State survey shows big decline in agricultural land

Hawaii’s farming footprint has changed a lot since most sugar cane and pineapple plantations disappeared, but now the contours of this footprint can be seen in a new report showing where agricultural activity was lost over the last 35 years and where future crop opportunities might lie.

The 101-page report from the state Department of Agriculture provides a look at where crops have vanished, shrunk, sprouted or expanded since 1980 on each island.

Mainly the maps show what cropped up in place of sugar cane and pineapple since the state last mapped active farm uses.

It’s also interesting to see exactly where bananas, flowers, tropical fruits and cattle are being raised in Waimanalo, or where all the seed crops are concentrated on Kauai, or where the most bee colonies exist.

But what’s glaring is the drop in the number of acres devoted to agriculture between 1980 and 2015: a decline of 200,000 acres of cropland and 340,000 acres of pastureland, representing drops of 57 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Scott Enright, chairman of the Board of Agriculture, said in a statement that the study is part of a foundation for measuring state progress toward increasing agricultural production in Hawaii.

“We look forward to using this tool in making informed decisions about current agricultural enterprises and in the planning and promoting of new agricultural investment to increase our food security,” he said.

The report, produced by the Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization Research Lab at the University of Hawaii at Hilo and released last week, said the amount of productive agricultural land probably will never rebound to past peaks.

“Hawaii’s agricultural footprint is a shadow of what it was in 1980,” the report said. “It is highly unlikely that Hawaii will ever see that amount of land in active crop production again.”

Still, the report said some of the existing surplus of fallow agricultural land can be used for more intensive farm use.

Hawaii’s long history of agriculture was touched on in the report, which noted that an estimated 380,000 acres was devoted to agriculture in Hawaii before Western contact. In 1937 there were 38 sugar cane and eight pineapple plantations that used most of 277,500 acres of farmland, while livestock grazing occupied 2 million acres.

Last year the total was 151,831 acres of cropland and 761,430 acres of pastureland.

Following the dramatic decline of Hawaii plantations that began in the 1990s, the biggest crops to sprout up were forestry, on 22,864 acres, and seed production, on 23,728 acres, the report showed.

Parts of Hawaii’s farm industry that have expanded a lot over the past 35 years are coffee, macadamia nuts and diversified crops that include herbs and vegetables. Crops with small increases are tropical fruits and aquaculture. And several areas of farming got smaller: banana, taro, dairy, papaya and flowers/foliage/landscaping.

The report said diversified farms have been concentrated on Oahu, where most Hawaii consumers live. There are 9,860 acres on Oahu producing diversified crops, compared with 7,000 acres for the rest of the state.

There is more cropland overall in production on the neighbor islands — about 85 percent of the statewide total — though 75 percent of the crops raised on the neighbor islands are for export.

“These crops provide an important stability to Hawaii’s rural economy through jobs and both direct and indirect spending,” the report said, adding that growing crops on the neighbor islands to feed Oahu residents puts farms there at a disadvantage because of the need to ship their product.

By the end of this year, Hawaii’s footprint will undergo another big change with the planned shutdown of the last remaining sugar plantation in the state, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. The Maui farm occupies 38,000 acres.

Alexander & Baldwin Inc., which owns HC&S and is the sole remaining plantation operator among Hawaii’s Big Five agriculture companies that once dominated commerce in the islands, said it has long-term goals to keep HC&S land in productive farming.