Farming inspires fantasies but requires viable funding

One artist’s rendition of Maui’s future shows golden fields of watercolor crops stretching from the central plains all the way up to the foothills of the West Maui mountains. The houses and buildings and highways that already exist aren’t quite there in the imagined future, blurred out like an aspirational ad.

That’s an image from the Maui Tomorrow report, which is different from the plan by Community Organic Farmland Initiative. An artist’s rendering for that plan shows blond children climbing fruit trees, a woman in a blue dress cradling a harvest of leaves in her arms, surfboards, happy turtles and a rainbow stretching across a houseless, building-less Central Maui. Next to that childlike image is a depiction of the alternative: farmers in hazmat suits, a helicopter spraying poison over dusty fields, ugly condos and factories looming in the distance.

The fantasies are darling. The reality, though, is that precious little former sugar land in Hawaii has successfully been diversified for other crops, and it’s not for lack of trying.

The sugar cane fields just up the road from Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. that used to be farmed by the Wailuku Sugar Co. are now subdivisions with hundreds of houses. The higher up the hill, the more expensive the homes. Wailuku Sugar tried to diversify. The company changed its name to Wailuku Agribusiness and planted macadamia nut trees and pineapple — even before the phasing out of cane — but uncooperative weather, a glut of cheaper products being imported from Central America and the cost of doing business in Hawaii made the company quit trying to farm in 1999.

On Kauai there are hundreds of acres of former sugar lands sitting fallow. For the last 40 years, various interests have tried to make a go on former Kilauea Sugar lands with aquaculture, guava farms and agritourism. The most recent venture, a cute field-to-table restaurant, shut down in 2014, and the land is back on the market.

On the west side of Kauai, former sugar lands are partially being used to grow seed crops by companies like Dow and Syngenta. To say that those companies have been demonized by some is putting it lightly. You’d think growing seed was somehow immoral.

On Hawaii island Richard Ha recently shut down his farming operations on former sugar land.

“The main reason we shut down the farm is that we saw what was coming. We knew the cost of farming was rising, rising, rising, and that in order to survive, at some point we would have to start cutting our employees’ pay and benefits,” Ha wrote on his blog.

It’s fun to dream, but the truth is that farming is hard. You can’t just put seeds in the ground, water them with good intentions and feed the world like some granola commercial. For plants to be viable, the business has to be viable. That means farmers need to be paid Hawaii-level wages to compete with easier jobs in hotels and restaurants. That means providing farmworkers with health insurance, pension plans, vacation and sick days.

No artist’s rendition includes an offer or even an idea of how to finance the fantasy.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.