Hawaiʻi Cropland Shrank From 350,000 to 153,000 Acres

15:50 Vincent Mina: So let me see. So we're going to move on here. I really appreciate everybody in the house this morning. On a Friday morning, this is impressive. And so without further ado, I'd like to get this started with Jeff Melrose, who is being contracted by the University of Hawaii to do a statewide database, a baseline on our agricultural farms that are existing. And I'll let Jeff further articulate his work. And please give a warm welcome to Jeff.

16:30 Jeff Melrose: Let me just start by saying I know on your program is somebody you'd rather hear from than me, Scott Enright. Scott texted me earlier this morning. I was going to pick him up and bring him here, and he said he woke up this morning ill and isn't coming. So it was his health that kept him here, not his desire to be a part of this conversation. And I know for him, every time he comes to the Big Island, this is where he lives, in ʻŌʻōkala, so it's his chance to go home and spend time with his family. Okay, let me just start with a little bit about myself so you understand where I come from.

17:09 I'm raised on Maui. I was raised in Makawao and have lived on the Big Island for about 25 years. Most of my professional life I have been a land use planner, and most of that in the context of large landowners. I started early as a consultant in downtown Honolulu after graduate school, and then five years with AMFAC, when AMFAC still owned five plantations, and I managed Puna Sugar's assets when Puna shut down in the 80s. And then spent a little time on Kauai as the managing director of Kauai when JoAnn just got elected,

17:46 spent a year there, and then moved back to Hilo and went to work for Kamehameha Schools and for 15 years managed the agriculture and conservation assets on this island, on Maui, and kind of worked statewide in planning really this transition of landscape that's really defined this last period since the 80s as sugar and pineapple have receded and agriculture has changed dramatically. So that's my background. That's where I come at this. I teach at the university part-time in land use planning, and I do a little bit of independent consulting.

18:22 This project is something that Scott really wanted to see happen and I want to introduce right now my partner in this process, Ryan Perroy. Ryan, just wave your hand back here. Ryan is the person responsible for the GIS program, the geographic information program at University of Hawaii at Hilo. he runs the Spatial Data Analysis and Visualization Lab, SDAV, which is where this comes from. So he's been a great partner. He's actually the principal investigator because he's a university employee and has been a real good contributor to this conversation. So thank

19:05 you Ryan for being here. He's getting to see this presentation for the first time. And I'm disappointed Scott's not here because it was his first chance to see it as well. So what you're getting really today is a preview of a digital mapping effort that we've done for the last six, eight months to kind of identify where Hawaii farms, in what areas, and what do we farm in a variety of different farm categories. So and the purpose of doing that is really to try and figure out, to give us all kind of a common view of what the agricultural footprint is and I can kind of go in at it from that.

19:51 The origins of this, how many people have seen this document? Raise your hand. This is the Hawaii County Food Self-Sufficiency Baseline Study that we did, again, out of the SDAV lab in 2012. It's on the web. You can Google it. It mapped in detail the agricultural footprint of the Big Island and talked in some detail about the history of each of those areas as a context that kind of breaks, explains some of what's going on and why. It also takes a look at food production and what kinds of foods we produce. But it was fairly well received statewide

20:32 and other counties were looking to try and duplicate it. And in that process, Scott, as the deputy initially recognizing its value and then as the director, said really what we need is a common view of the whole picture at one point in time. So that's what this is about. And there's an old story about the blind men and the elephant that if you're a bunch of blind men in a room holding on to different portions of the elephant, we'll describe a much different critter depending on what portion of the elephant they were holding on to. whether they are holding the nose or the ear or a leg,

21:13 their vision and their understanding of the elephant is constrained by what portion of the animal they look at. And as I've been around the state for years doing agriculture, I see that again and again in the ag conversations. People's passions and their regions and where their feet are planted every day define what they know and think about agriculture. And that's good. It gives good depth. But this is an effort to kind of get up to the 30,000-foot level and kind of give a broad sense, an overcast of what's happening in agriculture.

21:47 So when Mike first asked me to speak here, I said, Mike, what do you think people want to know? And he said he wasn't so concerned about what you want to know but what you need to know. And he said, put the big picture on the table. So that's what my task is today. and I really look forward to both doing that and in sharing conversations and questions at the end of that so let's just move through that so the first thing is how do you do an agricultural land use footprint basically we started with satellite aerial photography to map the crops we've used a whole variety of

22:25 satellite choices, Google, WorldView, a whole number of different pieces and we've digitized as much as we can see. We've done a lot of discussions with landowners and I've had the benefit of traveling the state through this project to talk to lots of farmers and kind of understand what's really going on on the ground. And to the extent that I listen well, I got some of that. And a little bit of drive-by ground truthing. I'll tell you there are places you don't drive when you go look around for agriculture and

22:55 you wait to be invited in and people aren't always looking for some strange rent-a-car to pull up on their property. But looking and getting that ground is important. And then we use real property tax and state and county water data as one source and a number of other sources of data that will help us identify where people are farming. This project was not intended, it's really intended to try and get at the commercial production of agriculture. We're not mapping people's backyard gardens. We're not mapping their small orchards in the backyard.

23:29 And in fact, by contract, anything under three acres, we didn't need to map. I know from watching agriculture that there's a lot of really powerful agriculture going on on small lots. And about, I'd say, 20% of the polygons we created are under a couple of acres in size. So we really tried to get down to small pieces. But I'm sure we didn't get everybody's small farm. That's just the nature of it. But we're trying to get the big cast of this. So what is a baseline? Basically, it's a snapshot in time. It just takes a snapshot. And it's a tool for measuring both forward and backwards.

24:12 It's a way for identifying where you've come from and how much you've changed back, and also a tool to look forward and monitor change over time. It's not a plan. And it doesn't have recommendations. We're not trying to create a body of new directions for the county out of this. But if in its best use, a baseline is really a tool to provoke informed conversation. It gives everybody that bigger picture of the elephant and therefore a conversation that's based on the whole beast rather than the part that everybody holds on to.

24:44 So, this is the first image is what the islands of Hawaii looked like 300 years ago. This is a native Hawaiian footprint and it was put together by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Nature Conservancy. So Sam Gon, I saw Sam Gon make this presentation some time ago and it stuck in my head as a a useful tool to anchor this conversation. So in red are areas that, based on archaeological evidence, based on some variety of knowledge, you know, pool of intelligent people, might have been used to support a population of 500,000 people in a 100% self-sufficient environment.

25:37 Whether that happened all at one time or it happened over time and moved through properties, question but this gives you a brief glimpse at a 300 year old baseline for what it might have looked like and it's informed speculation but it's certainly fed by some of the most intelligent and knowledgeable people I know who put that together. Now the next image we have comes, well it's a 1937 image. And this was put together by the Territorial Planning Board of the day as part of a 1939 inventory. And if you like to read cool old stuff, this is a remarkable document.

26:22 It really defines a lot of what Hawaii looked like in 1939. work was done in 37. So in pink is sugarcane. In orange, and sometimes it's a little hard to discern, orange is pineapple, Molokai and Lanai. And for the most part, the yellow is what they called grazing. Maybe not all pasture, but they presumed that lands that weren't in forest reserves, perhaps cattle were a roam on. And then for smaller agricultural activities and it's hard to see. They used a series of alphabet to identify where other kinds of crops were. So in 1937 there were 34 plantations, sugar

27:06 plantations, nine pineapple plantations and you might call this the high tide of agriculture in the state. There was still cane in Kahuku, there was cane in Waiʻanae, Waimānalo, North Kohala's plantations were still operating, Kīlauea Kauai is still operating, all of which have changed over time. Now the next time there was a baseline done was in 1980 and this was put together by the Department of Agriculture and when they mapped it up in big paper maps they took it to the Office of Planning and they digitized it. They put it in, this is

27:51 kind of the first digital map of Hawaii's agricultural footprint. And you can find it today. It's on the web in the Office of State Planning's data set, and it's called the Agricultural Land Utilization Map 1980. This is the last time we did this exercise. So you can imagine the change coming. So, again, you can see the sugar in pink. Pineapple has receded. Del Monte has left Molokai. still Dole in a portion of central Molokai. Kohala sugar shut down. Kahuku shut down. Kilauea shut down. These are all in the 70s. And there are about 250,000 crop acres.

28:39 Take that back. There are 350,000 acres in crop. That's sugar, pine, and all other things. and about 1.1 million acres in pasture. So following this in 1980, there is a pretty significant collapse, beginning in 1980 with the shutdown of Puna Sugar Company, and then very quickly in the 1990s, the collapse of 13 of the 14 plantations that were basically defined rural land use around the state. So in each one of these communities, how many in this room have had experience during a shutdown of sugar? We're actually around and involved in that.

29:27 Give me a hand. Good. I'm glad there's still some older, well, not that old. Sorry. But I also want to recognize how many people did not understand sugar, who weren't here when the sugar industry was here. And, yeah, there's a lot of us out there. And I think that it's important to understand this transition because it lays the foundation for where we are today in many ways. There are a couple of things that happened dramatically during this period in time. Maybe most significant is land ownership patterns fracture. Okay? For years, the green sheet of sugar that laid over landscape statewide

30:15 He had a variety of tenure underneath it. People who had leased lands to the sugar companies, private ownership of a variety of different types. But as this process evolved, some of the big five, the C. Brewer, Castle & Cooke, Amfac, Theo Davies, C. Brewer, I guess that I say them, some of them simply disappeared altogether. So on this coast, Amfac's gone altogether. They own zero acres in the state. C. Brewer the same way. They were a major landowner statewide. They own zero. Theo Davies, the same thing. Other large landowners like the Campbell Estate basically have liquidated.

31:00 So you're seeing this underlying control structure of land dissipate. Community gets redefined. And you can see it in this room today in terms of how many people know or are around or were involved in that during that period in time knew sugar or didn't know sugar. There's a whole new body of rural residents. Leadership gets redefined. The role of the unions in rural communities was always a very strong piece of the politics of Hawaii. That's pretty much gone when it comes to rural Hawaii today. Plantation workers got work in other places. They went, they're no longer

31:37 working in the fields and not in agriculture. And there was a real exodus of equipment and machinery that could help fix drainage, fight fires, do things that the plantations we kind of depended on them for many generations to do. So that's what a map, that's what we look like today. Here's just a couple of color hints. In the central plain of Maui, sugar, that's the last of the sugar operations. In yellow is pasture, substantially reduced, a lot of it leaving for purchases of federal government purchased a fair amount of that, Kahuku, Hakalau lands, people have taken their

32:22 lands out of pasture and put them into koa reforestation. Military bought some land up here, PTA. In purple is diversified agriculture. In this light green is the seed company. In this darker green up here is the commercial forestry operations that have come along the Hāmākua coast particularly. And there's still a little bit of pineapple here and in a couple of other locations on Maui as well. So we went from 350,000 acres of crop, I think it says 153,000 acres, and about 760,000 acres

33:09 in pasture. So we've actually been past low tide in the last 10 years in terms of the amount of agricultural land in use. And we've started to rebuild that. But in the 1990s, after the end of these shutdowns, we hit the low tide. We hit the lowest of low tides in centuries in terms of the amount of agricultural land use. And now we're beginning to rebuild it. And we're rebuilding it on a variety of different, on a basis in different places. Places are different, each one different, each one coming up with its own kinds of solutions.

33:43 So I'll take a walk through this and we'll give you some details about what that looks like. First off, just in terms of overall crop summary, sugar is still the largest crop in the state. at about 38,000. I think HC&S says they do 36,000 acres. You add the mill, you add some of the other lands around the outside that aren't croplands, that's about 38,000. The next largest is the seed industry at about 23,000. I'm not being able to see them from here, but you can see it is about 23,000, 24,000 acres. The next largest is the commercial forest industry.

34:21 Neither the seed industry nor the forest industry were even measured in 1980. They simply emerged in that period in time. The macadamia nut industry is the fourth largest, and it's almost entirely on this island except for a little bit on the Wailuku area of Maui. And diversified agriculture is the next piece at about 16,800 acres. Beyond that, there's a little bit of dairy here, a little bit of foliage, pineapple, papaya. There's about 610 acres of loʻi taro in the state. That's just taro grown in a wetland setting. And coffee. Coffee grew substantially during this period.

35:10 So just watch the screen for a second Tell me what you see That's the 1980 look That's today One more time Okay Just to get a feel for the transition It's a statewide transition. Every community has felt it. These changes have been profound in agriculture, and we're emerging in some new ways. So there are a couple of lessons that come out of this process for me as I watch this.

35:57 One is that each region evolves separately based on the opportunities that are around it. And think about that. Think about being in Lahaina. Alika knows this. Being in Lahaina when the plantations and the pineapple operations go down. Anybody who wanted a job working was going to go find a job in the hotel business because there was a lot of business and a lot of activity. Finding new workers to work in that environment, finding people who are willing to go out every day like Brother James does over there and work hard in the fields in the hot Lahaina sun,

36:34 it's a slow uptake, and it's been a slow uptake. So, in areas where there was closer to marketplace, you'll see more of that. Who owns the land matters. So if you buy, if the state owns land or your Kamehameha schools and you don't have an exit strategy, you're not trying to part with your land holdings, you approach agriculture differently. You approach it as if you're trying to manage it for the long term. If you bought property on the Hāmākua Coast and were waiting to resell it, then you have a different kind of an owner doing a different kind of a thing.

37:16 We're very fortunate here in this community to have Ed Olson, who picked up a substantial amount of South Hilo and in the Kaʻū area. He's invested a lot of money in building agriculture and planting coffee and cocoa and macadamia nuts and investing in it. those people are few and far between in terms of who bought the lands next. Probably the most important issue from an agriculture perspective is that the weight shifted for diversified agriculture into the central plain of Oahu. This is an area that grew no real diversified agriculture 30 years ago, and today there

37:55 is more diversified agriculture in the central plain of Oahu than there is in the rest of the state combined. And why? It seems logical, right? This is right there in the middle of the urban core, but the truth is that's where the market is. And this is also an area for very large farmers, people who are farming 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 acres at a time. These companies are producing substantial amounts of new, fresh, local produce. And they're right next to the market. They put it in a truck and they deliver it to wherever it's going.

38:33 And on the neighbor islands or in farther rural farms, most of that farming is in a smaller setting. People are buying smaller pieces. They're more decentralized. They're smaller. They're more diversified. And they have to compete against the central plain if they're trying to sell into the central marketplace. Now that they meet their needs perhaps more in their own communities than they do by shipping it to Honolulu. So let's take a look statewide. The island of Kauai, again green is seed, this brown is coffee, purple is diversified agriculture, red is taro.

39:17 And this has the state land use boundary in the light green and in green, the other green is the pasture, is pasture use. What's inactive pasture use. So here's just a little lesson I take from looking at this map. This area in Kekaha, largely owned by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and the State of Hawaii and managed by the Ag Development Corp. It's in a large use. It takes a large user. There are pumps in here that have to be run all of the time, otherwise this backs up and becomes a wetland again.

39:51 This is the Robinson estate. They own it all. They manage it all. They're very tight about what they do. This is Alexander and Baldwin. They put in 5,000 acres of coffee and now there's about a 3,000 acre commercial mechanically harvested coffee operation. and Grove Farm, now owned by Steve Case et al., picks up this portion of Līhuʻe. This is where the core of agriculture is happening, and these guys put out a lot of regular employment in agriculture, be it coffee or seed or whatever, and they manage the resources in a broad way. If you go north of Līhuʻe, from about Hanamāʻulu north,

40:32 these are, in fact, Līhuʻe Plantation properties, all sold, all in multiple hands, Bette Midler, a whole variety of very wealthy people bought properties. And you see that that agriculture is kind of finding its way. It's still trying to get itself up off its feet. And when you come up to the Kīlauea area, this was C. Brewer's property. Entirely sold. Bought by, in many cases, the one-tenth of one percent of the economic structure of the country. In terms of the wealth that's gone into these people. Lots of famous people and the like.

41:06 So it's still trying to find its way. It's got a big heart for agriculture, but it's still fractured. So just notice that when large ownership persists, there is a persistence of larger scale agriculture. And when it breaks into small pieces, it's kind of every farm for themselves. Just take a couple of quick pictures. This is the Moloaʻa lands on Kauai. It's probably the most intensively farmed concentration of small farmers. There's a great story at Moloaʻa, partly because it began as a first private agricultural park.

41:47 In other words, lots were cut up without residential use, and therefore the residential value didn't appear in the asset. And farmers could farm just based on the farm value of the property. This was done when Amfac was there, and when I was working for Amfac, I managed those properties. When Amfac sold it, the next guys were most interested in building the residential component on those properties. And over time, that started to happen. They negotiated with the county over time to allow for more residential use on those properties. And what that does

42:20 is when a farmer would say, I need to be there because I have to protect my farm, but what happens is it ends up getting picked up by somebody who's going to put a 5,000 square foot house next to the coast and landscape their property. So this is tropical fruit and diversified ag. And the story behind it really is the story between real estate and agricultural value, and that's a repeating story statewide. It's about 450 acres of loʻi taro, of wetland taro, on the island of Kauaʻi. It's about 70 percent of the state's total supply of wetland taro, and about 360 acres

43:06 of that are right here on the North Shore from Hanalei out to Lumahaʻi. These folks have, they face all kinds of challenges related to doing taro, let alone the price and the amount of work it takes. It's also been bought by, this portion of land here has been bought by the National Fish and Wildlife to set aside for wetland birds. So as a result, there are whole areas of the old taro lands that have been turned into bird habitat instead of taro and we're managing for birds. And in many of those farmers, they're struggling with the presence of the birds, the nēnē,

43:45 the ʻalae, ʻalae, yeah, because they can't even shoo them out of their property. Come time to harvest, you can't shoo them because they're an endangered species. So several farmers, several longtime farmers have actually moved to other areas on Kauai to try and get away from that intervention. And birds are just one portion of the problem. I mean, apple snails, blight, there are a whole series of things that affect taro. But there are 610 acres of loʻi taro in the state today. In 1980, I think there were 710. So we've lost a bit. So central Oahu.

44:29 The largest amount of crop on the island is diversified agriculture. Second is seed. I think that's pineapple. and then a variety of smaller operations. And the bulk of it lies right here in the central plain from Haleʻiwa to ʻEwa. Just a closer-up look. You can see the, say there's 700. This is just up here to Schofield. There's a big piece of land right in the middle of Schofield, and we'll never really, Wahiawa and Schofield Barracks, that isn't going to go into agriculture. So anyway, there's a variety of pineapple and small plots, diversified agriculture.

45:14 And the seed companies bought fee-simple lands from the Campbell estate. They were able to pick them up when the Campbell estate put them on the market. And that's why they're there. And that's why they're embedded, because they own the lands themselves. This is the largest banana plantation in the United States, run by Sugar Land Farms. and a fair portion of this is the Larry Jefts farm, Aloun, [unclear], a variety of others. And down here is the blast zone around Pearl Harbor that will always be available for agriculture because you can't put a house in it.

45:52 Those are the two developments that we hear a lot about, Hoʻopili and Koa Ridge. This piece right here in ʻEwa has been part of the urban planning for many decades, but recently when they went through the rezoning, they certainly took a lot of heat for the fact that they're going to relocate some good ag land. It's unfortunate. Same thing with this Koa Ridge up here with Castle & Cooke. There is some good ag land going to be priced to that. And at some point, Oahu is going to draw some hard lines. They're doing their important ag land study today,

46:24 and I think you'll see much less of that kind of large-scale urbanization of ag land following this.

46:32 Audience: Jeff, that's not a done deal yet, right?

46:34 Jeff Melrose: What?

46:35 Audience: Hoʻopili.

46:36 Jeff Melrose: Got its zoning. The City and County has already approved its zoning. Koa Ridge, I don't think so. You know, Waiʻanae is interesting. Waiʻanae has always been a real productive place for agriculture in the state. It's a dry, harsh land. It doesn't have an irrigation system. It uses entirely domestic water systems to do its agriculture. And there's about 470 acres of diversified crops out there today. For many years, it was the core of our dairy operations, poultry operations, piggeries, diversified ag of a whole variety. And it persists as such. I was struck when I drove around it

47:25 how much of that had been planted in sweet basil I'd say 300 acres of that 500 acres in sweet basil all as an export crop, all sent to Chicago and the west coast grown primarily by Laotian and Thais who've come in and leased property in the middle of Waiʻanae So where we were once, that was a once productive area feeding food into the central O'ahu marketplace, it's now primarily exporting by air. Sweet basil, galangal, betel leaf, a variety of other kinds of Asian spices and air freighting them to the United States and elsewhere.

48:09 there. Maui's agriculture still dominated largely by HC&S. The next largest use is diversified agriculture and most of that exists up in the Kula area that it has for many decades. There's a little bit of coffee out here in Lahaina, but for the most part you'll see that the whole west Maui side of the island has very little agriculture to show for the time that for the 20 years that has been out of agriculture. Alika farms out there in a small greenhouse. James is working hard at some diversified ag just above Lahaina town.

48:48 But there really are very few significant farming activities on the West Maui Mountains. So the green carpet and the water coming in, these are all very familiar stories for us. I would hate to see it go away just because I think it would turn the central plane into a dust bowl, and you have to be very careful about that. But I know there are changes coming at HC&S at some point. This is the upcountry Maui between Pukalani and Kēōkea, the lower and the upper Kula Roads. and this is the primary core of diversified agriculture. There's a little bit of pineapple here just above the cane line

49:31 and some tropical flowers, primarily protea. And then there's some tropical fruit. There's a fair amount of persimmons and other kinds of fruits grown in Kula. Kula is a very excellent place to farm. And the county, this is the only county-run ag park in the state, and there are 20 farmers there in 5 to 20 acre lots and it's a persistent area of farming and there is no exit strategy for the county property except to keep it in farming. So that's a rich resource and it gets water off of the ditch. The entire rest of that community gets water off the domestic system.

50:14 And this probably is the logical eroder of that over time. as small farmers decide what they wish to hand off to their children? Do they hand them off a farm that ties them to that farm for the rest of their life, or do they sell it and give them a million dollars apiece and say, you know, have a good life? The challenge of real estate on top of good agriculture is profound across the state, and with the kind of views and the climate of Kula, you can see why this is a very attractive place. and there's been a lot of eroding of the agricultural activity in more recent years.

50:55 Molokai, all agriculture is really right in the central plain, Hoʻolehua Plain. The seed companies are the largest farmer and the largest employer in agriculture. There's a variety of diversified ag. Actually, Larry Jefts farms some vegetables here and still ships them out, and there are sweet potatoes in the Hawaiian homestead farmers in the homesteads up here at Hoʻolehua. Molokai doesn't have varroa mite, it doesn't have ring spot virus, and it doesn't have CBB, the coffee borer. As a result, there is still papaya being grown here. This is the Kumu Farms that you see in the marketplace.

51:37 That's the non-GMO papaya varieties grown here, but because they don't have the ring spot virus on that island yet. There's also about 100 acres of coffee and that's fairly small commercial mechanically harvested operation that's sold a lot of its land off most recently. So Hawaii Island, our two biggest players on Hawaii Island are macadamia nuts and commercial forestry. And there's a whole range of other crops that compete in that, diversified ag, papayas, some bananas, or the dairy operations, we have two dairies here. Let's take a quick look.

52:23 So you can again, just to remind you, this is the state land use boundaries and the light green, darker green are pastures. north of where we are today up the coast in north and south Hilo. What was sugar has largely gone into a variety of tree crops, macadamia nuts, tropical fruits, and some of Kamehameha School's lands went into eucalyptus forestry. And there is a little bit of dairy growing grass out on the coast, growing corn out on the coast. This purple is probably 800, I I don't have a good number. There's probably 800 acres of sweet potato grown on this island.

53:08 All Okinawan sweet potato. Virtually all of it exported. It's all run through the irradiator and sent to the west coast to the Asian markets in the west coast. 16 million pounds in 2013. So this is a nomadic crop. It doesn't stay in the same place for more than a year. partly because it doesn't sort. It sorts in the field and leaves its seconds often in the field to continue to be fed on. It doesn't turn it. It doesn't put a cover crop on the top of it. And frankly, its rows go up and down the hill. So they're not generally cooperators in the Soil Conservation Service way,

53:51 but they are a group of farmers making money turning product out the door and sending it to the West Coast. We see the seconds. We see a fair amount of this in our marketplace, but it's generally the seconds that we send. So it's a big area of use, but I'm not sure on the long term a real sustainable use. And they're running out of virgin land. They're constantly looking for new lands to farm. If you go up the Hāmākua Coast, again, the forestry investment that Kamehameha Schools leased to is still in place, and then there's a big piece that Parker put in.

54:26 This is the dairy, the Big Island dairy. They've just invested $15 million to expand their dairy operation, and they grow about 40% of their cattle feed on site or bring it in from local sources. The Hāmākua Ditch, which is a big water source, still yet to kind of get very much diversified agriculture underneath it. There is a co-op and there are pockets of emerging diversified ag and much of this will end up in the cattle business because you can irrigate pasture and there's a slaughterhouse right here.

55:00 So it will allow for that grass to be fed in order to feed the cattle more effectively and basically fatten them up before you slaughter. This is our core agricultural diversified ag core, the Lālāmilo and the Puʻukapu farm lots in Waimea. fed by the Waimea irrigation system. There's a fair amount of land in the Department of Hawaiian Homes that is not in active farming and could be, and there's a great effort going on up there by the wild farms, people at wild farms and the Homesteaders Association to try and provoke some new agriculture, primarily in greenhouse operations,

55:42 to get Hawaiian homesteaders involved, at least in part-time farming activities. This is some of the oldest, most, these are the guys when you grab their hand you know they've been farming their whole lives in the Lālāmilo farm lots. And they tell me that probably about 50% of what they grow goes to Honolulu and about 50% stays here locally as part of our local food supply. The Kona Coast is, again, primarily an orchard environment because of the lack of soil. The lighter brown is coffee, the darker is macadamia nuts.

56:29 And if you take the whole of the Kona Coast, there are about 6,800 acres, it gets down to Mac Farms. This is a very rich environment for agriculture and digitizing it was the worst piece of the whole effort because it's all been there a long time. It's really hard to tell the difference between a fruit tree, an avocado tree, an ʻulu tree, a macadamia nut tree and much of the coffee has macadamia nuts and coffee grown on the same property underneath it. So I think it's about 20% of all the little circles we made we had to make them here. But it's also a very rich production area.

57:07 Particularly the biggest piece of it is an export crop, but there's a lot of other kinds of fruit trees and the like that put good food into this community and into the state as a whole. We mapped pasture acres in some detail. About 73% of that pasture area is here on this island. This is really where the core of cattle production is. Oahu just a very little bit. There are slaughterhouses on each one of these islands. The bulk of the cattle industry today is still shipped out. There are cow-calf operations. They sell their cows to the mainland, put them on a container and send

57:49 them to the mainland. But there are several efforts particularly by Parker Ranch and by the Kuahiwi Ranch folks in Kaʻū to build a grass-fed, pasture-fed business to keep some of those animals at home.

58:03 Audience: Do you have a comparison between the amount of land use for vegetables compared to the pasture use for cattle?

58:15 Jeff Melrose: Yeah he's asking to compare the difference between the amount of acres in cattle pasture use and the amount in vegetable use. Numerically I think the number was 16,000 in diversified agricultural crops, and that doesn't include bananas and papayas and some of the other things that we eat here locally, but just diversified crops.

58:39 Audience: But just [unclear] for plant vegetables compared to cattle?

58:44 Jeff Melrose: I'd have to look at that number again, but I would say 30 or 40,000 acres to 763. But I don't think it's a fair comparison and it's pretty irrelevant, frankly, because it isn't like those lands could be used for something else. That's the point I want to make. Yeah, yeah, no problem. But there's the difference. But I think the comparison is it's apples and oranges because of the nature of the land you would farm and the nature of the land you would pasture. So there may be a small interface overlap in some place, but I'll tell

59:19 you there's so much land available for agriculture in different places. The cattle industry has shrunk down a lot and some of it has come from other crops and some of it's gone to koa forests and some of it's gone to other kinds of things in the last 30 years. But I think you're...anyway, so again, we're down to about three quarters of a million acres in pasture use. This is probably one more related to natural farming. I started mapping pig farms. And you go to Hawaii and I, and you can see these ponds, right? They're kind of in the back in the bushes, and you can see a little water

59:57 flowing into them, and they're the waste ponds, you know. So I started mapping them, and I thought, ah, it's not right. I shouldn't be doing this, you know, because someone's going to come along and go, hey, look at that. So I talked to people at the Department of Ag, and they said, well, yeah, probably that's not a good idea. So they gave, they actually know where all of the pig farms are. They have to. They have to know. And there was, when porcine diarrhea came here last December, they needed to go to every one of those farms to make sure that was being dealt with

1:00:29 and it wasn't being harbored in any particular farm. They got the GPS locations for each of those gates for each of those farms. So they gave us numbers in terms of the total sow count that they knew about on the island and where they were, kind of by judicial district. So that's what this map shows you, is that in red, using this as the key for these colors, the numbers of sows per district. Assume a sow gives birth twice a year, maybe throws eight piglets a time. The heaviest concentration is in the Waianae area, Waianae, Waimanalo. Oahu is about 58% of the pig production in the state.

1:01:17 and primarily because it has access to the slop and the food waste out of Oahu. And there's a little bit of that on Maui as well. But for the most part, the cost of grain, the cost of meeting environmental regulations for waste waters have really eroded the pig production business, and we're still importing a fair number of live pigs into Honolulu for the Chinese hot market and much of the local production is really sold off as small piglets to different folks to raise themselves or to eat young. There's almost no real commercial agriculture of pig except on Kauai. There is a fair

1:02:03 amount of local production on Kauai from one large farm that actually feeds, it gets into the local marketplace.

1:02:15 Audience: [unclear] 200 and 400 [unclear].

1:02:17 Jeff Melrose: OK. That's a good point. This is a draft, and we're working on the colors. I think they're about the same, though. I don't know that there's a distinction. I have to go look at those numbers again. But you're right. We're working on colors. So there is, huh?

1:02:34 Audience: Do you know in those districts whether it's more one to 200 or more 200 to 400 sows in those areas?

1:02:41 Jeff Melrose: One to 200. Yeah, I said one to 200. Just an estimate. So we've also done a little bit of work on bees. And Danielle Downey has been helpful for us. She's the state apiary person. And this was just an effort. There is a data set that they collect, voluntary beekeepers and colonies. And so we broke it down by judicial district and mapped them by color. And one thing that's very clear is that the South Kona district is really the most significant bee population area. There's a, there are big, we're big exporters of queen bees. We supply something like 70% of all of Canada's queen bees for

1:03:26 commercial bee operations. They're a major player in the United States as well. And, and recently the introduction of varroa mite and the hive beetle have had a real impact on decimating the wild hives that have been evolving and have come out of the commercial hives over the years. So without those wild hives, the commercial hives, the managed hives, the ones that are being taken care of on a regular basis, become much more important for pollination. Because a lot of times the macadamia nut guys didn't need somebody from outside because they had plenty of wild bees. Not so many anymore.

1:04:03 So I walk up the forest during flowering at an ʻōhiʻa tree. In the old days, you could hear it before you saw it. now you gotta see it before you hear it and that's really the evolution of that wild hive collapse that happened as a result of some of these introductions so just coming to an end I just want to make the point that in this process we talk about agriculture as if it's a one thing lots of conversation about agriculture but it's not a one thing, it's a many thing And it's different by place, by crop, by people, by method, by land ownership.

1:04:46 All these things are the underlying features that help to define what happens where around the state. And what I would do is simply take some questions or thoughts or whatever. The point of this effort, this whole exercise, is about creating kind of a common understanding of what's on the ground and then thinking about it. What does it teach us? What does it tell us about change? Yeah?

1:05:13 Audience: Are you getting all your mapping information from Google Earth, or do you have any [unclear]?

1:05:22 Jeff Melrose: A couple of answers. One is that some folks. Oh, the question was, thank you very much. The question was, where are we getting our mapping data? Where are we picking up the information? We've used Google. Google's a very useful tool, because you can actually slide it back and forth and look at time, depth, and see, you know, get a cloudless image sometimes. We have WorldView-2 imagery. We have picked up a couple of different pockets of imagery that were flown more recently. And in some cases landowners provided us the data themselves. HC&S gave us their data. The

1:05:59 forestry industry gave us their data already done, already mapped as their operational mapping tool. So some of it came from the original source, some of it digitized off of a variety of different uses. Yeah?

1:06:15 Audience: What is the department's policy of self-sufficiency and sustainability?

1:06:23 Jeff Melrose: The guy who was supposed to answer that's not here. And you know, I don't know. My sense is that, and I'm not going to try to answer for Scott, So I don't want to try to answer it from a department perspective. The question was what's the department's position on self-sufficiency and sustainability. And I think part of what the answer is that this is all part of a whole cloth and that there's room for lots of different kinds of agriculture. And if you simply so I don't think there's anything that says no not that.

1:07:02 I mean that would be silly, right? There are lots of kinds of agriculture going on. And so that's the answer is there's no reason to think that it's not a good idea. Chris?

1:07:16 Chris: Thank you for this presentation. My question is about the types of agriculture that's currently going on in the state of Hawaii. How much of agriculture is in the In the state of Hawaii, stays in Hawaii? Do you have an idea?

1:07:36 Jeff Melrose: Yeah, the question is how much agriculture in Hawaii stays in Hawaii. And I think it's a good question, and it's a complicated one. If you took the diversified ag one and said there's 16,000 acres of diversified ag, I'd say most of that stays there, all but for, let's say, 500, 600 acres of basil and another 800 acres of sweet potato that run out the door. There's a little bit of export of onions from small guys. I mean, every now and then there's a pocket market in the U.S. where you can grow onions and sell them real well in the down market during the year.

1:08:21 but I'd say that the export process is what gives us the papaya industry. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be growing the papayas we're growing. The same is true, but most of the banana stays here. Most of the lychee, most of the tropical fruits that we can't treat, we keep. So you have to kind of go through the individual list and figure out a percentage and then look at it from an acres perspective maybe. Maybe 50% of the papaya stays here. So it kind of depends by the type. Yeah, in the back.

1:09:02 Audience: Are these maps available online?

1:09:04 Jeff Melrose: They will be. They will be posted on the Department of Agriculture's website and in the Department of Office of Planning as a digital layer. They may actually also be put in as a KMZ, which is something you can open up in Google Earth. So, as I said at the beginning, this is a preview. We'll be done with this product by maybe the end of October. And it's still subject to their kind of acceptance. I can't give you these numbers and this whole thing today because frankly they haven't even seen it yet. I was hoping Scott would see it for the first time today.

1:09:42 time today. But it is, one of the things I do these presentations and I welcome the opportunity to do it is it starts to give me a better sense of what the feedback and response is because this can make it better and focus it more effectively as a result. Yeah, in the back, [name unclear].

1:09:58 Audience: I appreciate your statement about the exit [unclear]. I just wanted to find out more, if you'd shed light on the southeast and southwest districts of the island in the way of agricultural interest.

1:10:21 Jeff Melrose: So you're talking about the southeast and southwest, this lower portion, South Kona, Kaʻū, is that what you're asking about? Oh, South Hilo, out to South Hilo. You know, one of the things about this side of the island, it's kind of a planning nightmare because they went through and cut up a ton of properties without any infrastructure in them, but it still gives people a chance to get a hold of a two, one, two, three, five-acre parcel at a reasonable price.

1:10:55 Think about it, most of the tropical fruit business, most of the cut flower business, most of the macadamia business, most of the papaya business are all based in the Puna district in South Hilo. This is on C, D, and E lands. There's no irrigation system. But that agriculture persists, not because of the soil and not because of some irrigation system. It's because people can afford to live there. They can put these crops up on benches and they grow them on benches. That the potential for agriculture is not just about soil and water. And we keep kicking at that.

1:11:31 But the truth is, there's a ton of agriculture going on in Puna and we've got none of that. So 89% of the agriculture on the island of Hawaii is on C, D, and E lands. 50% of it is just D and E quality. This is Land Study Bureau ABCD ranking. So there's one of the good things is that you can there's a lot of opportunity for small guys to explore and expand here in the in that particular area of Hilo of Puna and South Hilo You get into South Hilo the land gets more expensive. This is true

1:12:09 Audience: Did you map the koa [unclear]?

1:12:14 Jeff Melrose: In the Ag District, yes, but

1:12:16 Audience: I didn't really see it where I expected to see it. Maybe it was there and I just had no impression about that.

1:12:20 Jeff Melrose: So what lands were you talking about specifically?

1:12:30 Audience: On the Hāmākua side, [unclear] koa.

1:12:31 Jeff Melrose: Right, and like Umikoa Ranch and the group that's the Hawaiian Legacy Hardwoods. What I was trying to map, his question is about the koa resource and whether or not new koa was being mapped in this process. I talked to each of those folks and I asked the question, is this a commercial operation? Are you planting it for the purpose of harvest or are we planting it for the purpose of stewardship and long-term forest management? Kamehameha Schools, who's been planting at Keauhou Ranch since the 1950s or 60s, they may

1:13:09 take a couple of trees, but for the most part, they're not intending to turn this into a logging operation. Certainly not like the Hāmākua Coast eucalyptus. was true with the legacy hardwoods. They sell it as if it's going to be sold, but they told me the bulk of this is legacy pieces. People putting their name on a tree or their auntie's name on a tree or their father's name on a tree and wishing it to grow forever. So it's an interesting balance question, but we put up some of it.

1:13:39 Audience: But why doesn't it appear on the map?

1:13:40 Jeff Melrose: Because it wasn't a commercial use. She says, why doesn't it appear on the map? But I think you had another question. You were going to ask a question, and I want to remind you. Yeah.

1:13:51 Audience: Jeff, are you the person we can primarily thank for the Hawaii County Food Self-Sufficiency [Baseline]?

1:14:00 Jeff Melrose: There are probably a couple of us, but, yeah, I wrote it.

1:14:05 Audience: Do you know if the state has appreciated you and created one for the entire state?

1:14:13 Jeff Melrose: Well that's what this is intended to do in part. So it started at that level and it then grew to the statewide. And Scott understood it when he saw it the first time from here. And he said let's take it up another step and let's do it statewide. The difference is this process, this report isn't going to focus so much on trying to get food data in one pile because they've contracted Sustain Hawaii to try and do that and come up with some dashboard of things you can watch. But the truth is, and this is just a very important truth, is agriculture data sucks. We aren't collecting it.

1:14:53 We're telling ourselves we're going to be twice, we're going to produce twice the amount of Agriculture in the state. And from what to what? We don't have a clue. And we stopped. We laid off 25 enumerators at the Department of Agriculture in 2007. And from that point on, we have a blank in our agricultural monitoring process.

1:15:15 Audience: So the USDA on the mainland has the farm census. Does that happen here?

1:15:24 Jeff Melrose: Yes, the natural, She's asking about the National Farm Census, NASS, the National Ag Statistics Service. Yes. Understand that NASS is really aimed at mapping and collecting data out of large-scale commodity productions. That's really what it was intended for because people invest in the futures of these things, and whether it's orange juice or pork bellies, they want data on that stuff. Because we're a boutique player and a small player, their tools are fairly blunt objects for getting that kind of data.

1:16:01 Kathy King, who is the new head of that here, has a real interest in expanding that and developing a system that starts to be more responsive to our small scale operations. She's talking about doing a cocoa one. Nobody's ever really done anything on cocoa before. So NASS is a tool. I look at it kind of as a survey tool. And it's only as good as people who respond to the survey. I asked Kathy the other day if Larry Jefts fills out the form and she says no. Larry puts out a pound of food for every resident of the state of Hawaii every six days. And he's not putting his numbers in.

1:16:38 Audience: And also to go off of that, we're grouped in with the Pacific region. So if you consider that food's California, Hawaii is very minor compared to California, so a lot of the money goes to bigger states. Well, and many of the questions on that point, because I filled it out many times on the mainland, many of the questions are completely irrelevant to agriculture in Hawaii. Yes.

1:16:57 Jeff Melrose: Kathy's trying to make some changes to that and make it more equitable and useful. Yeah, support Kathy in that effort. It's a big deal and she's trying to be a trim tab at the bottom of a big ship that doesn't turn. I'll go back, back there. Oh, are you standing already? Okay.

1:17:13 Audience: I was able to come here in 99 and buy ag land, mostly grazing land for $6,000 an acre in the next square. Most of the ag land is sold like ag 20 and up. That same year, other people just crossed the highway and bought the same land, probably paid the same price, have been able to subdivide 100 down to 20 acre parcels and sell by the acre for $50,000 an acre. So I guess I'm wondering why zoning and planning doesn't prevent that extreme increase in the value of the land.

1:17:59 And land that, you know, just products work.

1:18:06 Jeff Melrose: That's kind of the $10,000 question in terms of agriculture in Hawaii and the interface between it and real estate. There's no doubt about that. Although it's interesting to note that on the Hāmākua Coast between the Wailuku River and Waipiʻo, the last time there was a state land use application that changed agriculture lands to urban was in 1976. And it was plantations trying to expand plantation camps. So, for the most part, what you've seen on that coast has not been really new subdivision, but when you take the green carpet off the top of the land, there is a settlement pattern

1:18:51 there, ahupuaʻa boundaries, grant boundaries, LCAs, roads that run now in between them and split them up, they are pre-existing lots. And for the most part, that's what settled the bulk of South Hilo, is those existence of pre-existing lots which can be put out and reformed and resold. And a lot of money has been made doing just that. But yeah, the increase in value drives a lot of the... Uncle in the hat.

1:19:21 Audience: with food security on a small scale, growing food for the people of Hawaii. That's our biggest concern, I think, for the past. Just pretend that you are now the governor of the the state of Hawaii, what would you do for agriculture? What would the changes be made so that you can actually start seeing transformation in agriculture to feed our own people? You have to be, it's like, if you're a farmer, you have to have more knowledge than most people in the country.

1:19:55 Jeff Melrose: He's putting me on the spot here. He wants me to tell him what the answer is. And I would say that it's a menu, not a meal, right off the bat. It's a menu and not a meal. And if you're going to be putting large scale, and if I was, like I said, if Larry Jefts says I put out a pound of food for every resident in the state of Hawaii every six days, I'd feed that one because he's going to continue to do it. That's one answer. But when you get outside of the central plain of Oahu, then it is a diversified agricultural circumstance.

1:20:37 People are going to be aiming at the marketplaces that are closest to them. And food safety pops its head up right there in the middle of that process because if you want to get to more people, you're going to have to deal with the food safety issue. If you're not farming at an economic scale, I don't know how to help you. Because if the farmer makes money he'll keep farming and if not eventually they're going to stop farming. So the scale is an important piece of that. Whatever that scale is for you. For Vince it's a quarter acre and he does fine with that.

1:21:08 Vincent Mina: Two thousand square feet.

1:21:10 Jeff Melrose: Oh, two thousand square feet. My goodness. No wonder you have all this time to do the Yeah, right. So, you know, I think the truth is, and I'll just end, I mean, I would just kind of finish that comment with, really, it is a menu, and it's a whole variety of solutions, and it depends on where, and different communities need to look at how those, how you meet those needs. I for years have watched places like Kohala and Kaʻū and these very remote locations saying we're going to be the breadbasket for the state of Hawaii and we got all this land and Hāmākua is going to feed everybody.

1:21:54 If you look back at today it's just not there and it's because the real practical realities of agriculture in a remote location are all about transportation and energy costs and gasoline and delivery and how do you get the guy off the farm to go take his stuff to where it needs to go. And those are just fundamental challenges about doing ag in a rural community. Doing it so that you feed your neighbors, aloha brah. That's what that's about. And that's what rural life is about, is working with each other to feed each other. And it

1:22:26 doesn't always generate a full income. Maybe it helps you to supplement your income in some way. I saw one more question back here.

1:22:32 Audience: I just wanted to point that out, that any commodity grown in Hawaii is not irradiated for consumption. Can you answer that?

1:22:43 Jeff Melrose: Say that again.

1:22:46 Audience: Any commodity grown in Hawaii is not irradiated for local consumption.

1:22:51 Jeff Melrose: Oh yeah, she's simply making the point that we don't irradiate food unless we ship it out. And that's true. Yeah.

1:22:59 Audience: Does the state have any thoughts on the restoration of the ahupuaʻa system?

1:23:05 Jeff Melrose: I couldn't tell you that and I'm not representing the state here. Thanks.

1:23:09 James: One problem as farmers, we all want to grow a large, wonderful amount of, say, banana.

1:23:10 Jeff Melrose: Hey, James.

1:23:16 James: But we still get imports through agents that says, we're going to agree to get bananas from the Philippines. We're going to agree to get bananas from the Philippines and Ecuador. And that stops us as farmers because we can't get our market growth to the market that we're competing by. This outside, you know, it kind of hurts.

1:23:38 Jeff Melrose: Yeah, and I think there's some bigger global issues that are going to affect that. And certainly the food safety issue is going to do it. Certainly I think to some degree the Pacific trade agreements are going to have some of that impact. Maybe not so much on bananas, but I guarantee you the flower industry and the foliage industry are going to get hit hard by that. They've already been hit by trade-offs that have been done diplomatically and affected them. Yeah, we're done. Okay, thank you very much.

1:24:16 Vincent Mina: What a wonderful presentation. Give it up again, please, for Jeff Melrose. You know, it's really sweet to see this work being done by someone who has such sensitivity to local agriculture and what that represents. So we have a resource in Jeff here. The jar that is sent around with the hau flower FPJ, if it hasn't been all consumed yet, here's the lid. Okay, so what we're going to do is a few minutes. I want to articulate something. First of all, Greg, don't go anywhere. Who here is president of the chapters on the Big

1:24:59 Island? Please stand up. Greg, stand up. Steve, Steve Cicala. Richard, where's, is Dash here? Where's Kyle? Is Kyle here? Ned, you're vice president on Kauaʻi? You're standing up? Okay, yes you are. I don't give you that. Okay, so we got leaders here for the Farmers Union, these are all farmers. Isn't that sweet? Can you give them a round of applause? There's three legs of our organization that we focus in on and that's education, legislation and cooperation. So one of the things that we feel and value is the fact of developing

1:25:44 food hubs here in the islands. I know Kohala is really taking some leadership in that respect. I like to call them an ACDC, energetic by nature, an agriculture community development cooperative. And if we can see those things manifest, then farmers can do what they love to do and farm. And then I have this vision that someday we're going to be able to go to our markets. Right now there's an iPhone app to take your EKG. You can literally do that. Well, at some point I see scanning devices to where if I'm mining the soil and I'm growing

1:26:20 cucumbers and then we got James growing cucumbers organically and we both bring them to market they look like cucumbers but we're gonna be able to scan that produce to where the nutrient density in James organic cucumbers is going to show up and we can market it with that nutrient density of how much percentage of nutrients is in there and my mining the soil the nutrient density is low while get paid less all of a sudden you'll see farmers pay attention to their practices yeah and start doing more Korean natural farming practices

1:26:49 Also, putting carbon back in the soil is another aspect that we can then generate water prices, the lower water prices for farmers who put more carbon back into their soil with their practices as opposed to mining the soil again of all life. So I think this is the future of agriculture personally in the spirit of holding farmers accountable and that we can start to create more of a system here. like Greg was talking about in feeding the people of Hawaii. We have, through our organization, because we value regenerative forms of agriculture,

1:27:29 if you looked on that map that Jeff had, the earlier picture, that was regenerative agriculture. That was agriculture that was built on aloha ʻāina and mālama ʻāina. So that's the direction we are going in. We're not here to make anyone or any practice wrong, but what we are here is to support all farmers that are pointed in the direction of regenerating their soils. I manage my soils organically but I haven't arrived anywhere. I'm constantly honing and honing but in that direction as opposed to going in the direction of killing my soil. So that's what we value as an organization.

1:28:05 Know that your membership will support that. And also another value of membership here, we have local discounts. We're going to be coming out with a white paper through statewide and national of all the discounts you can get through being a member. I saved like 25 bucks on one week at Ace Hardware, you know, paid half of my membership. And another aspect is the monthly meetings. These are valuable nuggets of opportunities to get together where people bring locally produced dishes and share educational, just like we're doing today, at a gathering. You know, I know Drake. Where is Drake?

1:28:46 Is he in the room? Drake is doing that monthly with Korean Natural Farming in this facility. So support, you know, as a member, I mean, it's better than going to the movies, folks. You know, go out, have a night out, have a nice local meal, and then be able to share and network with others who are doing these practices. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you know.