A short look at our bananas:
And part of our hydro system:
The Hawaii Tribune-Herald had an article this morning about the farm closing. The reporter did a good job.
All things considered, farming was easy when Richard Ha first started growing bananas in Kapoho nearly 40 years ago.
“You just had to work hard and you could be OK,” Ha, 71, told the Tribune-Herald on Thursday, a day after announcing on his Hamakua Springs Country Farm blog that the banana operation — the largest on the island — would be closing down.
“The last bananas will be the ones we are bagging now, which will be ready around the end of March, and then that will be it,” Ha wrote on the blog.
The past decades have seen the banana farm grow from 25 acres in Kapoho to 150 acres in its current Pepeekeo location.
The farm survived a Kapoho windstorm that forced a move to Keaau. It survived nematodes in Keaau. It was brought back to life in Pepeekeo after banana bunchy top virus decimated the Keaau crop in 2005.
And it weathered the 2008 oil price peak — an event that imposed extraordinary costs on the farm and would have shuttered the business if Ha’s employees hadn’t proposed a solution: switch from cultivating both apple bananas and Williams (a Cavendish cultivar) to exclusively Williams.
The proposal bought the farm time….