Diversified agriculture is a term that has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent months. As more and more acres of plantation lands are being pulled out of sugar production and, to a lesser extent, pineapple cultivation, the idea of replacing these monocrops with a more diverse range of produce appears to be gaining momentum.
In the dispute over what to do with water in the Waiahole Ditch in the post-sugar era, a number of land-owners in central O`ahu have pleaded with the state Commission on Water Resource Management to give diversified ag a chance before shutting off the water source.
At the Water Commission’s meeting on Waiahole water held July 26, 1994, for example, Roger McCloskey of Del Monte’s fresh foods division, said he wanted Hawai`i to be “self-sufficient” and produce all the produce it uses. Last March, he said, Del Monte “in partnership with Frito-Lay, planted 20 acres in potatoes.” It was, he said, an “experimental planting” that turned out to be quite successful. “We’re considering planting 300 acres of potatoes and, eventually, 600 acres, to have a year-round supply of potatoes for chips.”
Former Land Board Chairman William Paty, now a trustee of the Robinson Trusts, which own 2,000 acres of central O`ahu land, made the same point — albeit more dramatically — when he spread out before the commissioners a basket of central O`ahu’s bounty: mint, radishes, Chinese parsley, bok choy, turnips, green onions, curly parsley, and Irish (haole) potatoes. The Robinson Trusts are conducting “test plantings” for the potatoes, Paty had earlier told the commission. Other areas of the trusts’ holdings were tentatively set to be planted with Asian vegetables, bell peppers, broccoli, and tomatoes.
But as speaker Marion Kelly pointed out, “Plantations have known for many years that the soil of O`ahu can grow many diversified crops for local consumption — potatoes, corn, melons, lettuce, and many other vegetables that we now eat, food for which local people have had to pay shipment costs from Texas, California, and elsewhere. But did the plantations grow these crops for local consumption? No, they did not.”
The War Years
Actually, the plantations did devote considerable acreage to the production of crops for local consumption, but it took a war to get them to do this. In 1935, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association established a Diversified Crops Committee, one of whose purposes, as described by the HSPA, “was to draw up plans for food production to meet any emergency that might check or stop the flow of food supplies into Hawai`i.” In June 1941, the territorial governor, Joseph B. Poindexter, was briefed on the committee’s work. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the plans and other preparations made by the committee were put into the hands of the War Department’s emergency Food Administration.
Martial law makes it all but impossible to know on the basis of contemporaneous published accounts how much of the HSPA’s war contingency plans were put into effect. On December 17, 1941, the Honolulu Advertiser did carry a report headlined “Plantations to Produce Food Crops.” Later that month, the Advertiser reported that Waipahu High School students were being asked to “aid in the defense program by engaging in the raising of farm crops.” (However, at least since 1936, students in the vocational agricultural program at Waipahu High had been helping tend a vegetable garden on O`au Sugar Company land.)1
O`ahu Sugar’s annual reports for the war years gives some idea of the scope of diversified agriculture for that plantation. In 1942, potatoes were to be grown on approximately 500 acres of O`ahu Sugar land. Potato harvests for that year amounted to almost 3 million pounds, all of which were marketed locally. About 2.4 million pounds of potatoes were harvested in early 1943, according to the annual report for that year.
Additional crops may have been produced on cane land withdrawn by the military. Between 1941 and 1943, more than 2,000 acres (including 1,473 acres of prime cane land) were taken over by the military for unspecified purposes.
An HSPA publication titled “Picture Story of Sugar in Hawai`i, U.S.A.” (undated), shows workers in potato fields that stretch to the horizon. The caption reads: “Implementing a plan drawn up before the war by sugar industry leaders, plantations converted large acreage to the production of food crops. This field is planted to potatoes as far as the eye can see.”
An editorial writer for the Honolulu Advertiser of February 4, 1942, limned the wonders of self-sufficiency during war time: “In land where once squatted the pineapple and stood cane stalks in crowds, the Irish and sweet potatoes nestle in neat little hills, the corn, carrots, and onions shoot up sprouts, and the cabbage sits row upon row while yonder the peanut vine begins to climb.”
…And Before
Before the arrival of Captain Cook, Hawai`i produced sufficient food to meet local needs, of course. But with the disruption in Hawaiian agriculture and the acquisition of vast tracts of lands by sugar planters, production for local markets took a back seat to crops that could be sold on a more lucrative world market.
Still, as late as the 1930s, Hawai`i was growing much of the fresh produce consumed in the islands. One F.G. Holdaway, identifying himself as an entomologist, addressed this point in a letter to the Honolulu Advertiser dated January 26, 1942. “For some years,” Holdaway wrote, “90 to 100 percent of several kinds of fresh vegetables consumed in the Territory have been produced locally. During recent years, the local production of certain other vegetables has increased to such an extent that in season the local needs are completely satisfied and former imports are unnecessary.
“According to figures compiled by the Economic Division of the Agriculture Extensive Service, the Territory during 1940 was self-sufficient for such fresh vegetables as green beans, burdock, Chinese cabbage, dasheen, eggplant, and taro. On a year basis, it was 62 percent self-sufficient for tomatoes, while it was 100 percent self-sufficient [for tomatoes] during the winter months. It was 97 percent self-sufficient for pumpkins, 96 percent for cucumbers, 89 percent for head cabbage, 75 percent for beets, and 67 percent for fresh asparagus. There are several other small crops in which the Territory is also self-sufficient.”
Slippage
Compared to the figures provided by Holdaway in 1942, Hawai`i has not made progress in agricultural self-sufficiency. Of the vegetables he lists, Hawai`i remains almost self-sufficient only for burdock (producing 86 percent of the 267,000 pounds consumed in the state in 1992); and Chinese cabbage (92 percent self-sufficient in 1992). For green beans, less than half of the 1.2 million pounds consumed in 1992 were produced in the state. Hawai`i produced 64 percent of the eggplant consumed locally, and 58 percent of the dasheen. Instead of being 62 percent self-reliant in tomato production, Hawai`i had slipped to producing just 26 percent of the tomatoes consumed locally.
While Holdaway reports a pre-war self-sufficiency of 96 percent for cucumbers, by 1992, it was 61 percent. As for pumpkins, the locally grown share of the market slipped to just 7 percent.
The percent of market share for cabbage produced locally has held pretty steady since 1942, with 87 percent being grown here in 1992. For beets, the story is altogether different: local production of beets had disappeared off the statistical screen by 1992. The same holds true for fresh asparagus: local production is statistically insignificant.
Holdaway could boast in 1942 of self-sufficiency in taro. Fifty years later, imports accounted for 40 percent of local consumption.2
An Impossible Goal
With the plantations going out of business, thousands of acres of the most fertile land in the state are suddenly freed up for other purposes. Potentially the most lucrative use of the land lies in urban development — residential, commercial, or industrial. Few people today openly support the wholesale conversion of cane land into the urban land use district, however.
If the land is to continue to be used for agriculture, the question then becomes: What type of agriculture provides the best return on investment? For a century and a half, Hawai`i has grown crops that are sold to a national market. In the search to replace sugar and pineapple, other specialized crops, to be marketed nationally and internationally, are being discussed — coffee, tropical fruits, exotic herbs and the like — as well as golf greens (described at one point by Department of Agriculture Director Yukio Kitagawa as crops in a certain sense). While production for the local market has been included in the discussion, it has not been given the same attention as the search for crops to be marketed on the same scale as sugar and pineapple.
In the past, the sugar industry has frankly acknowledged the reasons plantations have not grown crops for the local market. Harold L. Lyon, director of the HSPA, wrote in 1941 to Governor Poindexter, “It should be obvious to any student making a careful examination of the situation that anyone undertaking the production of truck crops in Hawai`i on a scale sufficient to satisfy the local demand for these crops is embarking on a course that will lead to financial disaster if mainland produce has continued access to our market.”
Have conditions changed so much that today crops grown for the local market can provide a return on investment to land owners that is equal to the profit they might receive for growing crops for sale on the national and international markets? Whether Hawai`i becomes agriculturally self-sufficient or not hinges on the answer to that question.
1 See O`ahu Sugar Company, Ltd., annual report, 1936, page 13.
2 Figures are taken from Statistics of Hawaiian Agriculture, 1992, published by the Hawai`i Department of Agriculture, Marketing Division, and the United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Volume 5, Number 4 October 1994
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