Category Archives: Hydroponics

Community, Education, Hydroponics, Schools

Nawahiokalaniopu‘u

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Jimmy Naniole, of Nawahiokalaniopu‘u, the Hawaiian language immersion school in Kea‘au, brought some teachers for a tour of our farm the other day, so they could see firsthand what we do and how our farm operates.

We’re going to help Nawahi set up a hydroponic operation. We’ll provide help and assistance as needed, and if we can contribute used but functional equipment and supplies, we’ll do that. We like for youngsters to learn how to grow things.

When the Nawahi teachers were here, Kimo gave an orientation and told them why we do what we do. So now they have a good sense of what their plants will look like as they start producing a crop.

The teachers included Na‘ilima Gaison, Lei Franco, Poha Tolentino-Perry, Loke Rosequo and Pele Harmon.

 

Last week Jimmy took me on a tour of the Nawahi school grounds. I was last there maybe 10 years ago, when Jimmy was turning the outside area into a sustainable, organic operation. He was raising animals and plants and integrating them into the landscape. Water flowed from the roof of the school by a series of pipes above and underground, through a lo‘i (taro patch) and into a low spot, a pond. It was a real Hawaiian-style landscape.

At that time, Kimo took Jimmy some banana pulapula and now all of the bananas on the school ground are from those original plants.

Jimmy has retired since then, but the school has “called him back” to help with its nutrition program.

We’ve known Jimmy from his days at Hilo High School. One of his students at Hilo High was Henry Lovell, who is now our tomato field operation superviser.

When Jimmy was at Hilo High School, he taught by doing things in the old ways. He had students growing traditional plants, such as kalo and ‘uala, and even made an imu where the kids learned about roasting meat.

During that period, the Hokule‘a sailed from Radio Bay in Hilo to Rapa Nui, and Jimmy asked me if I could supply bananas for the journey. He pointed out that in just a few days the voyagers would be out of fresh fruit. So I set out to make the bananas last as long as possible by varying the maturity and variety we provided. We were happy to learn that the crew ate the last bananas as they crossed the equator.

We are happy to be working with Nawahi. The Hawaiians of old had a society that functioned well, and where trading and taking care of each other was part of the culture—and this is something that Nawahi teaches.

They are important lessons. We believe that as oil supplies decline and food prices continue to rise, people will need to grow more of their own food and trade with each other. As we move into a new era of alternate energy, and out of the “Era of Oil,” these are some of the things that we must again learn how to do.

This is why we are so pleased to be working with Jimmy again and with Nawahi.

Food Safety Certification, Health, Hydroponics, Lettuce

Safe Salad

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An article in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser caught my eye. The headline was Produce We Eat May Not Be Safer. Its subheading: “Government has failed to increase inspections after deadly outbreak.”

Coincidentally, we just had our Food Safety inspection two weeks ago by Craig Bowden of Davis Fresh. We passed the inspection and Craig told us he is pleased that we continue to show constant improvement. Nearly five years ago we were one of the first producers in the state to voluntarily participate in an independent, third-party Food Safety Certification program.

A few months back, when CNN ran a special about the deadly E. coli outbreak in spinach, we wrote a post explaining what we do to prevent disease at Hamakua Springs. We planned our production systems from the beginning to prevent these problems from happening. We feel confident that we are on the right track.

Leafy greens are especially vulnerable to disease because, unlike with some other vegetables, people actually eat the leaves. The plant grows low to the ground and is vulnerable to contamination from rain splattering off contaminated soil, flooding, or improperly treated compost. It is also vulnerable to contaminated spray water, employee sanitation problems, sickness, rodents and more.

Large bagged salad processors “mow” the lettuce, catch leaves and move them along conveyors in the packing house, where the product tumbles through a sanitation process—but there is no way to decontaminate leafy green in the packing house once they’ve been contaminated in the field. Worse, the packing house process actually serves to mix and spread the contamination. So it is most important to have safe field operations.

At Hamakua Springs, our hydroponic operations always begin with chlorine-treated water. After we treat the water, we measure it for E. coli colony forming units (CFU), and we have always found it to be zero.

After that we plant. The plants get their nutrients from this treated water. Since we grow our produce hydroponically (without soil) in covered houses, there is no risk from rain splattering the plants or contaminated spray water. We address other possible contamination issues as a part of our food safety program. We are very comfortable with our safety methods and you can be, too.

Although we hope we don’t hear about any more E. coli-contaminated lettuce on the Mainland, we will not be surprised if it happens again.

Hydroponics, Lettuce

No Weak Links Here

On CNN’s Special Investigation Unit this past weekend, they ran a story by Sanjay Gupta called Danger: Poisoned Food.

It talked about the many incidences over the last few years of bagged greens being contaminated with E. coli 0157-H7, some of which resulted in fatalities. The main issues it discussed were:

1. Since 1995, there have been 20 E. coli outbreaks associated with California lettuce.

2. E. coli 0157-H7, the dangerous form, is usually associated with cattle.

3. Once contaminated, the greens cannot be decontaminated.

4. The process which mixes and tumbles greens actually spreads any bacteria that might be present. And chlorine and washing cannot eradicate all bacteria.

5. Control measures on farms are voluntary, not mandatory.

6. The FDA does not inspect farms.

This is nothing new. We knew all this three years ago when we were starting to grow lettuce. I predicted then that there would be more cases of E. coli 0157-H7 contamination of bagged lettuce and greens.

And nothing significant has changed. There will be still more cases of E. coli 0157-H7 contamination. People will probably start to shy away from industrial, assembly-line production of leafy green bagged products.

This is why we chose to grow our vegetables hydroponically. We are able to address the E. coli 1057-H7 issue confidently through hydroponic farming.

The following is our approach to the problem. It is not very complicated. Cattle manure is the main problem, so we have made sure to minimize the ways that cattle manure can affect our operation.

We do not use compost. Incomplete composting is a risk factor.

We treat the water our leafy greens grow in with chlorine at 650 ORP. This means that bacteria are killed on contact before we plant. And because of the way we operate, it is very unlikely that our water can be contaminated by E. coli 0157- H7 after that. Also, only county water is used should we need to top off the raceways.

We only use county water when we spray the leafy greens. Contaminated spray water is a risk factor.

Our plants are protected from rain. This avoids rain splash, which is another risk factor for the spread of E. coli 0157-H7.

We only sell whole heads of lettuce. E. coli 0157-H7 cannot be washed off. And it can spread far and wide when mixed and tumbled in a industrial leafy green bagging system. Selling only whole heads avoids this serious problem.

We only sell what we grow ourselves. The food safety chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We don’t have any weak links.

Eating Locally, Hydroponics

Eating Better Than Organic

Richard Ha writes:

Time magazine recently ran an interesting article titled Eating Better Than Organic, which made me reflect about our long-time farming philosophies at Hamakua Springs.

The article talks about eating organic food that is produced elsewhere and transported long distances vs. buying food that is grown—and purchased—locally.

“Nearly a quarter of American shoppers now buy organic products once a week, up from 17% in 2000,” writes John Cloud. “But for food purists, ‘local’ is the new ‘organic,’ the new ideal that promises healthier bodies and a healthier planet.”

Cloud goes on to quote ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan in his 2002 memoir Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods: “If you send it halfway around the world before it is eaten,” he muses, “an organic food still may be ‘good’ for the consumer, but is it ‘good’ for the food system?”

Here at the farm we have thought about these issues for a long time. Even when organic was at the top of everybody’s consciousness, we always believed that “local” was most important and what we wanted to concentrate on.

In her 2001 memoir This Organic Life, Columbia University nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow writes that her commitment to eating locally is driven by three things. “The first is the taste of live food; the second is my relation to frugality; the third is my deep concern about the state of the planet.”

Long ago we came to three similar conclusions. First, regarding taste. We select the varieties we grow for taste above all else, and then we find the methods and systems that allow us to grow them successfully. In an effort to produce the freshest lettuce possible, we even sell Living Lettuce.

Second, frugality. We live in an area where production costs are high, so we look for ways to add value to our products. As only one example, our produce is third party Food Safety Certified by Davis Fresh Technologies.

Thirdly, whereas Gussow has a deep concern about the state of the planet, our similar concern is—because we live in the middle of the Pacific—about our island community.

But philosophies are one thing and measurable results are another. We believe in measuring.

Our cocktail tomatoes were ranked “Best Tasting” by Honolulu magazine in their 2005 “Best Of” issue.

Lynne Rosetto Kasper, who hosts the NPR program The Splendid Table, recently conducted a side-by-side tomato tasting in Honolulu. She invited 100 master chefs and culinary students to rate tomatoes from various farms, and our cocktail tomato was voted Best Tasting.

Recently we have started measuring the nutritional contents of the edible portions of our products, and we are working to improve them. We are taking baseline data, making adjustments and keeping track of results. This is not commonly done, but we think it makes perfect sense as long as the extra effort does not jeopardize our business.

Although we agree with most organic philosophies, after careful consideration we decided not to grow our vegetables organically. Before we started our hydroponic lettuce production three years ago, we knew that E. coli contamination was a huge and growing issue. We felt that composting, as done with organic methods of production, was riskier and less controllable than hydroponic methods of production.

We decided to use hydroponics in our lettuce growing operations, rather than organics, because we can disinfect our nutrient solution and keep it clean for the duration of the crop. We feel this is more dependable than field production, where rainwater could splash soil and contanimants onto the edible portion of leafy greens. Also, as we’ve seen in the news recently, growing in fields near cattle operations is a risk factor for E. coli. Our nutrient raceways are isolated, and the edible portions of our leafy greens never come in contact with soil or compost.

Finally, we strongly believe in locally grown products because Hawai‘i needs to be self-reliant in its food supply.

At a recent Senate hearing where Hawai‘i’s dependence on imported food was discussed, I testified in favor of growing food on all islands in all climate zones. Concentrating food production in one location can be risky, as we found out when Banana Bunchy Top virus devastated our Kea‘au banana farm (fortunately we had the Pepe‘ekeo farm, too).

Hawai‘i, it was noted, imports the majority of its food and is just seven days away from empty shelves should there be a shipping interruption. Andrew Hashimoto, Dean of the University of Hawai‘i College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, testified that, “We are the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the nation.”

The Time magazine article quotes local-eating pioneer Gussow defining “local” as: “within a day’s leisurely drive of our homes. [This] distance is entirely arbitrary. But then,” she says, “so was the decision made by others long ago that we ought to have produce from all around the world.”

Hydroponics, Sustainability, Water

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.