Apart from a few shiny starts, progress toward establishing the Whitmore Village area as an agricultural food hub has been underwhelming, to put it lightly. That was Agribusiness Development Corporation board member Douglas Schenk\u2019s take at the board\u2019s meeting last November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll of us are pretty unsatisfied. We put all this effort into getting all these lands,\u201d he complained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the past several years, the ADC has been on a buying spree of former Galbraith Estate, Dole Food Company, and Castle & Cooke lands in North-Central Oahu, driven and supported in large part by the area\u2019s state senator, Donovan Dela Cruz. About $100 million has been spent and more than 3,000 acres have been acquired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Establishing adequate water supplies and preparing the lands for farming have been challenging enough on their own. More recently, however, the ADC\u2019s struggles to bring their small farmers into compliance with their licenses and food safety standards have come to light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As part of the ADC\u2019s purchase of the 1,000-plus acres of Galbraith lands in 2011, the City and County of Honolulu, which provided some of the funding, required that 300 acres be designated for use by small farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In January of last year, ADC director James Nakatani reported that all but one of its smaller Galbraith tenants had failed either to meet the terms of their licenses or sign a license at all. And as a result, a number of them could not begin farming. Months later, ADC added that sanitation on some of the farms was also an issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In response, the board\u2019s investigative committee worked with staff on developing solutions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBasically, we need to get better, experienced farmers that are well-financed, that have a really good plan. I know it\u2019s hard to find, but if we fail to find those people, we\u2019re going to be where we are today: full of resources but [short on] performance,\u201d said Schenk, a member of the ADC\u2019s investigative committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the ADC\u2019s Ken Nakamoto, when initially shopping for tenants for the Galbraith lands, a couple of government agencies helped it create a list of candidate farmers, staff inspected their farms, and then negotiated licenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With input from investigative committee members, Nakamoto prepared a new license application and review standards to ensure that farmers are actually able to do what\u2019s required of them and to farm successfully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the new form, which was approved by the ADC board in December, applicants would be required to have a minimum of five years of farming experience. They would also need to prove they have access to adequate capital \u2014 such as through a Department of Agriculture loan \u2014 and provide a farming plan covering the first five years of their tenancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFarmers are undercapitalized. They cannot even throw away their own trash. They cannot afford a port-a-potty,\u201d Nakamoto said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Schenk admitted that the new applications and standards might be daunting and that most farmers who have approached the ADC would fall short. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s, like, really telling. Maybe that\u2019s not the kind of people we want to be attracting. Maybe that\u2019s harsh, but, frankly, this reflects on all of us. \u2026 What we\u2019re doing is not working,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of problems we\u2019re experiencing today was due to poor vetting. The farmers giving us the most problems lack these,\u201d Nakamoto added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Board member Robbie Melton asked whether the ADC could require training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nakamoto replied that the ADC had actually provided training on pesticide use and good farming practices to the Galbraith farmers, most of whom were immigrants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA lot of them come after work. Maybe they didn\u2019t pay attention or maybe they didn\u2019t understand what we\u2019re saying. They say \u2018Yes, yes,\u2019 and they go back and do what they do,\u201d he said. ADC chair Letitia Uyehara added that some of the early tenants required the assistance of an advocate to fill out forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nakamoto said the ADC doesn\u2019t want to discriminate, but \u201cwe don’t want the second-place guy. We want the best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To this, however, ADC director Nakatani stressed that meeting food safety standards and keeping up with regulations are challenges not just for immigrant farmers, but small farmers across the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nakamoto said some of the changes to the application process were meant to ensure that the farmers aren\u2019t blindsided by time-consuming and\/or expensive requirements they didn\u2019t realize they had to meet, such as having to prepare a conservation plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Board members and staff seemed split over whether or not the ADC should simply try to seek bigger farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kauai board member Sandi Kato-Klutke suggested that the ADC might try to offer more hands-on support for its small farmers, as Grove Farm does on Kauai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo matter what we do, we cannot outdo Grove Farm because of the amount of help they give their people,\u201d she said. Referring to the ADC\u2019s smaller tenants on Kauai, she added, \u201cWe are here saying we\u2019ll give you 50 acres. That\u2019s too much. Our two-acre farmer is our most successful on Kauai.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chair Letitia Uyehara and then-DOA director Scott Enright both seemed to think bigger was better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the ADC is having an extremely difficult time with its Galbraith lands, capitalized enterprises are starting to show up in Hawaii, Enright said. \u201cThe capital is not there for the two- and five-acre farms. It\u2019s hard to project out how this is all going to work if you\u2019re paying your taxes and permitting your structures and paying your farm laborers \u2026,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He noted that the University of Hawaii\u2019s GoFarm farmer training program has met with only limited success. \u201cI know three farmers that are actually starting to make it out of all the people they\u2019re putting out of their program. I wish it was more successful, but it\u2019s not,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nakatani countered that one of the ADC\u2019s small farmers on Kauai has done very well, showing that there are \u201cpockets where we can succeed,\u201d if farmers don\u2019t bite off more than they can chew in terms of acreage and then run into cash-flow problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether the ADC gets the new crop of farmers it wants remains to be seen. In addition to raising the qualification and review standards for prospective tenants, the board also voted to widen its search by reaching out to the state DOA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Hawaii Farm Bureau, Hawaii Farmers Union Foundation, GoFarm, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and various community groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(For more background on this, read the following articles at www.environment-hawaii.org: \u201cCompliance Problems with Small Farms Hamper Use of Former Galbraith Lands<\/a>,\u201d March 2018 and \u201cNon-Compliant Galbraith Farmers Frustrate State Land Managers<\/a>,\u201d July 2018.) Apart from a few shiny starts, progress toward establishing the Whitmore Village area as an agricultural food hub has been underwhelming, to put it lightly. That was Agribusiness Development Corporation board member Douglas Schenk’s take at the board’s meeting last … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[448],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-10922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-february-2019","tag-teresa-dawson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/environment-hawaii.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u2014 Teresa Dawson<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"