In Hawai‘i, 20% of our trash is food waste, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. When dumped in landfills, food rots and produces methane, a greenhouse gas that adds to climate change.

But thanks to bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms, composting turns food waste like coffee grounds, eggshells, and fruit and vegetable peels into nutrient-rich soil.

“It makes really great soil,” says Topher Dean, president of Recycle Hawaii. “We need to amend topsoil, especially after a century of sugar and pesticides and herbicides and bulldozers and things like that.”

Recycle Hawaii is a nonprofit based on Hawai‘i Island that focuses on minimizing waste. It oversees Malama Aina Compostables, a student-led group that has diverted over 11,000 pounds of cafeteria waste from the landfill and sent 665 pounds of food to food banks.

WORMS SPEED THINGS UP

The composting time needed to turn food waste into soil varies immensely depending on the food and the process used. Worms can shorten that significantly by producing vermicast in two to three months.

UH Mānoa’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience says vermicast – the waste produced by worms – is like fertilizer and soil conditioner, and has been shown to increase plant growth and suppress pests and diseases in greenhouses and field soils.

In Hawai‘i, red worms and Indian blue worms are most commonly used for vermicomposting. You can buy these composting worms on O‘ahu at Olomana Gardens in Waimānalo, Ewa Blue Worms in Makakilo and Oahu Worm Ohana in Mānoa.

Oahu Worm Ohana – supported by the College of Tropical Agriculture – offers monthly workshops in Mānoa and Pearl City. Starter kits provided at the workshops cost $95 but otherwise the workshops are free. Learn more at wormohana.org.

Mindy Jaffe teaches workshops, including supplies, on how to use composting worms at UH Mānoa’s Magoon Research and Instruction Station. At right, workshop participants learn firsthand how worms reduce food waste and create soil for growing plants. | Photos courtesy: Mindy Jaffe Magoon Wormery

Mindy Jaffe, nicknamed the “Waikīkī Worm Lady,” was one of the first people to introduce vermicomposting to Hawai‘i. She says that after learning about the process, she was unable to secure worms due to shipping restrictions – so she raised them herself at Petersons’ Upland Farm in Wahiawā.

Jaffe raised worms for 11 years at Petersons’ and sold them from her Waikīkī apartment and from her Waikiki Worm store. While she closed that business after more than 20 years, she continues to teach people how to use composting worms at UH Mānoa’s Magoon Research and Instruction Station at 2717 Woodlawn Drive in Mānoa.

She says she collects leftovers and food waste from the nearby elementary school and community and feeds her worms around 500 pounds of food waste a week.

In 2021, the Oahu Worm Ohana was born; since then, it’s collected 39,892 pounds of food waste and shared worms with 27 households on the island. Worm Ohana tracks food waste and vermicompost production and shares the data with the College of Tropical Agriculture.

“My unifying principle is always ‘waste is a resource,’” Jaffe says. “And if you see it as a resource, it’s an opportunity, and oh my God, there’s so much waste. And I just see the opportunities here are absolutely endless.”

Jaffe says composting is easier and less smelly than most people expect. She hosts the monthly workshops: One is on the second Saturday of the month at the Urban Garden Center in Pearl City; the other is on the fourth Saturday at the Magoon research facility. At the workshops she teaches people how to compost and sells them predrilled 18-gallon bins, elevation bricks, cardboard, food collection boxes and worms, all for $95.

YOUR CHOICE: HOT OR COLD COMPOSTING

There are two ways of composting: hot and cold. If you are doing home gardening, cold composting is ideal.

It’s slower but takes less work and fewer materials. In a bin, add a layer of coconut fiber, pine shavings, or household celluloses like egg cartons or small pieces of soaked cardboard. Add the worms on top, put the food waste above the worms and top the bin with shredded paper. Newspaper, paper towels and shredded cardboard can be added but wax paper and glossy paper, like the kind that Hawaii Business Magazine is printed on, are not compostable.

Hot compost piles – which require regular turning – should be constructed all at once, in a 4-to-5-foot area. As the pile decomposes and shrinks, a 3-cubic-foot area underground is necessary to retain heat. These piles should reach temperatures between 110 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which helps kill most weed seeds and plant diseases. Farms and small businesses tend to use hot composting.

Passive composting is a style of cold composting that requires the piling of organic products, too, but without turning the pile. This method, which takes significantly longer, is prone to weeds and can attract pests.

Avoid adding citrus and pineapple waste to your compost bins – the excessive acidity can kill microorganisms and worms. Meat, fish, greasy foods, dairy products, papaya seeds, twigs, branches and animal feces are not recommended either.

A pilot program called the O‘ahu Compost Project collected food waste from eight businesses in Honolulu’s Chinatown from January 2023 to January 2024, which led to the creation of 39,537 pounds of compost. There’s no word yet on whether the program will be renewed.

Compost bins, which help maintain the right moisture and aeration, can cost $10 to $400. They can be purchased online or from hardware stores. Worm Ohana explains how you can make your own at wormohana.org.

Kaua‘i County offers free compost bins at three locations: the Kaua‘i Resource Center, the Hanalei Initiative Creative Center and at ‘Āina Ho‘okupu o Kīlauea. The bins are available by appointment; email solidwaste@kauai.gov, hanaleiinitiative@gmail.com or info@ainahookupuokilauea.org for information.

If composting takes too much of your space or time, you can give food scraps to Full Circle Farm in Waimānalo, Leftover Love Co. at farmers markets or Compost Kauai in Līhu‘e or Kīlauea.

The folks at Full Circle Farm, formerly called Green Rows Farm, use collected food scraps to create compost and to feed their chickens. Farm Manager Sean Anderson says they collect around 600 to 800 pounds of food waste daily from businesses, food banks and individuals around the island.

Photos courtesy: Mindy Jaffe Magoon Wormery

For $25 a month, Leftover Love gives you a 5-gallon bucket to fill with food leftovers. When you drop off a full bucket, you receive a gallon of compost in return. Since the group uses commercial grade composters, it accepts meat, fish, seafood and dairy – items not recommended for home composters.

In April, Leftover Love collected 2,004 pounds of food waste that would have otherwise ended in the landfill, Anderson says.

On Kaua‘i, Compost Kauai collects buckets of food waste directly from homes for $26 to $32 a month, depending on the pickup location. For the same price, you can drop your waste off at Compost Kauai locations in Līhu‘e, Kapa‘a and Kīlauea. The nonprofit sells 5-gallon bags of compost back to consumers for $21.

Learn about composting on Maui at westmauigreencycle.com. Recycle Hawaii on Hawai‘i Island provides a composting fact sheet at tinyurl.com/ucompost.

Jaffe says she wants as many people as possible to compost their leftover food.

“I’m worming my way to their consciousness,” she jokes. “I work real hard every day, [as do] all my former staff members who also are doing this now. It’s miraculous, and it’s wonderful, and I just want it to keep happening. So, yeah, spread the worm.”

State administrative rules, state laws and county ordinances still use the outdated land classifications to inform decisions about the siting of country clubs, farm dwellings, solar farms and even landfills.

Efforts to create new designations over the decades have failed. A state report in 2024 warned, “These legacy classifications not only obscure the true potential of Hawai‘i’s lands but also complicate efforts to adapt to modern agricultural and land development needs, representing a dramatic departure from the holistic resource management principles of the ahupua‘a system.” (tinyurl.com/hilandreport)

The latest effort to reform the system failed to pass the state Legislature this year. According to some observers, one reason may be that the issues are too abstract for some lawmakers. It’s naturally difficult to comprehend the relevance of a half-century-old study to Hawai‘i’s agricultural future.

But numbers help explain why reform is so necessary. Of Hawai‘i’s total area of 4.11 million acres, approximately 47% is classified as agricultural — 1.93 million acres, according to the state’s Data Book. Yet only 120,632 acres were actually farmed for crops in 2020, the latest year for which data is available.

Designated agricultural land is everywhere in Hawai‘i. This is why the saga of the Land Study Bureau is not only a tale of a defunct government agency. It is the story of why the future of Hawai‘i’s agricultural sector is arrested by outdated metrics informed by a foreign past. Furthermore, it is a tale of what needs to be done to untether Hawai‘i’s future from an agricultural history that will never return.

The Highest and Best Use

Territorial Gov. Samuel P. King created the Land Study Bureau in 1957 to “develop, assemble, coordinate and interpret data on the characteristics and utilization of land throughout the Territory” to determine the highest and best uses of those lands.

The bureau’s five-point, alphabetical scale ranked “A” ag lands as the most productive, while “E” lands were considered least productive. Preserving high-yield, economically productive ag lands was a critical piece of the bureau’s mandate.

“It is relatively easy to convert good agricultural land to urban areas but the process can seldom be reversed,” warned a 1959 LSB report (tinyurl.com/1959report).

While the bureau’s “Overall (Master) Productivity Rating” ranked lands ostensibly based on facts and data on topography, rainfall and soil surface texture, many designations involved subjective decisions. For instance, sites reliant on extensive irrigation were classified as receiving 100% rainfall, no matter the actual precipitation.

Tomotsu Sahara, an LSB specialist in land classification, explained the association between higher land value and greater water availability during a 1969 conference on land use issues at UH. “Where there is a moisture deficiency and irrigation water is not available,” Sahara explained, “the land types are rated lower than if adequate moisture were available. If to this land water were applied, it would be given a higher productivity rating.” (tinyurl.com/Irrigateland) Decades later, the designations remain, regardless of whether the irrigation systems are still being used or have fallen into disrepair or disuse.

“It’s a snapshot of a particular era’s irrigation,” explains Hunter Heaivilin, a local food systems planner who oversaw the drafting of the legislatively mandated report in 2024. Whether or not land was irrigated for sugar or left unirrigated (as was the case with pineapple) would have long-range consequences. “The legacy of global market forces mediated through crop decisions and thus, irrigation, became enshrined in our policy for over half a century,” he says.

The nationally renowned planning firm Harland Bartholomew & Associates was hired to work with the Land Study Bureau; it produced recommendations in 1961 concerning implementation of the state’s land use law. (tinyurl.com/1959report)

The law remains in effect, dividing the state’s lands into four critical zoning areas: (1) urban; (2) rural; (3) agricultural; and (4) conservation. These zoning designations supersede county zoning authority.

The 2024 state report concluded, “Most remarkably, soil data collected in the 1930s, released in the 1950s, and incorporated into Land Study Bureau ratings in the 1960s continues to govern critical land use decisions – such as where solar energy projects will be established on agricultural lands in the 2030s.”

As plantations declined and agricultural trends shifted, the relevance of the Land Study Bureau’s reports came into question. But the LSB was closed before it could re-evaluate its methods: In 1973, the state budget effectively abolished the bureau, although the budget bill itself did not explicitly say why. Instead, it fell to House Standing Committee Report 732 to make a single note of the LSB’s deletion from the state budget, rationalizing that “this is what should be done when programs cease to be of high priority in terms of university or State needs.”

Meanwhile, then Gov. George Ariyoshi used LSB classifications to limit the “permissible uses” of agricultural lands in 1976. And though their applicability to real-world debates over the future of agricultural lands are inadequate, the bureau’s classifications continue to influence land use decisions today.

How Did We Get to This Point?

In the decades after the publication of the Land Study Bureau’s last findings in 1973, Hawai‘i’s political institutions struggled to create a universal classification system for managing agricultural lands.

The LSB’s thorough findings were supposed to inform a transparent process. “As many planners have discovered, however, the material is too academic in some respects and too difficult to apply in others to be useful as a guide for specific questions of conservation or development or for political administrative judgment between the two,” planner Thomas Creighton said in 1978.

Alternative systems of assessing agricultural land have been proposed. In 1977, the state Board of Agriculture adopted a broader, more expansive mechanism for designating “prime” agricultural lands. In 1978, the Hawai‘i Constitutional Convention adopted an amendment to “conserve and protect agricultural lands, promote diversified agriculture, increase agricultural self-sufficiency and assure the availability of agriculturally suitable lands.” The Constitution mandated that the Legislature would be responsible for providing “standards and criteria” to accomplish these goals.

The Land Evaluation and Site Assessment Commission, established by Ariyoshi in 1983, finalized the mechanics of a proposed system in 1986. Nevertheless, the Legislature refused to adopt the system, rendering the work worthless. It wasn’t until 2005 that a state law created the Important Agricultural Lands (IAL) designation. According to Earl Yamamoto, a planner with the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture, LSB data can influence the designation of IAL parcels by the State Land Use Commission.

Meanwhile, the LSB classification system continues to govern permissible uses on all state agricultural lands. As of 2024, permissible uses of agricultural lands have been expanded through amendments 25 times.

The LSB’s land classification process “was a one shot deal. It hadn’t been updated,” says Aaron Setogawa, acting branch chief of the state’s Land Use Division. “There was no means to update the [LSB] system. There was no means to challenge or effectuate changes in it because it was just a study. It was a snapshot in time.”

Setogawa is a major proponent of the 2024 state report, the latest attempt to reform the LSB classification system.

The reform effort began with state Sen. Lorraine Inouye, a longtime advocate for farmers who represents Hilo, Pauka‘a, Pāpa‘ikou and Pepe‘ekeo on the east side of Hawai‘i Island. During the 2022 session, she introduced Senate Bill 2056, which formally pushed for an updated land classification system. The bill passed and was signed into law as Act 189 by Gov. David Ige.

So 50 years after the last LSB studies were furnished, the state Office of Planning and Sustainable Development was tasked with determining whether the studies were still relevant. As Setogawa coordinated the preparation of Act 189’s final report, these were the questions that he pondered: “What is the history? How did we get to this point? What are ways to improve [the system]?”

Stakeholders like UH’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, the state Department of Agriculture, the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau, Hawai‘i Farmers Union United, and even the Hawai‘i State Energy Office supported the measure.

“Soil classification is no longer the determinant of land good for agriculture,” explains Hawai‘i Farm Bureau Executive Director Brian Miyamoto. “Greenhouses, hydroponics, aquaculture and aquaponics are just a few of the many types of agriculture that can occur on all classes of land (A, B, C, D, E). Some of the best floriculture and hydroponic operations in Hawai‘i are on C, D, and E lands.” Some of these technologies and uses contrast starkly with agriculture in the 1950s and 1960s when the Land Study Bureau devised the classifications.

Solar farms are a prominent example. Beginning in 2008, solar farms were permitted on poorly rated agricultural lands. By 2011, legislation expanded solar’s reach to include higher-rated agricultural lands.

A study found that the land’s classification was still based on whether it had been irrigated for sugar or nonirrigated for pineapple. Scott Glenn, then the state’s chief energy officer, explained: “For example, although the soils in one area may have a productivity rating that is higher than another area, the availability or lack of irrigation water may encourage or constrain the actual productivities of the various sites. The degree to which these factors are captured [or not] in the current system deserves review.”

For two years after the passage of SB 2056, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development met with stakeholders. Focus groups convened experts on technical legal matters, agriculture, land use, energy, development and large landownership across Hawai‘i’s four counties, with representation from the farming community, state and county government, nonprofits and others.

After over two years of community engagement, research and discussion, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development presented its final report to the Legislature at the end of 2024. It recommended a new, uniform land classification system for all of Hawai‘i.

What’s the Next Step?

At the Land Use Commission meeting of Jan. 22, 2025, Chair Dan Giovanni asked the key question, “What’s the next step?”

Gov. Josh Green’s administration pushed for the introduction of House Bill 1012 and Senate Bill 1331 as mechanisms to update the soil classification system. HB 1012 never received a hearing and SB 1331 only got one – from Inouye, chair of the Senate Committee on Water and Land. She described the legislation as “long overdue.” (tinyurl.com/1331hearing)

Nevertheless, the bill did not pass. Observers say legislators’ lack of understanding about the issue was a major obstacle. “Confusion abounds,” says food systems planner Heaivilin. “I think the nerdiness of the issue is literally underfoot, and the wonkiness of it makes it difficult to get public support.”

The report concludes, “The LSB model should be updated to a dynamic, statewide system that retains the familiar LSB title and A to E output classes. By maintaining the familiar LSB framework while updating its underlying data and methodologies, disruption to existing policies and statutes can be minimized while significantly improving the accuracy and relevance of the system.”

The report also says the new framework must integrate historical and current land use practices. And the Legislature needs to authorize a routine review of existing maps and models. Once a new land classification system is set, state and county laws permeated with outdated classifications can be revised.

This work could bear serious consequences in future efforts to identify and designate IAL parcels across Hawai‘i. “The LSB, for now, and its successor, should be the foundation upon which future ‘conversations’ about [agricultural] land use begin from,” Yamamoto explains. “And this foundation should be as sound as the original LSB work.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service was identified as a source of reliable data to replace older data. Since January 2025, however, the agency has faced staff reductions and threatened budget cuts.

Land classification systems, while intended to inform future decisions, far too often reflect the political frameworks of the past.

“It’s not really about soil types,” says Hugh Starr, a longtime agricultural land analyst, ranch consultant, agricultural real estate agent and ranch hand. “It’s about culture. It’s about half of our land being in the agricultural designation. We’ve created a social paradigm that’s got nothing to do with soil.

“We were placed in this paradigm by politicians in the ’60s throwing everything into the agricultural designation as though that was the wand of God and said, ‘This land is inviolate.’”

Many businesses in Hawai‘i are watching tariff decisions being made – and then sometimes reversed – 4,800 miles away in Washington, D.C. For them, the predominant feeling can be anxiety, hope or confusion.

Like a lot of sectors, the local papaya industry tracks tariff decisions with interest. A general 25% tariff on Mexico was announced by the Trump administration – which would have included Mexican papayas imported to the U.S. – but then the tariff was paused and at press time had largely been withdrawn, though some other new tariffs on Mexico remain in effect.

Trade among the three nations is once again largely governed by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that took effect in 2020. That means no tariff on papayas from Mexico, which supplies about 85% of the papayas consumed in the U.S.

“The stated reason for the tariffs is to bring back American production and level the playing field,” says Eric Weinert, president of the Hawaii Papaya Industry Association and owner of Hawaii Papaya Direct. “If there were to be an impact on our papaya industry it would absolutely be a positive one.”

In Hawai‘i, about 95% of the papaya crop is grown on Hawai‘i Island, in the district of Puna; the rest is grown on Maui and O‘ahu. The local papaya association, which comprises about 100 growers and half a dozen packing houses, says about two-thirds of Hawai‘i’s papayas are sold within the state, about 5% is sent to Japan, and the rest is shipped to the mainland.

HPIA growers do not consider themselves in competition with Mexico. For one thing, Mexico’s papaya is different. Maradol is commonly larger, with a muskier flavor that’s less sweet than the papaya grown in Hawai‘i, like the popular Rainbow variety, a hybrid of the Solo.

The cost of growing and selling papayas in Hawai‘i, compared to Mexico, is also high. “We pay to import fertilizer and export our products by ship or by air,” Weinert says. “And as American producers we have the strictest agricultural regulations in the world. We also pay American wage rates and taxes.”

Because of those costs, Hawaii Papaya Industry Association producers haven’t concentrated on expanding into other markets, Weinert says. “We’ve been primarily concerned with getting good quality and satisfying the markets that we do have.”

Should a market vacuum present itself and the demand for more papayas from Hawai‘i increase, HPIA has the capacity to ramp up production, Weinert says. “It would just be a matter of planning, as it takes about a year after planting for the first production to come in.”

If tariffs cause the price of Mexico’s papayas to go up, however, HPIA’s pricing structure wouldn’t be affected, Weinert says. With tariffs, he says, the price of Hawai‘i-grown papayas would just be “more attractive” than Mexico-grown papayas. “At this point we are charging as much as the consumer is willing to bear. We’re not getting rich, just covering our costs and making it all work.

“We’re not a subsidized industry, and from our perspective, the tariffs are a good thing for our papaya producers” – leveling the playing field and making local producers more competitive, he says.

This story, originally posted online May 3, has been revised to include additional reporting.

Hawai‘i’s macadamia nut farming industry is in crisis and a state law that takes effect Jan. 1, 2026, has exceptions that will diminish its relief.

In 2021, mac nuts were the state’s second-most important agricultural commodity, generating $62.73 million in revenue, according to an annual report released by the state Department of Agriculture. In 2022, mac nuts dropped to fifth place with just $33.18 million generated and by 2023, the last year for which data is available, mac nuts ranked seventh, generating only $30.91 million.

I spoke with leaders of three brands that say they exclusively use Hawai‘i-grown macadamia nuts in their products and process all their nuts locally. And I spoke with the CEO of the state’s biggest mac nut seller by far, Hawaiian Host Group. Hawaiian Host uses both local nuts and cheaper foreign nuts even though their packages emphasize Hawai‘i and do not mention when the nuts are foreign grown.

Mac Nuts from Africa and Australia

Macadamia nuts are an iconic Hawai‘i commodity, but imported nuts are used in some Hawai‘i-branded products. “Mac nuts have been imported from other areas for probably decades, but when it really started to become a problem and farmers began to take notice was during the pandemic,” says Jeff Clark, president of Hāmākua Macadamia Nut Co., which says it uses only local nuts in its products and processes them in the Islands.

According to its website, Hawaiian Host, which acquired the Mauna Loa brand in 2015, “currently has 80% of macadamia nut sales across Hawai‘i,” and the company has said tourism accounts for 65% of sales for the two brands.

So, when the pandemic halted tourism, Hawaiian Host almost went bankrupt. Then, in 2022, its Kea‘au nut cracking facility shut down after the EPA notified the company that the Hawai‘i Island facility’s 50-year-old biomass boiler no longer met EPA standards. Ed Schultz, Hawaiian Host Group’s president and CEO, explains that “the backup solution to that was burning diesel,” which “wasn’t sustainable.” Hawaiian Host’s Mauna Loa brand continues to use part of the plant for salting, seasoning and packaging nuts, as well as a visitor center that offers tours.

Schultz says this temporary reduction in processing capacity led Hawaiian Host Group to rely more on imported nuts that season. However, he says, the following year, HHG’s acquisition of an orchard on Hawai‘i Island that included an existing nut cracking processing plant, enabled them to resume purchasing and processing roughly the same quantity of locally grown nuts as in prior years.

Chad Cleveland is the owner of Ahualoa Family Farms, another company that exclusively uses local nuts and processes them in the Islands. Cleveland says the move to imported nuts in 2022 by some companies was a huge blow to mac nut growers on Hawai‘i Island: “Farmers did go out of business, or a lot of them didn’t even harvest. And that’s kind of when some of these other countries had a lot of these new plantings mature. So then there was a flood of foreign-grown nuts that you could buy for pennies on the dollar, which affected the market here.”

According to Russell Clark, a macadamia nut grower on Hawai‘i Island, “a lot of people have stopped picking their nuts. On the extreme end, they’ve cut trees down. The problem with that is getting a newly planted mac nut tree to production takes about eight years. So if you start cutting down your trees, you’re really putting the seal of death on it. At that point, you’re saying, I’m not going to be in that business again.”

Based on public import data, Hāmākua’s Jeff Clark says, “Hawaiian Host brought in 1.5 million kernel pounds of nuts in 2024. … That’s about 30% of what’s grown in the state.” Meanwhile, he says, “we have farms that are going out of business because they have no market. Mauna Loa is not buying it.”

When I initially asked to interview a Hawaiian Host representative in late March, I received an emailed statement from Schultz, who was on vacation at the time. He acknowledged Hawaiian Host buys foreign nuts but refused to disclose from which countries and what percentage of their nuts are imported.

“To fulfill the high demand for our products, we buy additional macadamias from other Hawaiian growers that we process in our local facility as well. In the past two harvest years, for example, we have purchased every high-quality Hawaiian macadamia that a small or large farmer wanted to sell us. … Yet, as we sell our products in 49 states and export to over 23 countries around the world, we need a significant amount of macadamias that exceeds what we can source from our own local orchards or other high-quality growers in Hawai‘i.”

Photo credit: Aaron Yoshino

In a follow-up interview on May 10, Schultz says HHG’s Mauna Loa brand currently sources “nearly 100%” of its nuts locally and estimates that “by October 25 you will see front-of-pack labeling that says 100% Hawaiian macadamias.”

Schultz again declined to disclose the percentage of imported nuts used in Hawaiian Host products, their brand which exclusively sells confections such as chocolate-covered macadamias. He did state that “the vast majority of [imported nuts] don’t make it to Hawai‘i,” meaning “they’re just never brought in for sale in this market.”

He says imported nuts are primarily used in Hawaiian Host products manufactured and sold on the mainland and overseas but says Hawaiian Host is also using imported nuts to a lesser extent in some products sold here.

Schultz confirms Hawaiian Host Group currently buys nuts from South Africa and Australia: “We know the growers. If we buy from somebody, it’s because I’ve been to and seen the source, and I know whether it’s sustainable and how they’re treating workers. But, you know, Australia grows a great product. South Africa does [too].”

And he says the trees that supply HHG from both countries are Hawaiian rootstock. “UH gave all the trees to the Australians and South Africans to start their farms,” he says.

At least eight mac nut companies say they’re committed to using only Hawai‘i-grown nuts in their products, according to the Hawai‘i Macadamia Nut Association. Many of these companies grow their own nuts and purchase additional nuts from other local farmers.

Among those companies is Island Princess and its parent, Hawaiian King Candies. Owner Patrick Haddad says his company purchased from 46 Hawai‘i growers last year. His reasoning: “If I don’t help the grower, I’m going to be alone one day.”

But the exclusively local brands can only buy so much, Hāmākua Macadamia Nut Co. President Clark says. “We’ve purchased in the past from about 150 independent farmers,” but from fewer today because of recent economic conditions, Clark says. He blames Hawaiian Host’s purchase of foreign nuts. “I can’t pay a Hawai‘i price to local farmers, because I can’t compete with Hawaiian Host using their cheaper kernel.”

Cleveland of Ahualoa Family Farms echoes Clark: “Of course, foreign grown nuts are going to cost far less money, so they’re going to be less expensive on the shelf when we’re barely scratching by with our margins to even market our nuts at a reasonable price. It’s very difficult for us with our economies of scale.”

Their biggest gripe with Hawaiian Host is not that it outsources its nuts. The complaint is that the company deceives consumers with packaging that showcases Hawai‘i but does not disclose the nuts are from elsewhere.

Photo credit: Aaron Yoshino

Misleading Marketing

A lot of tourists and locals want to buy made-in-Hawai‘i products – and are often willing to pay more for the real deal.

“If you look at any of the packaging that Mauna Loa and Hawaiian Host has, it’s in their (brand) name,” says Clark. Individual product names include AlohaMacs and Island Macs. He says the companies are “using all these crafty marketing terms to market their product without saying Hawaiian nuts. But they’re cleverly dancing around that.”

A label that calls the nuts “the original gift of aloha” appears on the packaging of many Hawaiian Host products, alongside Hawai‘i imagery such as Diamond Head, lei, waves and women in traditional Hawaiian attire.

“The one thing that gets me probably the most is just the deceptiveness,” says Cleveland. “It hurts my heart just to know that these people, whether they’re a visitor or someone who lives here or who is from here or is Hawaiian, thinks they’re getting an authentic Hawai‘i-grown and produced product.”

The Hawai‘i Macadamia Nut Association advocates for a labeling law from the state Legislature that would require brands to clearly state where their macadamia nuts are grown. According to Clark, every member of the association – except for Hawaiian Host – agrees it’s “not fair that they can use the marketing power of Hawai‘i while not using the ag aspect of Hawai‘i.”

The first label-of-origin bill failed in the state Legislature, but a watered-down version was approved on its second attempt. It was signed into law in June 2024 and is set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2026.

“We were advocating for all macadamia products to be included under this bill, which would have included chocolate covered and even cookies and things like that to have to label if they’re using Hawaiian or foreign nuts,” Clark says.

But the law that passed excluded macadamia nut products with multiple ingredients, such as chocolate-covered macadamia nuts or macadamia nut cookies. Currently, the label-of-origin legislation covers macadamia nuts that are plain, salted, honey-roasted, coconut and coffee-glazed, Maui onion, chili-spiced and other seasoning and flavor varieties.

“That’s a big hole in the market,” Clark says, adding that the macadamia nut association hopes a more comprehensive labeling law passes soon.

Given that nearly all of Mauna Loa’s products are flavored macadamia nuts, whereas Hawaiian Host exclusively sells macadamia nut confections, the current wording of the legislation that takes effect Jan. 1, 2026, would apply to the bulk of Mauna Loa’s products but none of Hawaiian Host’s product line. However, the law would not require the Mauna Loa brand to label whether local or outside nuts were used in its chocolate-covered whole macadamia nuts.

In his emailed statement, Hawaiian Host’s Schultz says his company fully supports the label-of-origin law that goes into effect Jan. 1, 2026. During our follow-up interview, I asked if he supports extending the label-of-origin law to confections, such as chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, macadamia nut cookies and ice cream.

“Do we support it on mac nuts? Yes. Do we support it on other food products? No.” He argues that in a lot of macadamia nut confections, “at least 80% of the ingredients are not from here. … There’s no disclosing where the cacao is from. It’s the number one ingredient on any confection item, we’re not disclosing that. Then you can get into the number two ingredient. We don’t disclose where that’s from. So, it’s like, at what point do we get down to the over regulation part of this?”

But some of his industry peers find fault with Schultz’s reasoning. Clark, whose Hāmākua Macadamia Nut Co. sells confections made with 100% locally grown macadamia nuts, calls them “the star of the show.”

“Obviously, they’re not doing chocolate-covered cashews or peanuts because the commercial macadamia industry was developed in Hawai‘i, right? … That’s why it’s identified here. No different than pineapple,” he says.

Big Island macadamia nut grower Russell Clark, a former attorney, says, “If you look at it just purely from a common law perspective, put the legislation piece aside, you’ve got a very strong argument that representing those as Hawaiian nuts is common law fraud, and so it’s just not a smart way to be doing business right now, in my opinion.”

Given that the label-of-origin legislation is a state law, companies will not need to disclose where nuts are grown in products sold outside of Hawai‘i. Regarding whether Mauna Loa’s seasoned and flavored nuts sold on the mainland and overseas will consist of 100% Hawaiian nuts, Schultz stated, “I cannot comment on that. Again, we’re going to be compliant with the labeling law.”

Although Hawaiian Host is against label-of-origin legislation for confections, Schultz says this year they “advocated at the state Legislature for additional labeling laws that would require ‘Hawaiian Macadamias’ to not only be grown in Hawai‘i but also processed here. The processing phase involves removing the husk, drying the nut, cracking the shell and roasting the kernel.”

Clark says he opposes Hawaiian Host’s proposal to make local processing a requirement for the Hawai‘i label. “I oppose the bill, not necessarily because I oppose the idea of processing in Hawai‘i. Clearly, we support that. I oppose it because they’re the very guys that reduce the capacity to crack. … We still don’t have enough capacity to crack all the nuts grown here” after the Kea‘au plant was closed.

Concern about insufficient infrastructure is where Clark and Schultz find common ground. “That’s why our industry’s focus should be to grow together,” says Schultz. “To do this, we need a modern co-op processing facility that gives all growers, large and small, economies of scale to compete on a global market.”

Schultz says the state’s largest mac nut grower sends 30-40% of the state’s macadamias to China for processing to avoid Hawai‘i’s high labor costs. He says Hawaiian Host “never has and never will” purchase macadamia nuts from China, nor do they process there.

“There has to be a solve for all the nuts leaving Hawai‘i to go to China,” he says. “Otherwise, we cannot build a plant big enough to effectively compete on a global scale. We have to compete globally. We can’t just compete locally. That’s not going to create jobs, that’s not going to create inward investment. … If we really want to talk about fixing the industry, you have to fix that.”

Schultz did not name the state’s largest mac nut grower, but that company is Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards. Brad Nelson, president of the general partner of Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards, says the company had no choice but to partially process their nuts outside of Hawai‘i after Hawaiian Host Group shut down its Kea‘au facility. He gave two reasons: First, because it was by far the largest facility of its kind in the state, capable of processing all Hawaiian-grown macadamia nuts. Given that Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards cultivates about 30-40% of Hawai‘i’s macadamia nuts, all of the remaining processors in Hawai‘i combined “can’t take all our nuts,” he says.

Second, because the Kea‘au facility “was the only plant, or is the only plant, because it’s still standing, that was designed to be able to handle mechanically harvested nuts,” he says. Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards uses mechanical harvesters to gather nuts from the ground, which is much faster than handpicking, but the downside is that the machines sweep up twigs, stones and other debris in with the nuts.

“Mechanically–harvested plants have separators that separate out the leaves, the sticks and stuff like that, and remove them before they go into the plant. If we did not send stuff out of Hawai‘i, there’s no plant that can take our nuts.”

He said a deal was in the works for his company to buy the plant from Hawaiian Host Group’s previous owners, but “when Ed Schultz came in, he cut that off. Every time we try to buy a plant or do a processing agreement, he blows it up.”

So, he explains, their only options were to send nuts to a cracking plant outside of Hawai‘i or go out of business. “All they’re doing [at the plant in China] is removing the shell from the nut,” says Nelson, adding that the facility is “audited by the USDA and FDA.” The other aspects of processing – husking, drying, pasteurizing and roasting – are done at Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Orchards’ own local facilities or other facilities in America. And deshelling the nut will soon be done locally too, he says: “We’re building the cracking plant. We’ve ordered all the equipment,” which will be here by summer, says Nelson.

“Right now, Ed has over 90% of the market share in Hawai‘i. He has control. He may say that [Kea‘au] plant is down, but physically it’s there. He probably has control over 80% of the processing capacity in Hawai‘i and he’s systematically put the price down to where we cannot stay in business. … We really just want to get to the point where we can make a reasonable amount of profit to reinvest in equipment, increase productivity and actually grow macadamia nuts.”

Photo credit: Aaron Yoshino

Made in Hawai‘i vs. Elsewhere

Most of the state’s mac nut farms are in the Hāmākua, Puna and Kohala districts of Hawai‘i Island, which is where Hawai‘i’s first commercial macadamia nut trees were planted over a century ago. Mac nut trees thrive in warm, subtropical conditions that get consistent rainfall.

“The quality of what feeds the mac nuts, the water and soil, is the best in the world,” says Hawaiian King Candies’ Haddad. “Water, because we are the furthest from any continent, so we are one of the least polluted areas. Second, the soil is renewed due to the fact that it’s a volcanic soil, and the absorption of the mineral is much better in Hawai‘i than anywhere in the world.”

Clark says you can taste the difference: “If you think of where else macadamias are grown – Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and now China – each has their own kind of growing conditions, and different types of soils. None is the same as what we grow in, which is purely volcanic type soils. So that is really the difference, that creamy, buttery texture that we get out of the macadamias that we grow here.”

Cleveland says sourcing macadamia nuts from foreign countries comes with uncertainties, particularly regarding freshness, food safety and ethical practices. He adds that imported nuts may spend extended periods in storage before being purchased, processed and transported, which can impact their quality. “That kind of taints the quality or perception of Hawai‘i-grown nuts” if they are being falsely marketed as such, says Cleveland.

Schultz says all Hawai‘i-grown nuts used in Hawaiian Host Group’s products are processed locally, but imported nuts are processed in the country of origin and then shipped to Hawai‘i raw and pasteurized here. He says foreign-grown and processed nuts are just as safe to eat as local nuts: “Everything we do is FDA inspected, USDA certified. … We’re very serious about food safety.”

This issue of protecting Hawai‘i’s brand from deceptive marketing goes far beyond mac nuts: Kona coffee, sea salt and māmaki tea have provoked similar controversies in recent years.

“Everyone deserves to know what they’re purchasing so then they can make that educated decision on who they want to support, and, yeah, maybe they need to buy the cheapest one. That’s fine as long as they know what they’re getting,” Cleveland says.

But as sugar began to decline in the mid-20th century, tourism became the central pillar of the local economy.

Plantations and mills closed one by one until only Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co.’s plantation and mill in Central Maui remained.

Known as “the Beast,” the massive Pu‘unēnē Mill could turn 7,000 tons of sugar cane into brown sugar crystals each day. After 115 years of production, its closure in 2016 ended an era.

In 2018, owners Alexander & Baldwin sold 36,000 acres of former sugar cane fields to Mahi Pono, a farming company that aims to cultivate diverse crops on the land. And in March 2024, local construction company Nan Inc. acquired the mill and 300 adjacent acres. The acquisition includes industrial, commercial, agricultural and residential-zoned land. VP Wyeth Matsubara said Nan plans to “maximize the best uses of each property zoning.”

Asked if Nan plans to tear down the mill, Matsubara said, “We’re going to probably have to do some substantial demolition of at least the interior machinery that was done for all the production.”

A pioneer and leader in the restoration of Hawai’i’s fishponds – Paepae o He’eia – is getting closer to the ultimate goal of sustainable fish harvesting.

The nonprofit founded in 2001 is dedicated to restoring He‘eia Fishpond at the edge of Kāne‘ohe Bay, says Executive Director Hi‘ilei Kawelo. Before 20th-century development, she says, there were about 30 fishponds in Kāne‘ohe Bay, “but many of them got filled in to make way for residential.”

He‘eia Fishpond escaped that fate; instead, it fell into disuse and disrepair after a 1965 flood destroyed parts of the wall and mangroves and other invasive species took over.

In the beginning, Kawelo says, the nonprofit was 100% focused on removing the mangroves because “you couldn’t see the horizon. You couldn’t see the fishpond wall, couldn’t see the water’s edge. It was just a wall of mangrove all the way around the pond.”

Staff and volunteers later started rebuilding the fishpond wall, whose skeleton was still there. “All of the wall has been restored. … We’re almost done with the mangrove. We’re not done with the other weeds or the invasive jellyfish or the invasive seaweeds,” says Kawelo. They are also working to reduce the carnivorous fish that live in the pond and eat the more desirable fish.

“One to two more years of restoration and then we’re done, and the focus has to shift to food production,” she says.

“One day, we’re going to feed people from the pond. I don’t know how many people. I don’t think we’re going to be feeding 6,000 people, like this pond fed historically. But … during Covid we were able to feed our volunteers meals that were 100% sourced from the fishpond.” Feeding those participants would be a good start, Kawelo says.

They are already harvesting Samoan crab, an invasive species that they sell for $10 a pound about once a month via phone orders. Occasionally, the crab is a special at some restaurants.

“We’re catching things like barracuda, pāpio and ulua that are predating on the more desirable fish that fishponds were built to grow, like mullet,” says Kawelo.

“We don’t sell those. It’s sort of just for staff (to eat) and we have fishing days that are open to the public, once a month, April through September.” The dates of their Lā Holoholo (family fishing days) and lottery sign-up are posted on their Instagram page, @paepaeoheeia.

About 2,000 Volunteers a Year

Paepae o He‘eia has eight staffers, seven interns in the summer and volunteers year-round. Kawelo estimates the nonprofit gets “maybe 2,000 volunteers” a year; most come from school groups, but it also gets help from individuals, families and companies.

“If you come to volunteer at a fishpond, it’s not going to be easy. But I think that people like that. They leave feeling good about their contribution, even if it was the muddiest thing they’ve ever done in their life.”

From 1200 to 1600, Native Hawaiians built and maintained hundreds of fishponds (loko i‘a) across the Islands. But colonialism, cultural suppression, urbanization, natural disasters and invasive species led to their destruction or deterioration.

“Fishponds had a pretty simple purpose and function, and that was to cultivate fish and supply our people with protein,” says Kawelo. In its heyday, the 88-acre He‘eia Fishpond “could supplementally feed a population of about 6,000.”

The pond wall is made of volcanic rock and coral and is 11 feet wide at the top. | Photos: Jeff Sanner

And it was sustainable. “Hawaiian fishponds are Indigenous aquaculture systems. Indigenous aquaculture systems are designed using ‘ecomimicry’ principles, which means that they enhance the existing environment, rather than detract from it as commercial aquaculture systems often do,” says Kawika Winter, director of the He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve.

He‘eia NERR co-manages the He‘eia Fishpond alongside its partners, including NOAA, UH’s Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology and Paepae o He‘eia. He‘eia NERR’s research helps to identify and remedy fishpond problems.

“What is clear from a scientific perspective is that it takes more than removing invasive mangroves to make a fishpond as productive as it was in ancient times. Fishponds need certain environmental parameters to exist in the larger system to function properly. These include things like freshwater inputs, water quality and fishery health,” says Winter.

Built Where Streams and Ocean Meet

Hawaiian fishponds are strategically located where freshwater streams meet the ocean, creating brackish water environments.

“The idea is that fresh water mixing with salt water creates the (right) habitat for the phytoplankton, which feeds the fish,” says Kawelo. This eliminates the need for people to feed the fish, a common practice at most commercial fish farms.

He‘eia Fishpond’s 1.3-mile wall is made of volcanic rock and coral and is 11 feet wide at the top. Interspersed along the wall are slatted gates, which allow small, young fish to enter the pond; those fish eventually grow so large they become trapped. The walls and gates also help maintain the right ratio of fresh water to salt water.

Slatted gates like these allow young fish to enter the pond from Kāne’ohe Bay, but after the fish grow, the gate keeps them inside the pond. | Photos: Jeff Sanner

“It’s kind of like a recipe, right? More fresh than salt (water), I’d say. You’re trying to cultivate the kinds of phytoplankton that the fish you want eat,” says Kawelo.

She says fishponds were built “to cultivate primarily Hawaiian striped mullet,” commonly called ‘ama‘ama in Hawai‘i, “but it’s a “super diverse ecosystem.”

“You have the phytoplankton, but then you have all the little critters like the crabs and shrimp that keep things clean on the bottom. You have filter feeders, like oysters and clams. You have macroalgae that other fish eat, like ‘awa, which is another fishpond fish. And then there’s other kinds of herbivores and other kinds of seaweed. And then you have omnivorous fish that eat shrimp” and other things.

The Bigger Picture

Paepae o He‘eia is part of a network of fishpond caretakers across the Islands called Hui Mālama Loko I‘a. Its coordinator, Brenda Asuncion, says it formed “out of this idea that people working to steward and restore fishponds could learn from and support each other.”

The network covers about 60 sites, including nonprofits, family-owned fishponds, and private properties such as resorts that have staff members who take care of fishponds.

“Some of the sites that are in the network have just identified that they have a loko i‘a and they want to be a part of a network where they can meet and learn from other people. And then some sites have dedicated staff or have community efforts that work on them,” says Asuncion.

Paepae o He‘eia is seen “as a leader in the network. More and more are growing and starting to do amazing things, too. But everyone still looks at them as a kind of pioneer organization, for sure.”

Asuncion emphasizes that fishpond restoration is not only about reinstating a sustainable food source: “When people talk about the function of fishponds, it really was to increase the abundance and ability to get food, but at the same time, there’s this whole rich understanding of how loko i‘a feed us in non-physical ways.

“They’re opportunities for us as people and community members and Hawaiians to connect to our lands and waters and have relationships with places that are meaningful to our lives.”

Winter shares a similar sentiment: “Restoring fishponds is not only for Native Hawaiians, and it is not only about holding on to the legacy of our ancestral past. Restoring fishponds is about reviving a way of thinking and being in Hawai‘i that allows us to thrive together with our environment, rather than at the expense of it. Many of our kūpuna have said that Hawai‘i can heal the world. This is a part of what they were talking about.”

Food and beverage startups that lack the space and equipment to get ahead have a new way to scale up production without outsourcing to the mainland.

The Wahiawā ValueAdded Product Development Center officially opened its 33,000-square-foot manufacturing and educational facility at the end of May. The center, a joint effort of Leeward Community College and state government, includes five kitchens, processing equipment, cold and regular storage, as well as spaces for packing, shipping, receiving, demonstrations and learning.

“The positive impact this center will have is tremendous,” says its manager, Chris Bailey. “The central theme of the center is education and incubation. I see this as a playground for (entrepreneurs to innovate) more and more Hawai‘i food and beverage products.”

Much of the technology at the facility is geared toward creating “value-added” products. “Adding value means taking an agriculture input – a fruit or vegetable coming from a local farm – and transforming it through some process,” says Bailey.

“This could be heating, chopping, boiling, blending or frying to turn it into something that you could command a higher price for.”

The possibilities are endless: Pineapples and passion fruit can be juiced and concocted into a cocktail mixer. Meat can be cut, marinated and dehydrated to become jerky. Potatoes can be peeled, sliced and cooked into potato chips with a variety of flavors.

“The facility’s equipment includes an industrial potato peeler that can knock out 50 pounds of potatoes in a couple minutes. For those that are processing sweet potato or ulu for chips or fries or whatever, this will save them hours of time,” says Bailey.

She Can Make More Tomato Jam

Mahina Akimoto Reppun, co-owner of Morning Glass Coffee + Café, says she plans to use the facility to create tomato jam.

“We save the ends of the tomatoes from lunch service, process them, freeze them and then we turn them into jam. So it’s a nice little exercise in minimizing our food waste by repurposing something to use it on the menu again,” says Akimoto Reppun.

Her company currently makes small batches in-house but is ready to scale up production.

“The jam is really popular, so it sells out fast. Right now it’s a little hard for us to keep up with the demand.”

Akimoto Reppun says the center is a stepping-stone for entrepreneurs who, for now, need the extra space and equipment.

“I think what people miss seeing is that the center’s an educational piece. It’s not the end all be all for manufacturing, but this is definitely a really great first step for people.”

State Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, whose district includes Wahiawā, was the catalyst behind the Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center and secured funding for it at the state Legislature.

“I’m always asking myself, what jobs can we create so people can stay and live in Wahiawā or any small town here that needs economic revitalization,” he says.

Dela Cruz believes the center will help unlock the tremendous potential of Hawai‘i’s food and beverage industry. “We’re talking about reversing the brain drain, making strides in economic development and helping agriculture.”

Many food and beverage entrepreneurs start operating out of their home kitchens and selling primarily to friends and family and at farmers markets. The equipment needed to grow beyond that is expensive and requires more space than most startups can afford.

The Wahiawā center rents that manufacturing equipment and space by the hour, as well as provide guidance to entrepreneurs so they can turn their side hustles into full-blown careers at a fraction of the cost of doing it on their own.

Fruits and vegetables with cosmetic imperfections like bruises or odd shapes are shunned by retail grocers, but Bailey says they can be just as wholesome and tasty as standard produce and “you can transform them into value-added products, whether it’s a hot sauce, jam, juice or ice cream. You can even have it dehydrated or freeze-dried.”

Produce that would have been tossed gets new life.

“This will help farmers because 40% of their produce are offgrades and don’t go to market. But now the farmer has the ability to sell more of their produce and make more revenue,” says Dane Wicker, deputy director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

The Wahiawā center will help farmers sell their off-grade crops to entrepreneurs, who could then transform them into value-added products. Or the center could help those farmers to create their own value-added products.

“It’s an incredible opportunity for many of these small businesses to be able to learn how to use this equipment and then have it as a resource,” says Denise Yamaguchi, CEO and founder of the nonprofit Hawaii Ag & Culinary Alliance.

The facility’s wet kitchens have a commercial hood system to ventilate air and support production of food products such as ulu and kalo chips with fryers, baked goods with ovens, as well as hot sauces and jams with steam kettles. | Photo: courtesy of Wahiawā ValueAdded Product Development Center

From Land to Market

Leeward Community College’s 12-week ‘Āina to Mākeke Program – meaning from land to market – works with students at whatever stage they’re at with their businesses, says LCC Chancellor Carlos Penaloza.

“So whether they still need to develop their own business plan, are at the point of marketing their product or mastering their product, we can help.”

Students, in a cohort of 15, learn how to scale-up kitchen recipes into ready-for-market products that can drive midsize food or beverage businesses. Graduates will then have priority access to the Wahiawā center and a free one-hour consultation with the staff.

Because of government subsidies and additional funding from organizations like the Hawaii Ag & Culinary Alliance, “we are able to offer up a lot of what we have at a very reasonable price,” says Penaloza.

Two cohorts graduated from ‘Āina to Mākeke last year, and Yamaguchi says “35% of those 29 businesses have already been picked up by major retailers like ABC, Foodland Farms and 7-Eleven.”

That proportion may rise now that cohorts have access to the center’s equipment.

But graduates aren’t meant to operate there forever, as the center needs to continuously make room for new entrepreneurs.

“It’s not going to be a viable career for any of these entrepreneurs if they don’t have the tools or resources to move on to the next stage,” says Dela Cruz. The program is designed to prepare them for eventually procuring their own warehouses and equipment.

And as Hawai‘i’s food and beverage industry grows, so will the network of support and partnerships, he says.

“For example, one guy who ended up building a warehouse had enough space to lease to other small businesses and they shared the facility together. So you start to see the spillover and effect of entrepreneurs now supporting other value-added entrepreneurs.”

All spots for the program’s third cohort are filled, but applications for the fourth will open online later this year.

Powering Up Hawai’i’s Exports

Value-adding processes often extend a product’s shelf life. A slightly under ripe banana will last about a week on the counter before it’s covered in brown spots, while an unopened package of freeze-dried bananas can stay good for years if stored properly, and six months to a year even after opening.

High-pressure processing is especially good at extending shelf life while preserving taste, texture, appearance and nutritional value because it doesn’t rely on heat.

“The HPP machine is really the crown jewel of the facility,” says Bailey. “You can fill that HPP machine with your bottles of juice to seal them up real tight. Then it applies pressure as tense as the bottom of the ocean, which kills pathogens. On average, it can extend the life of a cold-pressed juice type of product up to 30 times. That’s a tremendous upgrade.”

Long expiration dates make overseas exports more likely.

“Hawai‘i as a brand is incredibly well known. So if these value-added products are able to capitalize on that brand it will not just help our local agriculture industry, but our entire economy and strengthen Hawai‘i’s brand,” says Yamaguchi.

Dela Cruz’s long-term vision is having food processing facilities with educational programs on the Neighbor Islands, with the large Wahiawā center as the flagship. The first such facility, the Maui Food Innovation Center, opened in December 2022.

“What we don’t want to do is duplicate the same thing throughout the state if we can make a hub-and-spoke model work instead,” says Dela Cruz. “Leeward has the staffing to support other programs statewide.”

Learn more at www.leeward.hawaii.edu/wvapdc.

On the hottest day ever recorded in Honolulu – Aug. 31, 2019 – a group of volunteers organized by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency attached heat sensors to their cars and collected readings around O‘ahu. The project’s timing just happened to coincide with the oppressive weather, brought on by a record-breaking marine heat wave that was cooking up the waters around the Islands.

The volunteers recorded startling discrepancies. While the air temperature hit a high of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the “heat index,” which also factors in humidity, reached 107.3 degrees, logged at the Waimalu Plaza shopping center between 3 and 4 p.m. That was more than 22 degrees higher than the coolest temperature on O‘ahu recorded that hour.

This commercial stretch of ‘Aiea is one of the city’s many “urban heat islands,” where buildings, rooftops and pavement absorb the sunlight and re-radiate it as heat. Few trees are around to cool the area by blocking and reflecting the sun, or, in a process called evapotranspiration, releasing water into the atmosphere through their leaves.

And there’s another layer of heat to consider. The heat index is measured in shade. But the tropical sun can dramatically heat surfaces, making a sunbaked sidewalk or parking lot significantly hotter.

John DeLay, an associate professor of geography and environment at Honolulu Community College, measured temperatures in direct sunlight and under the thick canopy of a monkeypod tree at Makalapa Neighborhood Park near Pearl Harbor. While the air temperatures in the shade and sun were nearly identical, surfaces in the shade were 12 degrees cooler. “That’s why you’re feeling a significant difference in your body temperature,” he says.

About 1 million people live on O‘ahu, most in developed areas that are prone to the urban heat-island effect. Pockets of high heat and low vegetation can be found all along the coastal plains of O‘ahu, including in Pearl City, Waipahu, Kapolei, and Wai‘anae.

In the core of Honolulu, low-lying neighborhoods get dangerously hot, as shown by the dark red areas of the O‘ahu Community Heat Map. At these hot spots – stretching from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport to residential areas hugging Wai‘alae Avenue in Kaimukī – afternoon temperatures on that extreme heat day in 2019 reached 99.7 degrees and higher.

Jammed with apartment buildings and tightly packed houses, many of the trees and gardens in these dense urban areas have been cut down and paved over for parking. Municipal “street trees,” wedged into small plots of dirt along sidewalks, can have short lives and stunted growth, with little chance of developing the thick, sprawling canopies of mature shower trees blossoming in a park.

Tree canopy maps created in 2022 by the state’s urban forestry program, Kaulunani, along with the U.S. Forest Service, show that in neighborhoods such as Kalihi, McCully-Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and the makai side of Waikīkī, and parts of Kaimukī and Pālolo, tree-canopy coverage is less than 8% and as low as 2% – far less than the city’s goal of 35% coverage. Honolulu’s overall canopy coverage is estimated at 20%.

These neighborhoods are also some of the most disadvantaged parts of the city, as shown on the multilayered canopy map depicting income levels. Median household incomes in many of these areas fall in the lowest ranges – from $25,000 to $57,000 or from $57,000 to $76,000 – according to data from the 2015-2020 American Community Survey.

But travel south to north, into the cooler, often rainier and greener neighborhoods at higher elevations, and income levels tend to rise precipitously, a historical pattern that began in the 19th century as those with means moved out of the hot, congested town that had coalesced around the harbor.

Heat Is a Public Health Crisis

Those over-paved areas that don’t have sufficient tree canopy are going to be the hottest,” Brad Romine of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission says. Romine, a coastal resilience specialist with the UH Sea Grant College Program and deputy director of the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center, has worked with the five-member commission to develop guidelines that track the impact of urban heat and recommend ways for city and state officials to deal with it.

Average temperatures in Hawai‘i have risen 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and about 3.5 degrees at the Honolulu airport, according to Matthew Gonser, chief resilience officer and executive director of the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. Much of that rise has been in the past decade, and near-future projections show it will get hotter.

“We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.” – Matthew Gonser

In a heat wave like the one in 2019, when trade winds collapse and humidity rises, the heat can be punishing on the body.

Dr. Diana Felton, head of the state Department of Health’s Communicable Diseases and Public Health Nursing Division, says that vulnerable people will bear the brunt of the impact of intense heat: the elderly and children, outdoor workers, people with chronic health conditions, and those who can’t afford air conditioning or access health care.

Felton is a lead member of a new DOH working group that’s studying the local health impacts of extreme heat, floods, drought, wildfires, mosquito-borne illnesses and five other climate threats illustrated on a circular chart that Felton calls, with dark humor, “the pinwheel of death.”

The Climate Change and Health Working Group was formed to expand climate-change planning beyond sea-level rise and protecting infrastructure, she says. “No one was talking about the disease and injury that is going to come from climate change, and has actually already come.”

Felton is working with the group to gather evidence of how heat is impacting health in Hawai‘i, and is still sifting through data. But one fact is well documented across the globe: Fatalities rise when the heat index reaches 95 degrees – which can be air temperature of 90 degrees and humidity of 50%, for example – for an extended period.

“The longer the heat wave goes on, you have increased mortality,” explained Dr. Elizabeth Keifer, an assistant clinical professor at UH Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, at a seminar in January.

Romine says that urban Honolulu could experience intolerable heat in just a few decades. “I think we could surpass 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by mid-century, and that’s only going to exacerbate heat waves,” he says. “What that means is more frequent and severe heat emergencies.”

At Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry, part of the Department of Parks and Recreation, new administrator Roxanne Adams says her groundskeepers have switched to long-sleeved, high-visibility Dri-Fit uniforms that don’t require the extra layer of a safety vest. She plans to buy cooling neck wraps to supplement the ice water that work crews carry in their trucks.

Roxanne Adams, administrator of Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation’s Division of Urban Forestry, is responsible for trees in public parks and rights of-way. It’s a big job that requires residents to help: “If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increases greatly. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

“They notice the heat. We all notice that it’s hotter and drier than when we were kids,” Adams says.

“We’re not going crazy when we say, oh my gosh, it’s not as comfortable to sleep anymore,” Gonser echoes. “We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.”

Federal Funds to Expand the Canopy

In November, $42.6 million in competitive federal grants, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the U.S. Forest Service, was awarded to Hawai‘i groups to provide “equitable access to trees.” In raw dollars, only California, New York and Oregon received more money than Hawai‘i, and in terms of funding per resident, Hawai‘i topped the list.

“It just shows how ready people are to take on this kind of work. … I feel like in five years we’re going to look back and say, wow, this was an amazing time,” says Heather McMillen, an urban and community forester.

McMillen heads the state’s Kaulunani program, an urban and community forestry initiative at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife. Her small office distributes grant money, does outreach and education, and partners with the city, state and nonprofit sector to improve the health and viability of Hawai‘i’s trees.

Kaulunani received a $2 million competitive grant from the U.S. Forest Service, and is launching a project to plant shade trees at select Title 1 schools, where at least 47% of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

McMillen says that if you look at all public school campuses, and extend the footprint to include a half-mile buffer around the school, only 21% would meet the minimum goal of 30% tree canopy. But among the 67% of schools that are designated Title 1, or 197 schools, just 14% have these fuller canopies – an example of disparities in who has access to the cooling benefits of trees.

The project also involves creating a school forester position to work with teachers and staff on maintaining the trees. “Planting the trees is the easy part. Helping them grow to their full potential … is a much longer-term commitment,” McMillen says.

Heather McMillen, coordinator of the state Kaulunani community and urban forestry program, says: “Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do. This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Other groups receiving funding include the Akaka Foundation for Tropical Forests and the Friends of Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, both on Hawai‘i Island, and various county, state and UH Mānoa projects.

The largest U.S. Forest Service award in Hawai‘i, at $20 million, went to Kupu, a 17-year-old nonprofit that has trained thousands of young people, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, for jobs in conservation and natural resource management. In the process, its teams have cleared about 150,000 acres of invasive species and planted 1.5 million native specimens.

CEO and co-founder John Leong explains that most of the $20 million grant will be re-granted to other groups in Hawai‘i and the Pacific region over the next five years, with Kupu providing technical expertise. The application process is expected to open in the second quarter of 2024.

In the world of urban forestry, the Kupu grant is a huge amount of money. For comparison, Hawai‘i’s 2023 state allocation for urban and community forestry from the U.S. Forest Service is $1.5 million. Many people interviewed for this article say they’re eager to find out who will win sub-grants from Kupu and what projects will be funded.

The broad theme of the federal grant is to expand the tree canopy and cool down places where people live, but the finer details require projects to benefit underserved areas. Projects linked to creating green jobs and engaging communities in planning and decision-making are also prioritized.

The O‘ahu community heat map identifying urban “hot spots” was developed by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. It’s based on peak afternoon temperatures recorded on Aug. 31, 2019. The full islandwide map can be found at tinyurl.com/oahuheatmap

Kupu’s mission lands at the intersection of all those goals. Leong says it will seek out organizations that will bring trees to “under-resourced” areas, both urban and rural, and build up a workforce of arborists and conservation workers.

He’s especially focused on training and educating, both for those doing the work and the broader community that benefits from more trees, more jobs, and an understanding of how climate change will impact them and what they can do about it.

“When you educate a young person, you’re really impacting about seven people: their parents, their grandparents and their siblings,” he says.

In the fight against climate change, “We have all the right stuff in our Islands to be a model for the rest of the world,” Leong says. “But we also have to engage communities at the grassroots level, empower them and give them the resources they need on the ground to be successful. That’s really what this grant is about.”

Why Trees Are Important

In 2016, the nonprofit Smart Trees Pacific released the dispiriting results of its urban tree-canopy analysis. Nearly 5% of the tree canopy, or about 76,600 trees, had disappeared in a four year span. The consensus among experts is that things haven’t improved since then.

Trees are cut to make way for larger houses or more parking space for multifamily homes. They’re cut because they’re old, and then not replaced, or because it’s easier to remove a tree that’s interfering with a sidewalk or utility project than to work around it. They’re cut because a homeowner is worried about liability. And many times, they’re cut because someone wants a better view or just can’t deal with the rubbish.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says McMillen from the state’s Kaulunani program. No one tree-removal project accounted for a significant portion of the loss, she says, and it’s happening on both public and private land.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says street trees are sometimes destroyed maliciously. That’s an added insult when you consider all the nurturing required in a tree’s first few years, before it’s planted in the ground, and “it’s vandalism of a city asset and infrastructure.”

Trees can take years, even decades, to get large enough for their benefits to dramatically overshadow their costs. “They cost money to maintain, as do sidewalks, as do stoplights, as do fire hydrants. But unlike that kind of infrastructure, trees are the only kind of infrastructure that increase in value over time,” McMillen says.

An analysis conducted for the city’s Division of Urban Forestry found that for every dollar spent on Honolulu’s trees, the city gets back $3 in benefits. Estimates in many other cities show even more positive cost-benefit ratios.

On the global level, trees are called the “lungs of the world” for their ability to pull enormous quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, which they store in their trunks and branches. With the help of the sun, trees then release oxygen through their leaves. A dramatic NASA time-lapse video shows the forests of the Northern Hemisphere sucking carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis as trillions of leaves open in the spring and summer.

The lungs metaphor goes deeper as well. For people who feel connected to trees, or just aware of their contributions, trees don’t just make life on Earth possible, they make it worth living.

Trees provide shade and cooling. They clean the air by removing pollutants, and provide food for people and habitats for birds. They protect against flooding by absorbing stormwater and help prevent beach erosion.

Trees reduce noise in the city, and traffic calms along tree-lined streets. In hot climates, their shade makes a city more walkable and bikeable.

And there are intangible benefits too, McMillen says: Trees are the “keepers of memories” for anyone who spent time playing in them as a child, and they can strengthen social connections among neighbors sharing fruit from backyard trees. They help define a place and remind us where we are on this planet.

Trees can even change cortisol levels, heart rates, breathing and mood. At the Tropical Landscape and Human Interaction Lab at UH Mānoa, students’ physiological, “preconscious” responses were captured as they viewed images of trees. Lush, green canopies triggered states of relaxation while images of canopies with their tops lopped off had the opposite effect, says Andy Kaufman, an associate professor of tropical plant and soil sciences and a landscape specialist.

For all their benefits, trees and other vegetation are often taken for granted and treated as disposable. “Nature is so important to us, but landscaping is the first thing to be cut and the last to be addressed,” says Kaufman, who founded and runs the interaction lab. “We should embrace living in nature,” not work against it, he says.

Kaufman has seen many examples of trees chain-sawed at the top, which lets disease and pests enter the tree and weakens the branches that grow back from the stumps. He’s seen trees clear-cut from an ‘Ewa school’s campus, a “complete streets” project in ‘Aiea that failed to include trees, new buildings constructed with only a tiny strip for plantings, and – in an especially egregious case – miles of oleanders along the Moanalua Freeway ripped out and replaced with concrete.

The biggest challenge, Kaulunani’s McMillen explains, is to get policymakers, developers, homeowners and anyone who cares about their neighborhood to change the way they think about trees.

“Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do,” McMillen says. “This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process, not an additional thing to do if you have funds or if you have the inclination.”

Where Trees Are Needed Most

The City and County of Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry can trace its roots to the Shade Tree Commission, which started in 1922 to deal with the ongoing issue of how to cool a tropical city, now getting hotter with climate change. “I would love for our city to be a city in the forest. I’m a firm believer that trees make everything look better, cleaner and more friendly,” says Adams, the division’s administrator.

Before joining the division last year, she spent two decades overseeing the more than 4,000 trees at UH Mānoa. The campus is an accredited arboretum and includes what’s probably the nation’s largest baobab tree, which is at least 110 years old.

Her new role overseeing the estimated 250,000 trees in city and county parks and public rights-of-way offers a vastly larger canvas for planting – the entire island of O‘ahu – but also far more challenges.

At the moment, Adams’ division is finishing a complete inventory of all city trees, which will let her team know exactly what trees they’re responsible for, which ones need attention first and where to plant next. The project, funded in 2022 with $300,000 in federal assistance, will be done before the end of June.

She’s also been focusing on filling vacancies that have accumulated over the past decade. Adams says her team is nearly fully staffed to do the hard physical labor of digging holes and planting trees, many of which start from seeds in the division’s nursery at Kapi‘olani Regional Park.

Once the tree inventory is complete, Adams says her goal will be to plant where shade is needed most, such as in Kalihi, Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and Kaimukī, and outward to ‘Ewa, Nānākuli and Wai‘anae.

“We’re definitely looking at equity and will be planting in those neighborhoods,” Adams says.

Kaulunani and U.S. Forest Service maps track tree canopy coverage and heat vulnerability, and also data such as median family incomes in a particular area, the presence of impervious surfaces, the prevalence of asthma and cardiovascular disease, the number of residents by census tracts and Native Hawaiian populations. That fuller picture of which neighborhoods are being left behind – economically, environmentally, medically – seems to be shifting the conversation about where to focus efforts.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says that, over time, patterns in how a community is designed and developed “can exacerbate increasing temperatures and make it hotter in places. There really are disparities or inequities as a result of these practices. … We’re trying to make sure that we bring focused, strategic attention to those neighborhoods.”

People living in treeless, low-income areas on O’ahu, such as this stretch of Mō’ili’ili, suffer most in heatwaves.

 

In contrast, monkeypod trees line Kapi’olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street, offering shade and cooling to pedestrians and residents.

While planting in an older neighborhood full of hardened surfaces and densely packed housing requires more effort than in more remote areas, among urban foresters, anything is possible. Their often-repeated motto is “the right tree in the right place with the right care.”

In unshaded neighborhoods, for example, sections of concrete can be removed from sidewalks to make space for plantings. Clusters of small street trees can be planted together to create a bigger canopy. For something more ambitious, car lanes could be used for planting large canopy trees, such as the monkeypods that line Kapi‘olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street – a grove that’s been designated as one of Hawai‘i’s “exceptional trees.”

While trees can pose difficulties, those difficulties are surmountable, Kaufman from UH Mānoa says. “There are always ways to restructure roads. You can always work around trees. … Green infrastructure should be business as usual in every municipality.”

He and a team of researchers recently found that using Silva Cells – a modular, suspended pavement system developed a decade ago – is the most promising way to grow healthy street trees in Hawai‘i. Unlike other methods they tested, the roots stayed contained rather than sprawling out and up, damaging infrastructure. He says the long-term tests were the first ever conducted in a tropical urban environment, where trees and their roots grow year-round.

It’s not a magic bullet, Kaufman explains. But better planting techniques could help expand the canopy in some of the city’s oldest, most crowded neighborhoods, where working-class and middle-class people began moving more than a century ago, as new tram lines opened up new possibilities.

The Old Suburbs

Honolulu, like everywhere, has been defined by shifting migration and development. Through much of its history, one trend seemed clear: wealthier people tended to congregate in the hills or near the water, while the less affluent settled in the low-lying, hotter middle.

The first hint of a city started in the early 1800s, as whalers began stopping here for parts, provisions and rest, and a makeshift harbor settlement emerged to meet demand. By 1845, the capital of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i had officially moved from Lahaina to a now bustling Honolulu.

Wealthy ali‘i and white settlers were the first to leave the core, says William Chapman, the interim dean of UH Mānoa’s School of Architecture and a professor of American studies, with expertise in historical preservation. They fanned out for more space, less disease and often cooler climates.

Queen Ka‘ahumanu, for example, regularly retreated to her Mānoa house, near the present-day Waioli Kitchen and Bake Shop, where she died in 1832. In 1853, the German physician William Hillebrand built a house and planted trees at the site of Foster Botanical Garden.

In 1882, Anna Rice Cooke and Charles Montague Cooke, both members of missionary families, built a home on Beretania Street, on the site where the Honolulu Museum of Art is now. When electric streetcars were introduced in 1901, and the first automobiles traversed the city’s roads, large estates were constructed in the hills of Nu‘uanu Valley. Some are now occupied by foreign consulates.

After the kingdom was illegally overthrown by white businessmen in 1893, the global sugar and pineapple trade accelerated, along with immigration. Contract laborers first arrived from China in the mid-1800s, followed by people from Japan, Korea, Europe, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Kaka‘ako in the late 1800s was filled with small houses for artisans, stevedores and service workers, many of whom were Native Hawaiian, says Chapman. Working-class and artisan-class residents began branching out into Kalihi and Liliha.

Honolulu Tree Canopy Map, 2021. Prepared by EarthDefine, U.S. Forest Service, NOAA and Hawai‘i Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Streetcars opened up neighborhoods far beyond the harbor area. Many Japanese and Chinese workers, freed from contract labor that was deemed illegal in 1900, migrated east along King Street, renting or buying modest wooden houses stretching all the way to the rice fields of Mō‘ili‘ili.

By the 1920s, satellite communities as far away as Kapahulu and Kaimukī were developed as the rail lines expanded, while along the coast, affluent people had moved to the Diamond Head area and were expanding into Kāhala.

John Rosa, an associate professor of history at UH Mānoa, says his great-grandfather on the Chinese side of his family built a house on 16th Avenue during Kaimukī’s first wave of development. In the 1950s, his grandparents moved to a house in the breezy mountains above the neighborhood, in Maunalani Heights, where he grew up.

Many prosperous families had moved mauka into Mānoa Valley and Nu‘uanu, where whites-only “tacit agreements,” sometimes written into covenants governing new subdivisions, kept others out, explains Chapman.

These rules also determined the physical environment. “There were a lot of restrictions,” Chapman says. “It had to be a substantial lot. Residents weren’t allowed to build walls over a certain height. They couldn’t open a gambling den or a bar or a restaurant.”

The racial elements of the exclusionary practices were dropped after World War II, and the cooler, leafier neighborhoods opened to a mixture of people. Among the new Mānoa residents were many upwardly mobile Japanese residents who had gone to UH Mānoa on the federal GI Bill, Rosa says.

After the war, and before zoning laws were enacted in 1961, high-rise apartments were constructed amid the single-family houses of Waikīkī and Makiki. Eventually, cars brought people to the new postwar suburbs of ‘Āina Haina and Hawai‘i Kai, and then even farther from the city.

Today, some of Honolulu’s old working-class, mixed-use neighborhoods can feel improvised, a mismatched collection of small wooden bungalows, motel-style walk-ups with open corridors, taller “bare-bones” buildings with interior hallways, and their posher cousins, the newer high-rise condos.

“Planners aren’t the ones that actually build cities. It’s the developers,” Chapman says. “It’s like a rowboat and a tanker. The tanker is the developers, and they pretty well decide what’s going to happen.”

For example, setback regulations, which started in 1969, are still just 5 feet. “You’re supposed to put planting in the setback, but they’re often not very robust,” he says. “Developers probably see vegetation and trees as a luxury add-on. And if they don’t need to do it, they won’t do it.”

Chapman sees the old neighborhoods as “transitional,” with new housing set to rise in places like Isenberg Street in Mō‘ili‘ili. There, a 23-story tower is under development by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and on Kapi‘olani Boulevard, the Kobayashi Group is constructing a 43-story condo.

But with no requirements for trees, shade, green walls or green roofs – on new high-rise projects or throughout the older neighborhoods – these urban heat islands will only get hotter.

Greening the City

Community groups have been focused on trees and shade since at least 1912, when the newly formed Outdoor Circle, a volunteer women’s group, planted 28 monkeypod trees in Honolulu’s ‘A‘ala Park. Those trees still stand today.

The organization has spent the subsequent 112 years planting and protecting trees in public spaces. In 2017, the Outdoor Circle helped found Trees for Honolulu’s Future, a nonprofit group dedicated to increasing the urban tree canopy, advocating for laws and policies, and educating the public.

The group’s president, Daniel Dinell, spearheaded the educational component of the Makalapa Neighborhood Park project, which quantified the impact of shade on how we experience heat. Young “heat island investigators” from the underserved area nearby learned to measure trees, read temperature sensors and test hypotheses.

Among the organization’s many projects, Dinell is also leading a group of “citizen foresters” to map the trees in Kaimukī and locate places to plant, and he’s working with the city to get trees in the ground. One of the big obstacles to new street trees, he says, is getting homeowners and renters to water the trees in their early years, when they’re still weak.

“Just activating the community is key to the goal of increasing the tree canopy,” Dinell says. Government agencies can’t do it alone, Adams, the head of Honolulu’s Urban Forestry Division, says. “It’s critical that our neighborhoods, our friends, our family chip in and help us get this done. It’s a kōkua thing. If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increase greatly.”

Residents can contact Adams’ division to request a street tree, at 808-971-7151 or DUF@honolulu.gov. The city selects hardy trees that won’t become invasive pests; most native trees aren’t able to survive in harsh urban settings with vehicle pollutants and poor soils.

On Hawai‘i’s Arbor Day, about 4,000 trees, including fruit trees, are given away across the Islands. The next annual event, organized by Kaulunani and government, nonprofit and community partners, is scheduled for Nov. 2.

At the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, an ongoing effort to plant 100,000 trees on O‘ahu has passed the halfway mark. The agency’s online map tracks city plantings as well as trees planted on private property and larger restoration efforts.

The project, says Gonser, the office’s executive director, “was intended to be a campaign of awareness, and to celebrate those that are the true champions out in the community.” He says many plantings have not been recorded yet.

All of these efforts are steps in the right direction, and indications that more people and organizations recognize the value of trees in a time of rising heat and sweltering cities.

Globally, 2023 was by far the warmest year on record, according to NOAA. And while the heat affects everyone, it’s much worse in urban heat islands bereft of trees. And it’s particularly punishing for people without air conditioning.

“We’re already facing a lot of heat in these urban areas. It’s a problem we need to fix now,” says Romine, of the Climate Change Commission. “And if we start addressing it now, it’ll make these communities safer, more comfortable and more equitable, now and for the future.”

The farm offers seasonal arrangements and wholesale Protea flowers and plants to local florists, and ships them interisland and to the mainland.

Minney, who is lead farmer and co-owner, says her in-laws bought the property in 1986. She says her husband’s uncle was “very involved with the early Protea coming to Maui” and inspired the couple to continue the family tradition when they inherited the farm in the early 1990s.

“Uncle showed us how to make the plants and so we’ve been propagating for years,” she says.

Proteas are native to South Africa and typically bloom during winter in Hawai‘i, according to Minney. During the off season, she says, they are pruning and cleaning up the plants because when the season is on, “it’s all systems go.”

The farm was unharmed by August wildfires that ravaged other parts of Kula that are higher on Haleakalā. “People were able to come and get water from our farm,” she says. “We were so lucky.”

Malolo Farm previously offered occasional tours, events and workshops. Those have been suspended, but Minney says, “We’ll be back.”

proteasofmaui.com

“We believe that the introduction of technology into agriculture could reverse this bad trend.”

The “we” are Wyban and Jason Ueki, founders and organizers of the Thrive Hawai‘i Agrifood Summit, formerly called the Tropical AgTech Conference.

“The conference is an economic development platform showcasing new climate-smart ag technologies that can increase Hawai‘i ag efficiencies, boost production, increase salaries, create exportable intellectual property and reinvent Hawai‘i ag to be a growth industry,” Wyban says.

This year’s event will be held Sept. 26 and 27 at the Hawai‘i Convention Center in Honolulu.

Replacing an Aging Ag Workforce

Denise Yamaguchi, executive director of the Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation, says “the average age of a farmer in Hawai‘i and across the nation is 60.” The aging farm workforce is not being replaced by younger farmers.

“Many of us living in Hawai‘i are the fourth or fifth generation of immigrants who came to Hawai‘i and worked on plantations,” she says. But most of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, she says, didn’t want their children to become farmers, which has created an ag labor shortage.

Wyban points out another issue: “Farmers aren’t making any money. And when they’re not making any money, they stop farming.” Nor do their children want that often hardscrabble life.

Ag tech may eventually make farming more appealing by alleviating some of the arduous manual labor and making farming more cost-efficient.

“I think one of the emerging technologies that’s really interesting is robots that can pick fruit and vegetables. It’s eventually going to replace some of the more difficult work that is mostly done by immigrant labor,” says Ueki.

Robotic technology is still expensive, but it will eventually be cheaper than human labor, Wyban says.

“Maybe we aren’t going to create more jobs, but the farms will make more money, and it’ll be a more interesting space for young people entering agriculture because in addition to knowing about plant biology and agronomic systems, they’re also going to have to understand how technology works.”

The Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation’s education programs teach K-12 students about farming operations and careers, with much of the curriculum focused on ag tech and how to use it, Yamaguchi says.

“Kids are really interested in technology. Since the job is not necessarily in the field under the hot sun anymore, it may spark an interest in a different type of job in ag tech,” she says.

Minimizing Problems With Ag Tech

Agriculture is a complicated business. “More so than other industries,” says Yamaguchi, because farmers must consider soil health, pest control, food safety regulations, land leases, water supply and infrastructure.

Weather adds unpredictability and climate change makes severe weather more frequent. One bad storm can ruin an entire harvest and kill livestock.

Some farms are switching to controlled environment agriculture systems, or CEA, to mitigate unfavorable weather and other issues, Yamaguchi says. “You’re able to eliminate the pests that come in, birds that steal your crops, and you’re also able to ensure food safety.”

CEA systems – think greenhouses and other structures – also enable farmers to manipulate the internal climate of these structures so they’re always optimal. “With CEA you can carefully control the environment your plants or animals are in. That way, it’s not vacillating between the extremes of a very high rain event, and then a burning hot sun,” says Ueki. “That’s the pattern it seems we’re moving into with climate change – a fluctuation from super rainy weather to hot, sunny weather every couple of weeks.”

One form of CEA is vertical farming, which involves growing food in vertically stacked rows or on tall towers so there are many more plants on the same footprint.

John Seward, Eric Batha and Lenny Feder of Hawai‘i Farming LLC are cucumber farmers in Waimea on Hawai‘i Island. Their farm uses many kinds of ag tech, including greenhouses, hydroponics and data sensors.

“In controlled environment greenhouses, we can grow a lot more pounds per acre because we are less at risk to weather events,” says Batha. “We also use lots of real time data sensors to test our water chemistry, plant hydration and other variables. This allows us to give our plants exactly what they need to be the most healthy and greatest tasting cucumbers.”

Adds Seward: “Every cucumber plant has its own dripper. I’d say from an environmental perspective, we use 90% less water with very targeted hydroponic growing than you would farming in an open field.”

Seward says CEA also means fewer pests, such as those that lead to rat lungworm disease, compared to open fields, which “definitely minimizes the use of herbicides and pesticides.”

CEA systems like vertical farming and hydroponics require upfront investments beyond the reach of most farmers, but they have proven effective at reducing traditional ag problems. And they merely scratch the surface of ag tech’s possibilities.

Reducing Ag Theft

Agriculture theft and vandalism are huge problems in Hawai‘i – and it’s not just people stealing a few papayas at a time.

“Ag theft is industrial in the sense that they take everything,” says Sharon Hurd, chair of the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture. “They take every avocado on your tree, every sweet potato in the ground, every flower off your tree. That’s ag theft – when you are left with nothing.” Criminals are also stealing livestock, equipment, chemicals and fertilizer and other farm property.

A farmer’s worst nightmare can be waking up to find all of their crops stolen just before the harvest. According to the latest survey on Hawai‘i agricultural theft and vandalism, conducted in 2019, the total number of theft incidents that year was estimated at 3,616. That same survey estimated there were a total of 14,262 trespassing incidents, posing a huge threat to food safety.

“The total value of theft and vandalism losses, as well as security costs, from Hawai‘i farms is estimated at $14.4 million, or 10% of the 2018 Hawai‘i net farm income of $142 million,” the report said.

For comparison, American retailers lost $94.5 billion from theft in 2021, but that was only 1.4% of total sales.

“If we don’t solve ag theft. I think we’ll lose a lot of farmers because they aren’t reaping the benefits of their hard work,” says Hurd. “One farmer in Mililani spends about $200,000 a year on security measures because if he doesn’t, he’ll lose everything.”

Heavy surveillance such as motion sensing cameras and drones can alert farmers. Extensive fencing, especially electric fencing, is another way to keep out unwanted visitors. And farmers who live on-site also deter thieves, trespassers and vandals.

Hurd points to a newer tactic: Farmers can use “a magic liquid that marks every fruit on the tree.” It can only be detected with a certain kind of light, she says, so when you go to the farmers market or the supermarket you can shine it on produce to see if it might have been stolen.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone

Farmers can also increase their revenue by transforming crops into value added products. Hurd provides one example: “If you have a raw potato and then turn it into a potato chip, you’ve added value to it. This means you can now sell it for a higher price.”

Mangoes with bruises and other imperfections may be shunned in the produce aisle, but they are perfectly good for making dried mango, mango juice, mango puree or mango powder for flavoring, soap, essential oils, lotions and more – using food processing equipment like dehydrators, juicers, pulverizers and freeze dryers.

When I ask cucumber farmers Seward and Batha if they’d considered selling pickles, they both laugh. “Only about every 30 minutes!” says Batha. “Pickles would be a great business for us, absolutely. But first, we need the people and facilities to do it at that scale, and construction here is painfully slow. But we have plans to do it eventually.”

Adding value to a product can also extend its shelf life. Cucumbers only last a couple of weeks in the fridge but an unopened jar of pickles can stay good for well over a year and much longer than a couple of weeks even after opening.

A long shelf life is crucial for Hawai‘i exports, and that shelf life can be extended by techniques such as Hiperbaric high pressure processing.HPP uses intense pressure to kill microorganisms and because it does not use extra heat, it preserves taste, texture, appearance and nutritional value better than traditional preservation methods.

“HPP is a game changer, but it’s expensive,” Hurd says. “So what we can do is have food processing facilities that multiple farms can share. That will provide the equipment that will extend the shelf life to maybe two years.”

Food processing facilities are huge spaces that can contain myriad food processing equipment, including packaging and labeling machinery.

“You have to have the whole supply chain, right? A place to accept it, process it, and then ship it,” Hurd says. There are currently nine food processing plants in Hawai‘i – two on O‘ahu, three on Moloka‘i and four on Hawai‘i Island – and more are being built to meet the high demand.

The challenges faced by Hawai‘i’s agriculture industry are plentiful, but so are the ideas to overcome them. People like Hurd, Yamaguchi, Wyban and Ueki are passionate about coming up with solutions and they say innovation and technology are the keys to unlocking Hawai‘i’s potential to have a thriving agriculture industry.

“If we can create solutions to increase productivity, efficiency and profitability of our companies in Hawai‘i, we can then export that technology to a lot of small farms around the world,” says Ueki. “So if we can grow profitably in Hawai‘i, we can probably grow profitably anywhere in the world.”