Growing a Sustainable By Stefan Verbano
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KeOlaMagazine.com | November-December 2019
avid Reppun walks barefoot along the mounded rows of taro. He stops at a full-grown hedge of the broad-leafed Polynesian staple, announces its variety name, and leans into the mass of green, selecting a stem and bending it down to inspect coloring and venation. A stream of descriptors comes next: taste, density, suitability for “table taro” versus poi, and—perhaps most importantly—whether this specific variety is well-suited to the growing climate at his 25acre farm in Ka‘ohe Homesteads, just outside Pāhoa. David comes from a long line of native Hawaiian taro (kalo) farmers on O‘ahu, and currently propagates two dozen organic varieties using little more than grass clippings as fertilizer. When the rows grow tall and corms mature, he harvests the woody-skinned root vegetables and sells his crop to Island Naturals Market. Rattling off taro minutia with bent stalk in hand, clad in cutoff jeans, his wispy salt and pepper hair swaying in the breeze, the 64-year-old man hardly seems like the businessminded type. He talks like a scientist—about observational data, trial and error, taxonomy, and biochemical processes. He’s learned a great deal about agriculture the same way ancient Hawaiians did—through meticulous observation of natural phenomena, which drives him to keep his farm as closely aligned with nature as possible. It’s easy to imagine the food cornucopia lining Hawai‘i Island’s grocery store shelves coming from such picturesque, natural places as David’s farm in the misty hills above Pāhoa. Except it doesn’t. According to data from local Hawai‘i Island nonprofit The Kohala Center, roughly 85 percent of the food consumed on the island is grown and processed elsewhere. Despite ample available farmland and a centuries-long heritage of food sustainability, its residents have come to rely on a complex, transcontinental web of producers, processors, and distributors, ocean freighters, semi-trailer trucks, and cargo planes, all just to keep the island’s store shelves stocked. Hawai‘i Island’s ports are 2,500 miles from the nearest continental US port. Imported goods reflect this immense distance in their prices—the complexity and resourceintensiveness of the networks that bring these far-away products to the island. Boxes of cereal, cartons of eggs, gallons of milk, blocks of cheese, and loaves of bread can end up being twice as expensive compared to mainland prices. According to the nonprofit organization Feeding America (a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks), in 2017 approximately 160,000 residents across Hawai‘i were 58 considered “food insecure.” This data was based on the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) definition of “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members, and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods.” Hawai‘i Island itself was home to 23,190 food-insecure individuals in 2017, according to the Feeding America data. Interestingly, that means more than 23,000 people without enough food to eat live on an island which, some researchers say, less than 250 years ago had a larger human population than it does today, and was able to keep everybody relatively well-fed (save for a few brief war/famine periods) without the transcontinental web. “The Hawaiians, over many, many generations, figured out how to grow food here that collected carbon, conserved native species, and improved the soil,” says Craig Elevitch, co-director of the Hawai‘i Homegrown Food Network (HHFN), a Hawai‘i Island-based organization working to create a self-sufficient, community-focused food system. “They did it for hundreds of years, so we know it works. We just need to bring it into our modern context...it’s a good example of what can be attained here.” In 2008 and 2009, Craig presented a year-long series of food security workshops on Kaua‘i, Maui, and Hawai‘i Island, out of which grew the need for HHFN as a centralized resource for the myriad groups working to increase the islands’ local food Merlin Foreman harvests ripe noni fruit from one of nearly 75 noni trees on her 2 ¼-acre backyard farm in Orchidland Estates subdivision in Puna District. She crafts her ‘Aloha Sunshine Tea’ blend from noni leaves, soursop leaves, turmeric and ginger. photo by Stefan Verbano