Nodding Vigorously

Richard Ha writes:

I’m under 200 lbs., just barely.

I lost .6 pounds this week.

My goals: To lose one pound per week for 39 weeks, and to get my resting heart rate below 50 beats per minute.

Today’s weight: 199.5 lbs.
This week’s target weight was 199.6 lbs. 
I am .1 lbs. ahead of schedule.

Starting weight on 5/23/06: 214.6 lbs.
End goal, on 2/18/07: 175 lbs.
Since 5/23, I have lost 15.1 lbs.

On 5/23, my resting heart rate was 65 beats per minute.
Today’s resting heart rate: 52 beats per minute. *

* This goes down as one gets into better shape. Lance Armstrong’s is said to be 32. George W’s was reported to be 47 beats per minute. Out of shape, mine is in the 70s. My best was 52 many years ago and this week I’m there again.

***

I broke 200 lbs., and hit my lowest resting heart rate of 52 beats per minute this week. This is cause for celebration. I’m going to call our friends Dan and Linda Nakasone and invite them to celebrate at Alan Wong’s restaurant with June and me.

I was finally able to do an intensive bike ride and not have to take off the following days to recover. On Wednesday, Rodrigo Romo and I went up Banana Hill. It was funny because at the beginning, Rodrigo was holding a regular conversation with me. At first I answered, and then as we were further along I nodded and answered in three-word sentences. As we rode higher, I held up my end of the conversation by nodding vigorously.

Then, while I was trying to keep myself together, Rodrigo took a business call on his cell. I’m sure the person on the other end of the phone had no idea Rodrigo was on his bike climbing Banana Hill. As for me, I kept my game face on, taking really deep breaths in case I needed to make a one-word sentence.

But this was better than the first three times I rode the hill. This time, I did it in three intervals. The first stop, just above Damasco’s house, I hit a heart rate of 140+.

Rodrigo kept on cruising up the hill and although I kept falling behind, I did fairly well, for me. I actually rode straight up; I didn’t have to ride side-to-side, searching for flat ground in first gear. On that segment, I hit a 160+ heart rate. Very good.

I stopped on the intersection of Susie and Danny’s house road to get my heart rate below 120, and then rode up to the forest line where it climbed back up to 150 again.

This was the part that Rodrigo was looking forward to—the downhill. I asked him to go first and he took off, coasting downhill. I followed behind, making sure my brakes were working well. As I started rolling faster and faster, this question came to mind: “Are you sure you locked the front wheel down?” I wasn’t sure.

The faster I rolled, the more another thought crept to the front. “You do remember that you don’t bounce very well anymore, right?” That was what I learned when I crashed a dirt bike many years ago, and broke a couple of ribs and a collarbone.

So I balanced all those thoughts and went as fast as I dared under the circumstances. By the time we were three-quarters of the way down, I had fallen quite a ways back and pedaled as hard as I could to lessen the gap.

When we hit the bottom, I asked Rodrigo how fast he’d been going. He had hit 39 miles per hour, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t pedal at all. I hit 26 mph. But that’s okay, considering how well I bounce nowadays.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday, I got on the elliptical and did 500 calories worth at a slow speed, and on Friday I forced myself to do it again. On Saturday, I felt rested and I increased the intensity. This is a big deal to me because in previous weeks I’ve had to take two days off after bike rides.

Recently I’ve been losing a half-pound per week. I hope to resume losing a pound per week from here forward. We’ll see.

Beyond Organic

Richard Ha writes:

At Hamakua Springs Country Farms we agree with the intentions of, and almost everything else about, organic farming.

But instead of organics, we have chosen to grow our produce hydroponically. That’s a technique that uses soil-less culture to grow plants instead of dirt–it’s a “clean and green” growing method many people don’t know too much about.

Let me tell you a little bit about it, and about how we made this careful decision to grow our vegetables hydroponically.

Though we have some of the same philosophies as organic farmers, we take them a little further. And we think we are actually more sustainable than organic farms. For instance, we have food safety certification, which is not a requirement in organic farming. It’s not a requirement in what we do either, it’s a voluntary effort, and it’s an important part of our sustainability efforts. It’s a benefit in marketing our products. But its most important benefit is in allowing our people to work in a safe and sanitary environment. Taking care of our employees is part of our sustainable farming philosophy, and we take sustainability very seriously.

Part of our farming philosophy is to sustain the community we live in. To this end, we donate a lot of our produce in this community. We take care of the environment (as, of course, do organic farmers). And we try to work with our workers as a team. We deliberately try not to follow the sugar plantation model where management and workers were often working at cross purposes. To us, management and workers cooperating and working together as a team is logical and sustainable.

Another point organic food proponents make is that organic foods taste better. But there’s really no way to quantify that. And, interestingly, as an organic farmer you’re constantly looking for seeds that are disease-resistant, so you will be able to fight off disease with the limited tools available to you. So you’re always in a quandary—are you going for the best-tasting produce? No, you’re going for the ones most pest-resistant.

At Hamakua Springs, we constantly focus on taste. Our first priority is always to find the tastiest product possible, and then we figure out what it’s going to take for us to grow that crop.

When you farm organically, there are, of course, a lot of restrictions, such as on the kind of chemicals you can use. For instance, organic farmers frequently have to control weeds manually. It’s very labor intensive.

To look at the bigger picture, if we were all to go organic, our population would have to spend a lot more time at farming. Many more people would have to be growing food in order to feed everybody, which wouldn’t allow as many people to be productive and creative in other ways—like trying to go to the moon, going up on the mountain and looking at the stars, teaching in the university; that sort of thing.

Using hydroponics, we have a little more leeway than organic farmers in what chemicals we can use. But we are very cautious, and conscious, about chemicals. We always use the least toxic ones first. After all, we eat this produce, too, and we feed it to our children and grandchildren.

As an example of our caution: we don’t use organophosphates. Those are a group of chemicals that have been in the news over the last five years or so. The USDA and EPA were trying to determine if they are safe, and they came to the conclusion that it depended on the dose. They didn’t ban organophosphates. But because they are controversial, we made a commitment not to use them.

The other reason we don’t use them is because they harm some of the beneficial insects, the ones that help control pests on our crops. We would much rather figure out how to get the beneficial insects to help us with pest-control, so that’s what we do.

On its website, the Hawai‘i Organic Farmers Association lists 10 reasons (as provided by the Organic Trade Association) to buy certified organic products. I’ve listed those 10 items, and added some reasons to go a step further and BUY HYDROPONIC:

1. Organic Products Meet Stringent Standards. Hamakua Springs Country Farms follows stringent safety and hygiene procedures and goes even further by voluntarily being “Food Safety Certified” by the third-party Davis Fresh Technologies.

2. Organic Food Tastes Great! At Hamakua Springs, we select varieties solely for taste, not just because of their disease-resistance qualities.

3. Organic Production Reduces Health Risks. We are Food Safety Certified.

4. Organic Farms Respect Our Water Resources. This is something we are very serious about at Hamakua Springs. Because we grow our vegetable crops hydroponically, we meter the water and fertilizer we use very precisely. This conserves our water resources and also helps us avoid over-fertilizing, which lessens the risk of run-off into streams.
5. Organic Farmers Build Soil. We plant our tomatoes using coconut fiber, a renewable resource approved for use in organic farming.
6. Organic Farmers Work in Harmony With Nature. As do hydroponic farmers. We believe in sustainable farming and have won national and international awards for our sustainable farming methods. For instance, Hamakua Springs was one of six finalists in the country for the Patrick Madden award. Tomatoes and cucumbers normally don’t do well at Pepe‘ekeo due to the area’s high rainfall and disease pressure. But we have been successful here because we developed ways to protect plants from the rain.

7. Organic Growers Are Leaders in Innovative Research. We are innovative farmers who always look beyond the status quo. We seek to keep plant pests and their predators in balance, and our success at this helps us avoid chemical usage. We do not use organophosphate-type chemicals. Instead we rely on soaps, oils and insect growth regulators to control insects, as well as other techniques such as physical barriers, crop rotation, strategic mowing, temperature control, oxygenation, etc.

8. Organic Producers Strive to Preserve Diversity. Diversity is good. We work on supporting beneficial insects at our farm as well growing a diverse mix of vegetables. One of our goals is to repopulate our farm with native species, especially around the stream banks and other unfarmable areas.

9. Organic Farming Keeps Rural Communities Healthy. We strongly believe in sustainability, which, in our book, includes the health of our communities. This is one reason we donate a lot of our product to charitable organizations.

10. Organic Abundance? Foods and Non-Foods Alike! We think of abundance in these terms, too. For instance, growing our hydroponic food locally is sustainable in more ways than immediately meet the eye. The fuel that it takes to import organic produce from distant countries overrides the benefits of growing them organically. Growing crops sustainably in Hawai‘i also protects our food supply from shipping interruptions in the future.

Buying organic lettuce that was grown on the mainland and beyond, for instance, does not contribute to a sustainable society for us living here in Hawaii. The money spent to buy that product goes out of the state, instead of staying here to support the infrastructure that could help Hawai‘i become self-sustaining in terms of food production.

Buying Hamakua Springs Country Farms products always contributes to sustainability.

These are some of the many reasons we have chosen, and prefer, hydroponic over organic techniques in growing our tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers.

If you have any questions or comments about our farm or our philosophies, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

Meet Florence Ha

When I chatted with Richard’s mom, Florence Ha—who still works on the farm at age 82—I realized that her family’s history tells some of Hawai‘i’s story.

Florence’s mother, Kamado Kina, came to the Islands from Okinawa as a picture bride.

“She was supposed to marry somebody else,” Florence told me. “But when she got off the boat and saw the person she was supposed to marry, she didn’t like him. And, you know, it was a disgrace to go back.”

It worked out. She met Matsuzo Higa, who had come from Okinawa to work on a sugar plantation. They married and had nine children.

Florence was their third child. She grew up in Honolulu and then lived for several years on Moloka‘i, where her father farmed, raising watermelons he sent to market in Honolulu by barge.

After the family returned to Honolulu, Florence worked at a cousin’s café. A young man who lived upstairs came down for breakfast every morning. That was Richard Ha, Sr., and they were married in 1944.

Chef_alan_and_grandma_ha_2Florence and Richard had six children, and Richard, Jr.—our Richard—was the firstborn.

“Of all my children, he got into most of the trouble. Oooooh,” she said, remembering. Still, she said, she knew he was very smart.

“I didn’t think he was going to be a farmer. At first I thought he might be a lawyer. But when he came back from the service and saw us struggling, that’s when he came and helped us on the poultry farm.”

And then he started another farm. “I helped him. This and that—I helped him box the bananas and grade the bananas. Whatever needed to be done.”

She’s modest about her help, but Richard stresses how hard she worked.

“She’s been working with us from day one,” he said, “all the way to now. And she is the person most responsible for us being where we are today.

“Mom was the person in the early days who, when we needed help, she was there. Not only eight hours, but 12, 15, 20 hours. Whatever it took. Back when we started up it was seven days a week, for years.”

He told me that in those early years, she would work at their Waiakea Uka farm during the day. When that work day was done at 6:00, he’d bring a trailer load of bananas from his new farm in Kapoho and she would stay for hours, packing those bananas so the trailer was empty and ready to go back to Kapoho early in the morning.

“When I think about it now, I don’t know when she slept,” he said.

“She was always the hardest worker of all of us,” he said. “She was an example. Some of us were marketers and talkers, and she was a doer.”

Though she’ll be 83 next month, she still works from 7 a.m. to 11 in the mornings, “every day that I feel like going. Richard told me, ‘I don’t want you to retire.’ I’m working in the nursery and I feel kind of bad, because I hardly do anything now. I don’t feel I’m doing enough. But he says he doesn’t want me to retire because he wants me to get exercise instead of just sitting home and doing nothing.”

“People would tell me, Don’t work so hard. I said, I’m not working, I’m exercising.”

She talked about all the exercise equipment her son has bought her over the years, which she uses. “Exercise machines, weight-lifting machines, bicycles. One day one of the bishops came to my house, and said, where did you get all this equipment? I told him my son got it for me, and he said that’s the best thing he could do.”

Richard joked that he gives her the equipment because it keeps her able to work. “Cheap labor. But of course it’s not that. Mainly it’s for health.”

He said he wants her to exercise for her health, and to keep coming to work to keep active. “Even if she just comes to work for one hour a day,” he said. “Whatever it takes to keep on going. It keeps her young.”

He talked about a time when she decided to retire and stopped working at the farm.

“It was maybe more than ten years ago,” he said. “She started getting fat, really sluggish, not happy. When she started coming again, she slimmed down. I was able to pick her up and talk story with her, tell her where the farm was going, this is what we’re doing. She’s like a sounding board.”

They both told me that that’s the part of the day they enjoy the most—the mornings, when he picks her up at her Waiakea Uka home and they talk on the way to the farm in Pepe‘ekeo.

“He tells me what he’s thinking of doing (at the farm),” she said, “things like that. That’s what I really enjoy.”

Richard said he gets his sense of humor from her and sometimes they share a good laugh.

“She loves to laugh,” he said. “We have a good time. Every once in awhile I’ll crack a joke and crack her up.”

She’s at home right now, recovering from foot surgery, but said she’s going back to work this week.

“I know Richard’s trying so hard,” she said, “so it makes me feel good.” Her hard work at the farm, she said, has always been “a real labor of love.”

So Close!

Richard Ha writes:

Next week, under 200!

I lost .6 pounds this week.

My goals: To lose one pound per week for 39 weeks, and to get my resting heart rate below 50 beats per minute.

Today’s weight: 200.1 lbs.
This week’s target weight was 200.6 lbs.
I am still .5 lbs. ahead of schedule

Starting weight on 5/23/06: 214.6 lbs.
End goal, on 2/18/07: 175 lbs.
Since 5/23, I have lost 14.5 lbs.

On 5/23, my resting heart rate was 65 beats per minute. Today’s resting heart rate: 54 beats per minute.*

* This goes down as one gets into better shape. Lance Armstrong’s is said to be 32. George W’s was reported to be 47 beats per minute. Out of shape, mine is in the 70s. My best was 52 many years ago.

***

Below are typical training times that various categories of bike racers commit to training. The lowest category racer commits from 30 minutes to an hour every day of the year, and sometimes more than two hours per day. I can’t realistically commit that much time, no matter how much I want to improve.

Category Hours/Year Minutes/Day
Pro 800-1200 132-197
1-2 700-1000 115-164
3 500-700 82-115
4 350-500 57-82
5/Junior 200-350 33-57

Three weeks ago I hit a weight loss plateau, so I increased the length of time I exercised at a low heart rate (110 beats/minute) from approximately 40 minutes per session to more than one hour per session. I did this seven days per week. But it was taking too much time and I was hardly losing any weight.

I read about interval training a few months ago and learned that one can get the benefits of the above training program with a shorter time commitment. It involves working out at a higher intensity three times per week for 30 minutes.

For the last two weeks I have been doing this. I checked with my doctor first and he said that I should have no problem going on this exercise program as I had already been exercising for three months. Having a resting heart rate of 60 in his office also helped to convince him.

For this new program, I start to count seconds from the time my heart rate gets into the zone. After the length of time scheduled, I stop and walk around until my heart rate hits the recovery level of 115, and then start another interval. The idea is to squeeze as many intervals as possible into a 30-minute session. Three intervals is plenty for right now and as I get into better shape I should be able to do more.

My first month’s schedule of Interval Training:

Week % max heart rate Beats/minute Duration
1 75-80 123-132 3 minutes
2 85-90 140-148 90 seconds
3 90-95 148-156 45 seconds
4 70-75 115-123 1 hour

So in week 1, I do 3-minute intervals of 123 to 132 beats per minute during a 30-minute total session, and I do this three times (say, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.)

In week 2, I do 90-second intervals of 140 to 148 beats per minute, during a 30-minute session, 3 times during the week.

In week 3, I do 45-second intervals of 123 to 132 beats per minute, during a 30-minute session, 3 times during the week.

In week 4, I do a 1-hour session at 115-123 beats per minute, one time each on Mon., Wed. and Fri.

Then I repeat the cycle.

This training program is more like competitive ice skating than bicycle racing. The Kulani Trails require this type of short burst of intense work and some coasting and then repeat. It’s like doing triple jumps and resting and then doing it again.

Since I am trying to lose weight in addition to improving my performance, I have modified this program to make sure I expend at least 500 calories of energy per day. I spend that additional time at a low recovery heart rate of 115 or so.

I feel this program will help me start losing weight again. Several days ago, I actually weighed 197.5 pounds. And on Friday morning my resting heart rate was 50.

Due to the increase in exercise intensity lately, I am craving food, and I also needed to take two days off each of the last two weeks. This makes me think this program will work just fine once my body adapts and I can start to do low heart rate exercise on some days instead of having to take them off completely.

P.S. I have noticed I can eat the largest fresh salads and hardly gain weight. And they are nutrient-dense. But I do need to watch the rice, bread, meat and fat.

Shedding Pounds and Picking up Awards

Richard Ha writes:

I lost .5 lbs. this week.

My goal: To lose one pound per week for 39 weeks

Today’s weight: 200.7 lbs.
This week’s target weight was 201.6 lbs. 
I am .9 lbs. ahead of schedule

Starting weight on 5/23/06: 214.6 lbs.
End goal, on 2/18/07: 175 lbs.
Since 5/23, I have lost 13.9 lbs.

On 5/23, my resting heart rate was 65 beats per minute
Today’s resting heart rate: 57 beats per minute.* (after 2 cups of coffee)

* This goes down as one gets into better shape. Lance Armstrong’s is said to be 32. George W’s was reported to be 47 beats per minute. Out of shape, mine is in the 70s. My best was 52 many years ago.

***

I lost half a pound this week. I started riding my bike, and because of the increase in intensity I had to rest for two days. Based on how rested I feel today, I should be back on track with my workouts this week.

On Wednesday, Rodrigo and I rode our bikes from the farm down to the ocean and back. We went over the highway and down Banyan Tree Road through an open gate–the same one featured on the front page of the Tribune-Herald a few days later because it was blocked with boulders—and down to the ocean access road. We headed north and stopped at the main fishing spots to see what was going on.

The coastline is falling into the ocean there and pine trees with most of their roots exposed are barely hanging on. We saw a few turtles floating on the surface, and even a flock of seabirds gliding in and out of a sea cave as if with the wave motion.

Rodrigo’s comfortable pace is much faster than mine. Of course, he’s a couple of decades younger than me. If he had not stopped to wait for me, he would have been halfway home by the time I reached the top. It was a good reminder that I still have a ways to go with my training.

The week before, Rodrigo had ridden the Kulani trails for the first time, and he commented on how challenging and active the trails were. In Tucson, he used to ride to work on a 15-mile loop several days per week, and he’s been riding a similar trail since they moved to the Big Island a couple of months ago.

He said that the Kulani trails are different in that you tend to be outside your comfort zone. The terrain is varied and the trail is such that one needs to accelerate, decelerate, maneuver though and around roots and rocks and trees and branches the whole way. To make it more interesting, the person he rode with was an advanced rider/racer.

My goal is still to ride in Kulani and have fun. In order to do this, I need to weigh no more than 175 pounds and be in good aerobic shape. I’ve got a long way to go. But I do know what I need to do.

We have some news and here’s even a bit of entertainment:

We were going to wait to announce that Ha Ha Ha! has been selected as a Typepad featured blog and will appear on its homepage on September 1st.

But when we started checking out Typepad’s featured blogs, we enjoyed this one from the San Jose Mercury News so much that we wanted to share it.

It features two Chinese guys lip-synching to Jessica Simpson, the Black Eyed Peas and others. These guys are big in China and they are hilarious. Check it out.

We’ll come back and tell you more about the Typepad thing when it’s time.

Not “Just a Banana Farm”

Richard Ha writes:

When Leslie was putting together that post about our employee Susie White, she asked me whether she should include Susie’s quote—“I thought, ‘I don’t want to work on a banana farm’”—or whether it wasn’t what we wanted to portray.

I told her that it was very honest and to include it.

I told her that I tell politicians and business people, and everybody, the same thing—that we know our workers don’t want their kids to be banana farm workers. They want more for their kids.

I understand that and that’s why I try to do whatever I can to help the situation so their kids might have more opportunities. That’s why I push for economic development opportunities. Like when the brand new College of Pharmacy (at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo) came up and they were accepting testimony, I went and spoke in favor of it. I kept it light and humorous—I told them I wasn’t there to support the school of pharmacy because we were going to sell more bananas. I was there because it meant more opportunities for our banana workers’ kids.

Another example is the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) proposed for Mauna Kea. It gives economic opportunity; some of the kids might want to become astronomers. That’s my agenda, really. When I support something like the TMT, it’s with the thought of how this will help our workers.

What it really comes down to is if the kids can get good jobs, maybe they can buy their own piece of property. We can help them help themselves, without their having to leave Hawai‘i, or having to go get subsidies from the state.

I’m glad Susie made that comment about thinking we were just a banana farm, but soon realizing that we are much more than that. I don’t often get the opportunity to talk about this important subject.

Employee Spotlight: Susie White

Richard told me a story about something that happened several months ago, when the hydroponic lettuces were new and he asked Susie White—at the time, she was the Hamakua Springs tomato packing house supervisor—to come see what they were doing with lettuce.

Susie_first1_1“I could tell that she really wanted to get her hands on the lettuces,” he said. “The clincher was when I handed her one. She held it really gently, like it was a baby bird, and I thought to myself, ‘She’s the one.’”

He asked her if she was interested in taking on the lettuce project and she said she couldn’t wait. Susie is now Lettuce Production Supervisor at Hamakua Springs Country Farms.

Susie says that she used to drive by the farm and see the greenhouses. She wondered what was growing in there, and when she saw a job opening she applied.

“I really needed full-time and benefits, and that’s what they were offering. I thought, I don’t want to work on a banana farm. But it turned out to be so much more than I expected. I just love it.”

She was hired to work in the greenhouse, pruning tomatoes. Less than two weeks later she was put in charge of the packing house, becoming the first tomato packing house supervisor. Together, says Richard, they developed the processes they use today.

She says it’s great fun learning about hydroponics and greenhouses. “Plus it’s all new—his greenhouse operation is new and he’s cutting edge. We’re learning as we go. I’ve never been bored since I worked here. Plus it’s close to my house; I live just up the road. And I get to use all my experience.”

Her experience is extensive and fitting. She studied at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo’s Department of Agriculture, and also used to grow vegetables at home—lettuce, herbs, corn, asparagus and watercress—for restaurants (Rosie’s Boathouse, Harrington’s) where she worked as a bartender.

Before coming to work at Hamakua Springs in early 2004, the self-described “aggie” worked for the Hawai‘i Agriculture Research Center, and for the Research Corporation of the University of Hawai‘i, doing forestry research for both.

“I use all that research in the job now. For instance, with the tomato yield it was a lot of data collection, and out here in the lettuce it was how to set up little trials, spacing, how many seeds. We were doing a lot of Alan Wong research, trying to get all the lettuces the right size and shape for him, and how long it takes to the time of harvest, different times of year….”

She says Richard’s fun to work for because he “tries things that people don’t think can be done, mostly because they just haven’t been done before.”

“And he’s always trying new things and is open to new ideas,” she says. “He asks all of us, wherever we’re working. He’s always looking for feedback.”

She speaks highly of both Richard and June, who she says “approach things very business-like, but are very down to earth. For instance, all Richard cared about working with tomatoes is how they tasted, not the yields. And Kimo and Tracy, too. They are making very thought-out decisions, plans, and everything they do they have a reason for. You might not know what it is at first but after awhile you see it.”

“I like working for all of them,” she says. “I trust them.” Susie2_1

Richard speaks equally highly of Susie. “The thing that first got my attention,” he says, “was how Susie cared for her fellow workers, especially the ones who could possibly get overlooked because of not understanding the language as well as others. She was like a mother hen to all those workers and we appreciated that very much.”

He says he saw that she noticed if somebody—especially someone new, who didn’t know the routine yet—didn’t know it was break time.

“Or if there’s a meeting,” he says, “some of the new people might not feel comfortable and they’ll hang back. She’ll bring them to the middle and make them feel welcome. That’s what we want to do here at Hamakua Springs—take care of the most defenseless. And that’s what she does.”

Susie says her job has kept her “challenged beyond belief”—in a good way. “We went from six greenhouses of tomatoes to over 100,” she says. “Now I’m challenging my way back up over here in the lettuce. It’s kept me on my toes a hundred percent. This job just turned out to be the dream job I never knew it would be.”

“I love it,” she says. “I’m having a ball.” — posted by Leslie Lang

Gaining Weight

Richard Ha writes:

I gained .6 lbs. this week.

My goal: To lose one pound per week for 39 weeks
Starting weight on 5/23/06: 214.6 lbs.
End goal, on 2/18/07: 175 lbs.

This week’s target weight: 202.6 lbs.
Today’s actual weight: 201.2 lbs. 7/23/06
I am 1.4 lbs. ahead of schedule

Since 5/23, I have lost 13.4 lbs.

On 5/23, my resting heart rate was 65 beats per minute
Today’s resting heart rate: 55 beats per minute.*

* This goes down as one gets into better shape. Lance Armstrong’s is said to be 32. George W’s was reported to be 47 beats per minute. Out of shape, mine is in the 70s. My best was 52 many years ago.

***

I gained weight this week and it’s starting to worry me.

I’ve read in a lot of places that one can expect to come to a weight loss plateau. And I am in the middle of one right now. So I need to increase the duration of exercise or the intensity or both.

The routine that I had settled into felt harder when I started it three months ago. I must have adapted fairly well as it feels very easy now. Maybe too easy. I believe that I need to get back to the original feeling of difficulty in order to start losing weight again.

I notice that a heart rate of 118 per minute seems to feel the same as when I first started. I’ll increase from the 110 beats per minute that I’ve been doing lately to 118 beats per minute and see what happens.

Last week, I rode my mountain bike up Banana Hill for the first time. It was tougher than I remembered. I made it to the bottom of the last steep climb before I had to stop to rest. I’ll be riding my bike several times per week and should improve steadily.

To recap: I’ll ride my bike twice per week and that will automatically increase intensity. I’ll do the other five days at a heart rate of 118 per minute or so. This will still be fairly easy. But it will be slightly more strenuous that the 110 or so that I had settled into.

Hopefully, this will get me pass this plateau that I am stuck at. Fortunately, I am 1.4 lbs. ahead of schedule.

Our Food Safety Certification

Richard Ha writes:

Hamakua Springs Country Farms was inspected this past Tuesday by Davis Fresh Technologies for its ProSafe Food Safety certification program. This is the independent, third party Food Safety certifier we work with to ensure that we comply with “Good Agricultural Practices.”

This food safety certification is something we do completely voluntarily. It’s not required in our business. It involves a lot of extra work, cost and time but we consider it very important because it results in a better work environment for our people and it makes them proud to work for a responsible company. Through its structured organization, the certification helps us to manage our operation. And, finally, it gives our customers confidence in our product and our Hamakua Springs brand.

Craig_bowden_and_tracy_pa

We think we did well on this inspection. We will receive the final report in a few days.

The ProSafe certification program was designed in response to the U.S. Government’s food safety concerns as addressed by the FDA and USDA in their “Guide to Minimize Microbial Food Safety Hazards for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables.” This guide describes “Good Agricultural Practices,” which reduce food safety hazards.

The guide covers agricultural and post-harvest water uses, worker health and hygiene, field and facility sanitation, transportation and traceback. We know our customers expect a certain level of care regarding our growing crops for their consumption, and the ProSafe certification program gives credibility to the extent of the care we take in growing our crops.

Some of the guide’s important points are:

When water comes into contact with fresh produce, its quality determines the potential for contamination.

Agricultural water. If water is of good quality, risk is low. We evaluate water samples for heavy metals as well as for bacterial content. We document and maintain records throughout the year. We use county water for all our spray water since it comes in contact with the edible portions of our crops.

Processing water. We use good quality water wherever it comes into contact with fresh produce, and monitor and document water quality throughout the process. For example, we know that bacteria need approximately 350 milivolts of electricity to hold itself together. Therefore, we maintain chlorine in the water so that there is at least 550 milivolts in the water. This causes the bacteria to come apart upon contact. We monitor and record the measurements of the wash water throughout the day and keep the records for inspections.

Cooling Operations. We maintain temperatures that promote best produce quality and minimize bacterial growth. And we keep our cooling equipment clean and sanitary. This includes inspecting and cleaning Young Brothers containers before loading and shipping. We document the inspection as well as the course of action for each container that we ship out. The records are available for inspection at any time.

Worker Health and Hygiene. We know that infected employees increase the risk of transmitting food borne illnesses. So:

We train employees to follow good hygiene practices. We do not allow employees with open cuts or lesions to come into contact with fresh produce. Neither do we allow workers with signs of infectious disease to handle fresh produce. We maintain records to show that all workers receive training in these areas.

Sanitary Facilities. We provide toilet facilities that are accessible to everyone and maintained by an outside service on a regularly scheduled basis. In addition, we check the facilities on a daily basis. We provide hand-washing facilities that are adequately supplied with soap and paper towels. Maintenance and resupply is documented and the record is maintained and available for inspection.

Field Sanitation. Fresh produce may become contaminated during pre-harvest and harvest activities from contact with soil, fertilizers, water, workers and harvesting equipment.

We harvest our produce into plastic totes that are washed and sanitized prior to each use. The harvest totes are placed on wooden pallets. We are a hydroponic operation and by its nature this gives less opportunity for contamination. Ida_logging_tote_sanitation

For example, we use sterile media. We do not use soil, compost or manures. The floors of the hydroponic houses are covered with a weed barrier and so the fruit cannot come into contact with soil. In addition, the houses are covered with plastic that acts as an umbrella. This prevents splashing of water and soil onto the fruit, thereby lessening the chance of contamination.

Packing Facility. We do not use secondhand boxes. Packing materials are covered and stored on pallets, not on the floor. Plastic totes are cleaned and sanitized and packers use gloves when handling the produce, which is always packed into new clamshells and boxes.

Pest Control. We maintain a 10-foot weed-free barrier around the packing facilities. We set rat traps outside the packing facilities to manage rat populations near the facility. We maintain a log that indicates when bait was changed and whether or not we caught any rats.

Transportation. We make sure the Young Brothers containers are washed and sanitized before we load up. In addition, we make sure that the product is sent at the temperature that is optimum for its type.

We have written procedures on how fruit is to be transported from the field to the packing house. We require newly harvested fruit to be stored in refrigeration as soon as it comes in from the field.

Traceback. We have formal procedures in place to recall product in the event it becomes necessary. We do mock recalls periodically, where we partner with distributors and simulate a situation where we recall a batch of product. We have pack dates on each box of product that we ship, which allows us to track the box.

We stringently enforce all of these procedures on a day-to-day basis. The most important result is that these procedures protect our workers from bacterial and infectious disease situations. Secondarily, it an important management tool that we use to manage our farm effectively. And finally, it gives our customers assurances that our brand stands for good food safety practices.

(Photos: Craig Bowden and Tracy Pa go over some of our standard operating procedures; Tomato Packing House Supervisor Ida Castillo logs data re: the sanitation schedule for harvesting totes.)