volunteers who administer and oversee soil and water conservation activities. The districts are also a “source of peer pressure” to do the right thing, El-Swaify says. There are 16 Soil and Water Conservation Districts throughout the state. Together, the NRCS and HACD system should be credited for helping to preserve natural resources, El-Swaify says.

Others disagree with that assessment. Concerning these USDA’s educational and technical assistance agencies, the Environment article states, “Many of these initiatives are ‘end-of-the-pipe’ in nature, treating the symptoms of misplaced incentives instead of the root causes.”

“Vegetation is the key to the prevention of soil erosion. If all soils were perpetually covered with mature forests or grass sward, accelerated erosion would not be a problem. However, at least for brief periods of time, farming, logging, fires, mining, and construction activities expose the soil, which then becomes vulnerable to erosive rainfall and runoff,” El-Swaify writes.

In addition to vegetation, conservation tillage, minimum tillage, contour tillage and ridging, terracing, bench terraces, hillside ditches, grassed waterways, earth embankments, spillway inlets, conduits, outlets, even watershed management software are also methods of erosion control. The list is long and will get longer as new techniques are developed.

According to Smith, methods to prevent erosion have changed over the years. Today, he says, “most erosion ‘fixes’ involve application of massive machinery followed by hydro-mulching or some similar technique.”

However, the prime factor in creating erosion has not changed, he adds.

“That cause is not stupid, ignorant, or greedy farmers,” he says. “Quite the contrary. It is the economic theory so prevalent in developed countries, which is, essentially, maximizing for short term gains, with little or no regards for long term consequences. The primary culprit is the naïve belief that resources are infinite — that soil, water, air, and minerals are inexhaustible in their supply; that the only cost of a resource is the cost of extracting or using it and not the cost of replacing it….

“For the most part, farming and ranching practices are known that will keep erosion in check. In the majority of cases where excessive erosion has been contained, it has required outside economic assistance as the measures used typically require that the land be set aside from productive use for a period of time.”

“The solution to erosion on most lands is not to do less of what caused the problem in the first place (e.g. plow only 30 acres of hill country instead of 40, or reduce the numbers of livestock) nor is it benign neglect (do nothing, allow nature to take her course). What is required is a major attitude re-adjustment (paradigm shift) in how one manages a farm or ranch,” Smith says.
Examples of this re-adjustment are emerging here in Hawai`i and throughout the world.

In Salina, Kansas, “Wes Jackson and his then-wife, Dana, founded the Land Institute in 1976 to seek ways of providing food, shelter, and energy without degrading the planet,” according to the March 1999 Audubon article by Sanders. “He has begun to win support in the scientific community for a revolutionary approach to farming that he calls perennial polyculture — crops intermingled in a field that is never plowed, because the plants grow back on their own every year. The goal of his grand experiment: a form of agriculture that, like a prairie, runs entirely on sunlight and rain.”

Sanders quotes Washington State University soil science professor John Reganold as saying that, with Jackson’s type of natural-systems agriculture, “soil quality will significantly improve — better structure, more organic matter, increased biological activity, and thicker topsoil.”

The intermingling of crops is an option that has also been explored in Hawai`i.

“Intercropping and precropping with low-lying groundcovers has been demonstrated in pilot areas… Legume intercrops in particular offer protection against runoff and erosion while providing forage, food, and income and contributing yield gains in succeeding crops with their residues. Residue recycling remains the single most promising but least-utilized technology for soil protection,” according to the International Soil Conservation Organization `99 conference report.

According to an August 1992 article by EL-Swaify in the Australian Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, intercropping as a conservation tool was tested on very dry soils on Moloka`i. Taro and rose clover planted amid a maize crop significantly reduced runoff and soil loss, he found. Similar effects were found when stylosanthes [a perennial shrub introduced to Hawai`i as a fodder plant] was planted with a cassava crop.

Lessons from the Past

In old Hawai`i, land was managed according to the ahupua`a system, which ran from the mountains out to the ocean and which took into account how each activity affected the land’s resources. Today, in He`eia, a non-profit group hopes to revive this management system on more than 600 acres. The Center for a Sustainable Future, Inc. has leased the 90-acres He`eia pond and has plans to lease 405 acres from the state Hawai`i Community Development Authority. On these lands, the center hopes to practice sustainable agriculture and teach students about the old farming ways.

Will the paradigm shift from large-scale, intensive monocrop agriculture to a more sustainable system reduce soil erosion? It may, considering that the focus will be on creating a sustainable future rather than on generating short-term profits. “A measure of success for these groups [who wish to practice ahupua`a land management] is how close it comes to natural erosion,” El-Swaify says.

In addition to these grassroots efforts, the University of Hawai`i is working with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the University of Florida, Cornell University, North Carolina State, Montanta State, and Texas A&M Universities on a $19 million project to increase food production while sustaining soils. The five-year project began in 1997. UH soil scientist Goro Uehara believes that nutrient management will lead to a stable ecosystem and improved production. UH researcher Russell Yost is investigating a computer-based system to help farmers and planners make decisions about soil conditions and management strategies.

Despite all the programs and resources made available to control erosion, those who actually work the land make the final decision.

“As in every human endeavor there are the good, bad, and indifferent. Most farmers and ranchers that own their land want to be good stewards as they value their resource and wish to pass it on to future generations,” says Burt Smith. “Those who lease land fall into a slightly different category and not always of their own making,” he adds.

“Land tenure in this state is, for the most part, geared towards guaranteeing that the land will be raped. If the tenant can be kicked off with only a month or year notice and (as is typically the case) with the loss of all capital improvement, stewardship of the land is not going to be a very high priority on his list. On the mainland the cost of capital improvements made to the land are typically shared by landlord and tenant. That is generally not the case in Hawai`i, although there have been some recent improvements in that regard.”

Another problem Smith sees is the inflated value that landowners ascribe to their agricultural lands. “Stewardship counts for little, money in hand counts for everything,” he says.

“Until all landowners (including the state) are held accountable for the condition of their lands, this continual raping, which results in accelerated erosion, due to insecure land tenure and unreasonable payments will continue.”

Catastrophic Losses

A handful of mishaps regarding soil erosion highlight some of the most egregious instances of poor land stewardship in Hawai`i.

In April 1989, many farmers leasing state land in Waimanalo agriculture lots failed to follow grading requirements. One farmer, Roger Watson claimed that the state Department of Land and Natural Resources did little to ensure that Soil Conservation Service-approved grading plans were carried out. “About all we can do is put strict terms in contract relative to the grading and make sure the [state Department of Agriculture] monitors,” said Bill Paty, then head of the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

In July 1994, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund filed a $6.75 million federal lawsuit on behalf of the Moloka`i Chamber of Commerce to get Kukui, Inc., to stop erosion caused when it installed a nine-mile pipeline from central to west Moloka`i. SCLDF asserted that the state did not enforce the federal Clean Water Act and that Kukui, Inc., failed to get a state permit outlining plans to control erosion. According to Paul Achitoff of SCLDF (now Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund), the lawsuit was settled in 1995. Kukui agreed to provide funds to establish a Moloka`i environmental protection fund. The developer also set aside money to hire an engineer to oversee the restoration of the area. Last winter, Achitoff says, the restoration work was carried out. Kukui has since abandoned the waterline, he adds.

In November 1995, a Maui jury awarded Paula Harrison of Kula, Maui, $1.17 million for erosion damages to her 30-acre lot in Kula’s agriculture park, according to a November 10, 1995, article in The Honolulu Advertiser, “Harrison filed the suit in 1990 after claiming she was not able to get the county or two farmers, Kenneth Tengan and Paul Otani, to deal with her erosion problem.”

Harrison was planting an area downslope from parcels farmed by Tengan and Otani, who had allegedly planted their crops in a drainageway. In December 1988, a three-day rainstorm washed mud onto her parcel, and subsequent runoff from the higher lots destroyed her plantings, the article reported.

As part of her settlement, Harrison was awarded $45,000 in punitive damages against Otani. “Otani was singled out because he is a member of the Upcountry Soil and Water Conservation District, which is responsible for preventing erosion problems on farm parcels in the region,” according to the article.

— Teresa Dawson

Volume 10, Number 3 September 1999