Food and beverage startups that lack the space and equipment to get ahead have a new way to scale up production without outsourcing to the mainland.

The Wahiawā ValueAdded Product Development Center officially opened its 33,000-square-foot manufacturing and educational facility at the end of May. The center, a joint effort of Leeward Community College and state government, includes five kitchens, processing equipment, cold and regular storage, as well as spaces for packing, shipping, receiving, demonstrations and learning.

“The positive impact this center will have is tremendous,” says its manager, Chris Bailey. “The central theme of the center is education and incubation. I see this as a playground for (entrepreneurs to innovate) more and more Hawai‘i food and beverage products.”

Much of the technology at the facility is geared toward creating “value-added” products. “Adding value means taking an agriculture input – a fruit or vegetable coming from a local farm – and transforming it through some process,” says Bailey.

“This could be heating, chopping, boiling, blending or frying to turn it into something that you could command a higher price for.”

The possibilities are endless: Pineapples and passion fruit can be juiced and concocted into a cocktail mixer. Meat can be cut, marinated and dehydrated to become jerky. Potatoes can be peeled, sliced and cooked into potato chips with a variety of flavors.

“The facility’s equipment includes an industrial potato peeler that can knock out 50 pounds of potatoes in a couple minutes. For those that are processing sweet potato or ulu for chips or fries or whatever, this will save them hours of time,” says Bailey.

She Can Make More Tomato Jam

Mahina Akimoto Reppun, co-owner of Morning Glass Coffee + Café, says she plans to use the facility to create tomato jam.

“We save the ends of the tomatoes from lunch service, process them, freeze them and then we turn them into jam. So it’s a nice little exercise in minimizing our food waste by repurposing something to use it on the menu again,” says Akimoto Reppun.

Her company currently makes small batches in-house but is ready to scale up production.

“The jam is really popular, so it sells out fast. Right now it’s a little hard for us to keep up with the demand.”

Akimoto Reppun says the center is a stepping-stone for entrepreneurs who, for now, need the extra space and equipment.

“I think what people miss seeing is that the center’s an educational piece. It’s not the end all be all for manufacturing, but this is definitely a really great first step for people.”

State Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, whose district includes Wahiawā, was the catalyst behind the Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center and secured funding for it at the state Legislature.

“I’m always asking myself, what jobs can we create so people can stay and live in Wahiawā or any small town here that needs economic revitalization,” he says.

Dela Cruz believes the center will help unlock the tremendous potential of Hawai‘i’s food and beverage industry. “We’re talking about reversing the brain drain, making strides in economic development and helping agriculture.”

Many food and beverage entrepreneurs start operating out of their home kitchens and selling primarily to friends and family and at farmers markets. The equipment needed to grow beyond that is expensive and requires more space than most startups can afford.

The Wahiawā center rents that manufacturing equipment and space by the hour, as well as provide guidance to entrepreneurs so they can turn their side hustles into full-blown careers at a fraction of the cost of doing it on their own.

Fruits and vegetables with cosmetic imperfections like bruises or odd shapes are shunned by retail grocers, but Bailey says they can be just as wholesome and tasty as standard produce and “you can transform them into value-added products, whether it’s a hot sauce, jam, juice or ice cream. You can even have it dehydrated or freeze-dried.”

Produce that would have been tossed gets new life.

“This will help farmers because 40% of their produce are offgrades and don’t go to market. But now the farmer has the ability to sell more of their produce and make more revenue,” says Dane Wicker, deputy director of the state Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism.

The Wahiawā center will help farmers sell their off-grade crops to entrepreneurs, who could then transform them into value-added products. Or the center could help those farmers to create their own value-added products.

“It’s an incredible opportunity for many of these small businesses to be able to learn how to use this equipment and then have it as a resource,” says Denise Yamaguchi, CEO and founder of the nonprofit Hawaii Ag & Culinary Alliance.

The facility’s wet kitchens have a commercial hood system to ventilate air and support production of food products such as ulu and kalo chips with fryers, baked goods with ovens, as well as hot sauces and jams with steam kettles. | Photo: courtesy of Wahiawā ValueAdded Product Development Center

From Land to Market

Leeward Community College’s 12-week ‘Āina to Mākeke Program – meaning from land to market – works with students at whatever stage they’re at with their businesses, says LCC Chancellor Carlos Penaloza.

“So whether they still need to develop their own business plan, are at the point of marketing their product or mastering their product, we can help.”

Students, in a cohort of 15, learn how to scale-up kitchen recipes into ready-for-market products that can drive midsize food or beverage businesses. Graduates will then have priority access to the Wahiawā center and a free one-hour consultation with the staff.

Because of government subsidies and additional funding from organizations like the Hawaii Ag & Culinary Alliance, “we are able to offer up a lot of what we have at a very reasonable price,” says Penaloza.

Two cohorts graduated from ‘Āina to Mākeke last year, and Yamaguchi says “35% of those 29 businesses have already been picked up by major retailers like ABC, Foodland Farms and 7-Eleven.”

That proportion may rise now that cohorts have access to the center’s equipment.

But graduates aren’t meant to operate there forever, as the center needs to continuously make room for new entrepreneurs.

“It’s not going to be a viable career for any of these entrepreneurs if they don’t have the tools or resources to move on to the next stage,” says Dela Cruz. The program is designed to prepare them for eventually procuring their own warehouses and equipment.

And as Hawai‘i’s food and beverage industry grows, so will the network of support and partnerships, he says.

“For example, one guy who ended up building a warehouse had enough space to lease to other small businesses and they shared the facility together. So you start to see the spillover and effect of entrepreneurs now supporting other value-added entrepreneurs.”

All spots for the program’s third cohort are filled, but applications for the fourth will open online later this year.

Powering Up Hawai’i’s Exports

Value-adding processes often extend a product’s shelf life. A slightly under ripe banana will last about a week on the counter before it’s covered in brown spots, while an unopened package of freeze-dried bananas can stay good for years if stored properly, and six months to a year even after opening.

High-pressure processing is especially good at extending shelf life while preserving taste, texture, appearance and nutritional value because it doesn’t rely on heat.

“The HPP machine is really the crown jewel of the facility,” says Bailey. “You can fill that HPP machine with your bottles of juice to seal them up real tight. Then it applies pressure as tense as the bottom of the ocean, which kills pathogens. On average, it can extend the life of a cold-pressed juice type of product up to 30 times. That’s a tremendous upgrade.”

Long expiration dates make overseas exports more likely.

“Hawai‘i as a brand is incredibly well known. So if these value-added products are able to capitalize on that brand it will not just help our local agriculture industry, but our entire economy and strengthen Hawai‘i’s brand,” says Yamaguchi.

Dela Cruz’s long-term vision is having food processing facilities with educational programs on the Neighbor Islands, with the large Wahiawā center as the flagship. The first such facility, the Maui Food Innovation Center, opened in December 2022.

“What we don’t want to do is duplicate the same thing throughout the state if we can make a hub-and-spoke model work instead,” says Dela Cruz. “Leeward has the staffing to support other programs statewide.”

Learn more at www.leeward.hawaii.edu/wvapdc.

On the hottest day ever recorded in Honolulu – Aug. 31, 2019 – a group of volunteers organized by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency attached heat sensors to their cars and collected readings around O‘ahu. The project’s timing just happened to coincide with the oppressive weather, brought on by a record-breaking marine heat wave that was cooking up the waters around the Islands.

The volunteers recorded startling discrepancies. While the air temperature hit a high of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the “heat index,” which also factors in humidity, reached 107.3 degrees, logged at the Waimalu Plaza shopping center between 3 and 4 p.m. That was more than 22 degrees higher than the coolest temperature on O‘ahu recorded that hour.

This commercial stretch of ‘Aiea is one of the city’s many “urban heat islands,” where buildings, rooftops and pavement absorb the sunlight and re-radiate it as heat. Few trees are around to cool the area by blocking and reflecting the sun, or, in a process called evapotranspiration, releasing water into the atmosphere through their leaves.

And there’s another layer of heat to consider. The heat index is measured in shade. But the tropical sun can dramatically heat surfaces, making a sunbaked sidewalk or parking lot significantly hotter.

John DeLay, an associate professor of geography and environment at Honolulu Community College, measured temperatures in direct sunlight and under the thick canopy of a monkeypod tree at Makalapa Neighborhood Park near Pearl Harbor. While the air temperatures in the shade and sun were nearly identical, surfaces in the shade were 12 degrees cooler. “That’s why you’re feeling a significant difference in your body temperature,” he says.

About 1 million people live on O‘ahu, most in developed areas that are prone to the urban heat-island effect. Pockets of high heat and low vegetation can be found all along the coastal plains of O‘ahu, including in Pearl City, Waipahu, Kapolei, and Wai‘anae.

In the core of Honolulu, low-lying neighborhoods get dangerously hot, as shown by the dark red areas of the O‘ahu Community Heat Map. At these hot spots – stretching from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport to residential areas hugging Wai‘alae Avenue in Kaimukī – afternoon temperatures on that extreme heat day in 2019 reached 99.7 degrees and higher.

Jammed with apartment buildings and tightly packed houses, many of the trees and gardens in these dense urban areas have been cut down and paved over for parking. Municipal “street trees,” wedged into small plots of dirt along sidewalks, can have short lives and stunted growth, with little chance of developing the thick, sprawling canopies of mature shower trees blossoming in a park.

Tree canopy maps created in 2022 by the state’s urban forestry program, Kaulunani, along with the U.S. Forest Service, show that in neighborhoods such as Kalihi, McCully-Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and the makai side of Waikīkī, and parts of Kaimukī and Pālolo, tree-canopy coverage is less than 8% and as low as 2% – far less than the city’s goal of 35% coverage. Honolulu’s overall canopy coverage is estimated at 20%.

These neighborhoods are also some of the most disadvantaged parts of the city, as shown on the multilayered canopy map depicting income levels. Median household incomes in many of these areas fall in the lowest ranges – from $25,000 to $57,000 or from $57,000 to $76,000 – according to data from the 2015-2020 American Community Survey.

But travel south to north, into the cooler, often rainier and greener neighborhoods at higher elevations, and income levels tend to rise precipitously, a historical pattern that began in the 19th century as those with means moved out of the hot, congested town that had coalesced around the harbor.

Heat Is a Public Health Crisis

Those over-paved areas that don’t have sufficient tree canopy are going to be the hottest,” Brad Romine of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission says. Romine, a coastal resilience specialist with the UH Sea Grant College Program and deputy director of the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center, has worked with the five-member commission to develop guidelines that track the impact of urban heat and recommend ways for city and state officials to deal with it.

Average temperatures in Hawai‘i have risen 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and about 3.5 degrees at the Honolulu airport, according to Matthew Gonser, chief resilience officer and executive director of the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. Much of that rise has been in the past decade, and near-future projections show it will get hotter.

“We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.” – Matthew Gonser

In a heat wave like the one in 2019, when trade winds collapse and humidity rises, the heat can be punishing on the body.

Dr. Diana Felton, head of the state Department of Health’s Communicable Diseases and Public Health Nursing Division, says that vulnerable people will bear the brunt of the impact of intense heat: the elderly and children, outdoor workers, people with chronic health conditions, and those who can’t afford air conditioning or access health care.

Felton is a lead member of a new DOH working group that’s studying the local health impacts of extreme heat, floods, drought, wildfires, mosquito-borne illnesses and five other climate threats illustrated on a circular chart that Felton calls, with dark humor, “the pinwheel of death.”

The Climate Change and Health Working Group was formed to expand climate-change planning beyond sea-level rise and protecting infrastructure, she says. “No one was talking about the disease and injury that is going to come from climate change, and has actually already come.”

Felton is working with the group to gather evidence of how heat is impacting health in Hawai‘i, and is still sifting through data. But one fact is well documented across the globe: Fatalities rise when the heat index reaches 95 degrees – which can be air temperature of 90 degrees and humidity of 50%, for example – for an extended period.

“The longer the heat wave goes on, you have increased mortality,” explained Dr. Elizabeth Keifer, an assistant clinical professor at UH Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, at a seminar in January.

Romine says that urban Honolulu could experience intolerable heat in just a few decades. “I think we could surpass 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by mid-century, and that’s only going to exacerbate heat waves,” he says. “What that means is more frequent and severe heat emergencies.”

At Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry, part of the Department of Parks and Recreation, new administrator Roxanne Adams says her groundskeepers have switched to long-sleeved, high-visibility Dri-Fit uniforms that don’t require the extra layer of a safety vest. She plans to buy cooling neck wraps to supplement the ice water that work crews carry in their trucks.

Roxanne Adams, administrator of Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation’s Division of Urban Forestry, is responsible for trees in public parks and rights of-way. It’s a big job that requires residents to help: “If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increases greatly. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

“They notice the heat. We all notice that it’s hotter and drier than when we were kids,” Adams says.

“We’re not going crazy when we say, oh my gosh, it’s not as comfortable to sleep anymore,” Gonser echoes. “We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.”

Federal Funds to Expand the Canopy

In November, $42.6 million in competitive federal grants, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the U.S. Forest Service, was awarded to Hawai‘i groups to provide “equitable access to trees.” In raw dollars, only California, New York and Oregon received more money than Hawai‘i, and in terms of funding per resident, Hawai‘i topped the list.

“It just shows how ready people are to take on this kind of work. … I feel like in five years we’re going to look back and say, wow, this was an amazing time,” says Heather McMillen, an urban and community forester.

McMillen heads the state’s Kaulunani program, an urban and community forestry initiative at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife. Her small office distributes grant money, does outreach and education, and partners with the city, state and nonprofit sector to improve the health and viability of Hawai‘i’s trees.

Kaulunani received a $2 million competitive grant from the U.S. Forest Service, and is launching a project to plant shade trees at select Title 1 schools, where at least 47% of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

McMillen says that if you look at all public school campuses, and extend the footprint to include a half-mile buffer around the school, only 21% would meet the minimum goal of 30% tree canopy. But among the 67% of schools that are designated Title 1, or 197 schools, just 14% have these fuller canopies – an example of disparities in who has access to the cooling benefits of trees.

The project also involves creating a school forester position to work with teachers and staff on maintaining the trees. “Planting the trees is the easy part. Helping them grow to their full potential … is a much longer-term commitment,” McMillen says.

Heather McMillen, coordinator of the state Kaulunani community and urban forestry program, says: “Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do. This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Other groups receiving funding include the Akaka Foundation for Tropical Forests and the Friends of Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, both on Hawai‘i Island, and various county, state and UH Mānoa projects.

The largest U.S. Forest Service award in Hawai‘i, at $20 million, went to Kupu, a 17-year-old nonprofit that has trained thousands of young people, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, for jobs in conservation and natural resource management. In the process, its teams have cleared about 150,000 acres of invasive species and planted 1.5 million native specimens.

CEO and co-founder John Leong explains that most of the $20 million grant will be re-granted to other groups in Hawai‘i and the Pacific region over the next five years, with Kupu providing technical expertise. The application process is expected to open in the second quarter of 2024.

In the world of urban forestry, the Kupu grant is a huge amount of money. For comparison, Hawai‘i’s 2023 state allocation for urban and community forestry from the U.S. Forest Service is $1.5 million. Many people interviewed for this article say they’re eager to find out who will win sub-grants from Kupu and what projects will be funded.

The broad theme of the federal grant is to expand the tree canopy and cool down places where people live, but the finer details require projects to benefit underserved areas. Projects linked to creating green jobs and engaging communities in planning and decision-making are also prioritized.

The O‘ahu community heat map identifying urban “hot spots” was developed by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. It’s based on peak afternoon temperatures recorded on Aug. 31, 2019. The full islandwide map can be found at tinyurl.com/oahuheatmap

Kupu’s mission lands at the intersection of all those goals. Leong says it will seek out organizations that will bring trees to “under-resourced” areas, both urban and rural, and build up a workforce of arborists and conservation workers.

He’s especially focused on training and educating, both for those doing the work and the broader community that benefits from more trees, more jobs, and an understanding of how climate change will impact them and what they can do about it.

“When you educate a young person, you’re really impacting about seven people: their parents, their grandparents and their siblings,” he says.

In the fight against climate change, “We have all the right stuff in our Islands to be a model for the rest of the world,” Leong says. “But we also have to engage communities at the grassroots level, empower them and give them the resources they need on the ground to be successful. That’s really what this grant is about.”

Why Trees Are Important

In 2016, the nonprofit Smart Trees Pacific released the dispiriting results of its urban tree-canopy analysis. Nearly 5% of the tree canopy, or about 76,600 trees, had disappeared in a four year span. The consensus among experts is that things haven’t improved since then.

Trees are cut to make way for larger houses or more parking space for multifamily homes. They’re cut because they’re old, and then not replaced, or because it’s easier to remove a tree that’s interfering with a sidewalk or utility project than to work around it. They’re cut because a homeowner is worried about liability. And many times, they’re cut because someone wants a better view or just can’t deal with the rubbish.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says McMillen from the state’s Kaulunani program. No one tree-removal project accounted for a significant portion of the loss, she says, and it’s happening on both public and private land.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says street trees are sometimes destroyed maliciously. That’s an added insult when you consider all the nurturing required in a tree’s first few years, before it’s planted in the ground, and “it’s vandalism of a city asset and infrastructure.”

Trees can take years, even decades, to get large enough for their benefits to dramatically overshadow their costs. “They cost money to maintain, as do sidewalks, as do stoplights, as do fire hydrants. But unlike that kind of infrastructure, trees are the only kind of infrastructure that increase in value over time,” McMillen says.

An analysis conducted for the city’s Division of Urban Forestry found that for every dollar spent on Honolulu’s trees, the city gets back $3 in benefits. Estimates in many other cities show even more positive cost-benefit ratios.

On the global level, trees are called the “lungs of the world” for their ability to pull enormous quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, which they store in their trunks and branches. With the help of the sun, trees then release oxygen through their leaves. A dramatic NASA time-lapse video shows the forests of the Northern Hemisphere sucking carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis as trillions of leaves open in the spring and summer.

The lungs metaphor goes deeper as well. For people who feel connected to trees, or just aware of their contributions, trees don’t just make life on Earth possible, they make it worth living.

Trees provide shade and cooling. They clean the air by removing pollutants, and provide food for people and habitats for birds. They protect against flooding by absorbing stormwater and help prevent beach erosion.

Trees reduce noise in the city, and traffic calms along tree-lined streets. In hot climates, their shade makes a city more walkable and bikeable.

And there are intangible benefits too, McMillen says: Trees are the “keepers of memories” for anyone who spent time playing in them as a child, and they can strengthen social connections among neighbors sharing fruit from backyard trees. They help define a place and remind us where we are on this planet.

Trees can even change cortisol levels, heart rates, breathing and mood. At the Tropical Landscape and Human Interaction Lab at UH Mānoa, students’ physiological, “preconscious” responses were captured as they viewed images of trees. Lush, green canopies triggered states of relaxation while images of canopies with their tops lopped off had the opposite effect, says Andy Kaufman, an associate professor of tropical plant and soil sciences and a landscape specialist.

For all their benefits, trees and other vegetation are often taken for granted and treated as disposable. “Nature is so important to us, but landscaping is the first thing to be cut and the last to be addressed,” says Kaufman, who founded and runs the interaction lab. “We should embrace living in nature,” not work against it, he says.

Kaufman has seen many examples of trees chain-sawed at the top, which lets disease and pests enter the tree and weakens the branches that grow back from the stumps. He’s seen trees clear-cut from an ‘Ewa school’s campus, a “complete streets” project in ‘Aiea that failed to include trees, new buildings constructed with only a tiny strip for plantings, and – in an especially egregious case – miles of oleanders along the Moanalua Freeway ripped out and replaced with concrete.

The biggest challenge, Kaulunani’s McMillen explains, is to get policymakers, developers, homeowners and anyone who cares about their neighborhood to change the way they think about trees.

“Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do,” McMillen says. “This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process, not an additional thing to do if you have funds or if you have the inclination.”

Where Trees Are Needed Most

The City and County of Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry can trace its roots to the Shade Tree Commission, which started in 1922 to deal with the ongoing issue of how to cool a tropical city, now getting hotter with climate change. “I would love for our city to be a city in the forest. I’m a firm believer that trees make everything look better, cleaner and more friendly,” says Adams, the division’s administrator.

Before joining the division last year, she spent two decades overseeing the more than 4,000 trees at UH Mānoa. The campus is an accredited arboretum and includes what’s probably the nation’s largest baobab tree, which is at least 110 years old.

Her new role overseeing the estimated 250,000 trees in city and county parks and public rights-of-way offers a vastly larger canvas for planting – the entire island of O‘ahu – but also far more challenges.

At the moment, Adams’ division is finishing a complete inventory of all city trees, which will let her team know exactly what trees they’re responsible for, which ones need attention first and where to plant next. The project, funded in 2022 with $300,000 in federal assistance, will be done before the end of June.

She’s also been focusing on filling vacancies that have accumulated over the past decade. Adams says her team is nearly fully staffed to do the hard physical labor of digging holes and planting trees, many of which start from seeds in the division’s nursery at Kapi‘olani Regional Park.

Once the tree inventory is complete, Adams says her goal will be to plant where shade is needed most, such as in Kalihi, Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and Kaimukī, and outward to ‘Ewa, Nānākuli and Wai‘anae.

“We’re definitely looking at equity and will be planting in those neighborhoods,” Adams says.

Kaulunani and U.S. Forest Service maps track tree canopy coverage and heat vulnerability, and also data such as median family incomes in a particular area, the presence of impervious surfaces, the prevalence of asthma and cardiovascular disease, the number of residents by census tracts and Native Hawaiian populations. That fuller picture of which neighborhoods are being left behind – economically, environmentally, medically – seems to be shifting the conversation about where to focus efforts.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says that, over time, patterns in how a community is designed and developed “can exacerbate increasing temperatures and make it hotter in places. There really are disparities or inequities as a result of these practices. … We’re trying to make sure that we bring focused, strategic attention to those neighborhoods.”

People living in treeless, low-income areas on O’ahu, such as this stretch of Mō’ili’ili, suffer most in heatwaves.

 

In contrast, monkeypod trees line Kapi’olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street, offering shade and cooling to pedestrians and residents.

While planting in an older neighborhood full of hardened surfaces and densely packed housing requires more effort than in more remote areas, among urban foresters, anything is possible. Their often-repeated motto is “the right tree in the right place with the right care.”

In unshaded neighborhoods, for example, sections of concrete can be removed from sidewalks to make space for plantings. Clusters of small street trees can be planted together to create a bigger canopy. For something more ambitious, car lanes could be used for planting large canopy trees, such as the monkeypods that line Kapi‘olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street – a grove that’s been designated as one of Hawai‘i’s “exceptional trees.”

While trees can pose difficulties, those difficulties are surmountable, Kaufman from UH Mānoa says. “There are always ways to restructure roads. You can always work around trees. … Green infrastructure should be business as usual in every municipality.”

He and a team of researchers recently found that using Silva Cells – a modular, suspended pavement system developed a decade ago – is the most promising way to grow healthy street trees in Hawai‘i. Unlike other methods they tested, the roots stayed contained rather than sprawling out and up, damaging infrastructure. He says the long-term tests were the first ever conducted in a tropical urban environment, where trees and their roots grow year-round.

It’s not a magic bullet, Kaufman explains. But better planting techniques could help expand the canopy in some of the city’s oldest, most crowded neighborhoods, where working-class and middle-class people began moving more than a century ago, as new tram lines opened up new possibilities.

The Old Suburbs

Honolulu, like everywhere, has been defined by shifting migration and development. Through much of its history, one trend seemed clear: wealthier people tended to congregate in the hills or near the water, while the less affluent settled in the low-lying, hotter middle.

The first hint of a city started in the early 1800s, as whalers began stopping here for parts, provisions and rest, and a makeshift harbor settlement emerged to meet demand. By 1845, the capital of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i had officially moved from Lahaina to a now bustling Honolulu.

Wealthy ali‘i and white settlers were the first to leave the core, says William Chapman, the interim dean of UH Mānoa’s School of Architecture and a professor of American studies, with expertise in historical preservation. They fanned out for more space, less disease and often cooler climates.

Queen Ka‘ahumanu, for example, regularly retreated to her Mānoa house, near the present-day Waioli Kitchen and Bake Shop, where she died in 1832. In 1853, the German physician William Hillebrand built a house and planted trees at the site of Foster Botanical Garden.

In 1882, Anna Rice Cooke and Charles Montague Cooke, both members of missionary families, built a home on Beretania Street, on the site where the Honolulu Museum of Art is now. When electric streetcars were introduced in 1901, and the first automobiles traversed the city’s roads, large estates were constructed in the hills of Nu‘uanu Valley. Some are now occupied by foreign consulates.

After the kingdom was illegally overthrown by white businessmen in 1893, the global sugar and pineapple trade accelerated, along with immigration. Contract laborers first arrived from China in the mid-1800s, followed by people from Japan, Korea, Europe, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Kaka‘ako in the late 1800s was filled with small houses for artisans, stevedores and service workers, many of whom were Native Hawaiian, says Chapman. Working-class and artisan-class residents began branching out into Kalihi and Liliha.

Honolulu Tree Canopy Map, 2021. Prepared by EarthDefine, U.S. Forest Service, NOAA and Hawai‘i Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Streetcars opened up neighborhoods far beyond the harbor area. Many Japanese and Chinese workers, freed from contract labor that was deemed illegal in 1900, migrated east along King Street, renting or buying modest wooden houses stretching all the way to the rice fields of Mō‘ili‘ili.

By the 1920s, satellite communities as far away as Kapahulu and Kaimukī were developed as the rail lines expanded, while along the coast, affluent people had moved to the Diamond Head area and were expanding into Kāhala.

John Rosa, an associate professor of history at UH Mānoa, says his great-grandfather on the Chinese side of his family built a house on 16th Avenue during Kaimukī’s first wave of development. In the 1950s, his grandparents moved to a house in the breezy mountains above the neighborhood, in Maunalani Heights, where he grew up.

Many prosperous families had moved mauka into Mānoa Valley and Nu‘uanu, where whites-only “tacit agreements,” sometimes written into covenants governing new subdivisions, kept others out, explains Chapman.

These rules also determined the physical environment. “There were a lot of restrictions,” Chapman says. “It had to be a substantial lot. Residents weren’t allowed to build walls over a certain height. They couldn’t open a gambling den or a bar or a restaurant.”

The racial elements of the exclusionary practices were dropped after World War II, and the cooler, leafier neighborhoods opened to a mixture of people. Among the new Mānoa residents were many upwardly mobile Japanese residents who had gone to UH Mānoa on the federal GI Bill, Rosa says.

After the war, and before zoning laws were enacted in 1961, high-rise apartments were constructed amid the single-family houses of Waikīkī and Makiki. Eventually, cars brought people to the new postwar suburbs of ‘Āina Haina and Hawai‘i Kai, and then even farther from the city.

Today, some of Honolulu’s old working-class, mixed-use neighborhoods can feel improvised, a mismatched collection of small wooden bungalows, motel-style walk-ups with open corridors, taller “bare-bones” buildings with interior hallways, and their posher cousins, the newer high-rise condos.

“Planners aren’t the ones that actually build cities. It’s the developers,” Chapman says. “It’s like a rowboat and a tanker. The tanker is the developers, and they pretty well decide what’s going to happen.”

For example, setback regulations, which started in 1969, are still just 5 feet. “You’re supposed to put planting in the setback, but they’re often not very robust,” he says. “Developers probably see vegetation and trees as a luxury add-on. And if they don’t need to do it, they won’t do it.”

Chapman sees the old neighborhoods as “transitional,” with new housing set to rise in places like Isenberg Street in Mō‘ili‘ili. There, a 23-story tower is under development by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and on Kapi‘olani Boulevard, the Kobayashi Group is constructing a 43-story condo.

But with no requirements for trees, shade, green walls or green roofs – on new high-rise projects or throughout the older neighborhoods – these urban heat islands will only get hotter.

Greening the City

Community groups have been focused on trees and shade since at least 1912, when the newly formed Outdoor Circle, a volunteer women’s group, planted 28 monkeypod trees in Honolulu’s ‘A‘ala Park. Those trees still stand today.

The organization has spent the subsequent 112 years planting and protecting trees in public spaces. In 2017, the Outdoor Circle helped found Trees for Honolulu’s Future, a nonprofit group dedicated to increasing the urban tree canopy, advocating for laws and policies, and educating the public.

The group’s president, Daniel Dinell, spearheaded the educational component of the Makalapa Neighborhood Park project, which quantified the impact of shade on how we experience heat. Young “heat island investigators” from the underserved area nearby learned to measure trees, read temperature sensors and test hypotheses.

Among the organization’s many projects, Dinell is also leading a group of “citizen foresters” to map the trees in Kaimukī and locate places to plant, and he’s working with the city to get trees in the ground. One of the big obstacles to new street trees, he says, is getting homeowners and renters to water the trees in their early years, when they’re still weak.

“Just activating the community is key to the goal of increasing the tree canopy,” Dinell says. Government agencies can’t do it alone, Adams, the head of Honolulu’s Urban Forestry Division, says. “It’s critical that our neighborhoods, our friends, our family chip in and help us get this done. It’s a kōkua thing. If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increase greatly.”

Residents can contact Adams’ division to request a street tree, at 808-971-7151 or DUF@honolulu.gov. The city selects hardy trees that won’t become invasive pests; most native trees aren’t able to survive in harsh urban settings with vehicle pollutants and poor soils.

On Hawai‘i’s Arbor Day, about 4,000 trees, including fruit trees, are given away across the Islands. The next annual event, organized by Kaulunani and government, nonprofit and community partners, is scheduled for Nov. 2.

At the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, an ongoing effort to plant 100,000 trees on O‘ahu has passed the halfway mark. The agency’s online map tracks city plantings as well as trees planted on private property and larger restoration efforts.

The project, says Gonser, the office’s executive director, “was intended to be a campaign of awareness, and to celebrate those that are the true champions out in the community.” He says many plantings have not been recorded yet.

All of these efforts are steps in the right direction, and indications that more people and organizations recognize the value of trees in a time of rising heat and sweltering cities.

Globally, 2023 was by far the warmest year on record, according to NOAA. And while the heat affects everyone, it’s much worse in urban heat islands bereft of trees. And it’s particularly punishing for people without air conditioning.

“We’re already facing a lot of heat in these urban areas. It’s a problem we need to fix now,” says Romine, of the Climate Change Commission. “And if we start addressing it now, it’ll make these communities safer, more comfortable and more equitable, now and for the future.”

The farm offers seasonal arrangements and wholesale Protea flowers and plants to local florists, and ships them interisland and to the mainland.

Minney, who is lead farmer and co-owner, says her in-laws bought the property in 1986. She says her husband’s uncle was “very involved with the early Protea coming to Maui” and inspired the couple to continue the family tradition when they inherited the farm in the early 1990s.

“Uncle showed us how to make the plants and so we’ve been propagating for years,” she says.

Proteas are native to South Africa and typically bloom during winter in Hawai‘i, according to Minney. During the off season, she says, they are pruning and cleaning up the plants because when the season is on, “it’s all systems go.”

The farm was unharmed by August wildfires that ravaged other parts of Kula that are higher on Haleakalā. “People were able to come and get water from our farm,” she says. “We were so lucky.”

Malolo Farm previously offered occasional tours, events and workshops. Those have been suspended, but Minney says, “We’ll be back.”

proteasofmaui.com

“We believe that the introduction of technology into agriculture could reverse this bad trend.”

The “we” are Wyban and Jason Ueki, founders and organizers of the Thrive Hawai‘i Agrifood Summit, formerly called the Tropical AgTech Conference.

“The conference is an economic development platform showcasing new climate-smart ag technologies that can increase Hawai‘i ag efficiencies, boost production, increase salaries, create exportable intellectual property and reinvent Hawai‘i ag to be a growth industry,” Wyban says.

This year’s event will be held Sept. 26 and 27 at the Hawai‘i Convention Center in Honolulu.

Replacing an Aging Ag Workforce

Denise Yamaguchi, executive director of the Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation, says “the average age of a farmer in Hawai‘i and across the nation is 60.” The aging farm workforce is not being replaced by younger farmers.

“Many of us living in Hawai‘i are the fourth or fifth generation of immigrants who came to Hawai‘i and worked on plantations,” she says. But most of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, she says, didn’t want their children to become farmers, which has created an ag labor shortage.

Wyban points out another issue: “Farmers aren’t making any money. And when they’re not making any money, they stop farming.” Nor do their children want that often hardscrabble life.

Ag tech may eventually make farming more appealing by alleviating some of the arduous manual labor and making farming more cost-efficient.

“I think one of the emerging technologies that’s really interesting is robots that can pick fruit and vegetables. It’s eventually going to replace some of the more difficult work that is mostly done by immigrant labor,” says Ueki.

Robotic technology is still expensive, but it will eventually be cheaper than human labor, Wyban says.

“Maybe we aren’t going to create more jobs, but the farms will make more money, and it’ll be a more interesting space for young people entering agriculture because in addition to knowing about plant biology and agronomic systems, they’re also going to have to understand how technology works.”

The Hawai‘i Agricultural Foundation’s education programs teach K-12 students about farming operations and careers, with much of the curriculum focused on ag tech and how to use it, Yamaguchi says.

“Kids are really interested in technology. Since the job is not necessarily in the field under the hot sun anymore, it may spark an interest in a different type of job in ag tech,” she says.

Minimizing Problems With Ag Tech

Agriculture is a complicated business. “More so than other industries,” says Yamaguchi, because farmers must consider soil health, pest control, food safety regulations, land leases, water supply and infrastructure.

Weather adds unpredictability and climate change makes severe weather more frequent. One bad storm can ruin an entire harvest and kill livestock.

Some farms are switching to controlled environment agriculture systems, or CEA, to mitigate unfavorable weather and other issues, Yamaguchi says. “You’re able to eliminate the pests that come in, birds that steal your crops, and you’re also able to ensure food safety.”

CEA systems – think greenhouses and other structures – also enable farmers to manipulate the internal climate of these structures so they’re always optimal. “With CEA you can carefully control the environment your plants or animals are in. That way, it’s not vacillating between the extremes of a very high rain event, and then a burning hot sun,” says Ueki. “That’s the pattern it seems we’re moving into with climate change – a fluctuation from super rainy weather to hot, sunny weather every couple of weeks.”

One form of CEA is vertical farming, which involves growing food in vertically stacked rows or on tall towers so there are many more plants on the same footprint.

John Seward, Eric Batha and Lenny Feder of Hawai‘i Farming LLC are cucumber farmers in Waimea on Hawai‘i Island. Their farm uses many kinds of ag tech, including greenhouses, hydroponics and data sensors.

“In controlled environment greenhouses, we can grow a lot more pounds per acre because we are less at risk to weather events,” says Batha. “We also use lots of real time data sensors to test our water chemistry, plant hydration and other variables. This allows us to give our plants exactly what they need to be the most healthy and greatest tasting cucumbers.”

Adds Seward: “Every cucumber plant has its own dripper. I’d say from an environmental perspective, we use 90% less water with very targeted hydroponic growing than you would farming in an open field.”

Seward says CEA also means fewer pests, such as those that lead to rat lungworm disease, compared to open fields, which “definitely minimizes the use of herbicides and pesticides.”

CEA systems like vertical farming and hydroponics require upfront investments beyond the reach of most farmers, but they have proven effective at reducing traditional ag problems. And they merely scratch the surface of ag tech’s possibilities.

Reducing Ag Theft

Agriculture theft and vandalism are huge problems in Hawai‘i – and it’s not just people stealing a few papayas at a time.

“Ag theft is industrial in the sense that they take everything,” says Sharon Hurd, chair of the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture. “They take every avocado on your tree, every sweet potato in the ground, every flower off your tree. That’s ag theft – when you are left with nothing.” Criminals are also stealing livestock, equipment, chemicals and fertilizer and other farm property.

A farmer’s worst nightmare can be waking up to find all of their crops stolen just before the harvest. According to the latest survey on Hawai‘i agricultural theft and vandalism, conducted in 2019, the total number of theft incidents that year was estimated at 3,616. That same survey estimated there were a total of 14,262 trespassing incidents, posing a huge threat to food safety.

“The total value of theft and vandalism losses, as well as security costs, from Hawai‘i farms is estimated at $14.4 million, or 10% of the 2018 Hawai‘i net farm income of $142 million,” the report said.

For comparison, American retailers lost $94.5 billion from theft in 2021, but that was only 1.4% of total sales.

“If we don’t solve ag theft. I think we’ll lose a lot of farmers because they aren’t reaping the benefits of their hard work,” says Hurd. “One farmer in Mililani spends about $200,000 a year on security measures because if he doesn’t, he’ll lose everything.”

Heavy surveillance such as motion sensing cameras and drones can alert farmers. Extensive fencing, especially electric fencing, is another way to keep out unwanted visitors. And farmers who live on-site also deter thieves, trespassers and vandals.

Hurd points to a newer tactic: Farmers can use “a magic liquid that marks every fruit on the tree.” It can only be detected with a certain kind of light, she says, so when you go to the farmers market or the supermarket you can shine it on produce to see if it might have been stolen.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone

Farmers can also increase their revenue by transforming crops into value added products. Hurd provides one example: “If you have a raw potato and then turn it into a potato chip, you’ve added value to it. This means you can now sell it for a higher price.”

Mangoes with bruises and other imperfections may be shunned in the produce aisle, but they are perfectly good for making dried mango, mango juice, mango puree or mango powder for flavoring, soap, essential oils, lotions and more – using food processing equipment like dehydrators, juicers, pulverizers and freeze dryers.

When I ask cucumber farmers Seward and Batha if they’d considered selling pickles, they both laugh. “Only about every 30 minutes!” says Batha. “Pickles would be a great business for us, absolutely. But first, we need the people and facilities to do it at that scale, and construction here is painfully slow. But we have plans to do it eventually.”

Adding value to a product can also extend its shelf life. Cucumbers only last a couple of weeks in the fridge but an unopened jar of pickles can stay good for well over a year and much longer than a couple of weeks even after opening.

A long shelf life is crucial for Hawai‘i exports, and that shelf life can be extended by techniques such as Hiperbaric high pressure processing.HPP uses intense pressure to kill microorganisms and because it does not use extra heat, it preserves taste, texture, appearance and nutritional value better than traditional preservation methods.

“HPP is a game changer, but it’s expensive,” Hurd says. “So what we can do is have food processing facilities that multiple farms can share. That will provide the equipment that will extend the shelf life to maybe two years.”

Food processing facilities are huge spaces that can contain myriad food processing equipment, including packaging and labeling machinery.

“You have to have the whole supply chain, right? A place to accept it, process it, and then ship it,” Hurd says. There are currently nine food processing plants in Hawai‘i – two on O‘ahu, three on Moloka‘i and four on Hawai‘i Island – and more are being built to meet the high demand.

The challenges faced by Hawai‘i’s agriculture industry are plentiful, but so are the ideas to overcome them. People like Hurd, Yamaguchi, Wyban and Ueki are passionate about coming up with solutions and they say innovation and technology are the keys to unlocking Hawai‘i’s potential to have a thriving agriculture industry.

“If we can create solutions to increase productivity, efficiency and profitability of our companies in Hawai‘i, we can then export that technology to a lot of small farms around the world,” says Ueki. “So if we can grow profitably in Hawai‘i, we can probably grow profitably anywhere in the world.”

Jeth Parbo began raising chickens eight years ago to help feed her family and neighbors. Her farm, Mama Jeth’s Farmstead, now houses about 175 chickens on a quarter-acre lot in Waimea, and they produce about 45 to 60 dozen eggs a week.

Baby chicks at Mama Jeth’s Farmstead in Waimea will grow into egg producers for Mālama Kaua‘i and other local vendors. | Photo: courtesy of Mālama Kaua‘i

She’s one of 17 egg producers who participated in Mālama Kaua‘i’s Poultry Egg Education Project, or PEEP, which began in 2022 and provided Kaua‘i farmers with startup equipment, supplies, education and peer support.

“When they had a program open up, I wanted to join and help out, do whatever I can on my part to help feed the island,” Parbo says, adding that her peers taught her about best practices for feeding schedules and chicken health.

Created in 2006, Mālama Kaua‘i’s mission is to increase local food production and access. Its staff of 10, along with hundreds of volunteers, distribute food through an online food hub, keiki and kūpuna programs, and food pantries. In 2022, Mālama Kaua‘i distributed $500,000 worth of food from 130 food producers, 60% of which were minority-owned businesses. Most of those producers were based on Kaua‘i; a handful were from other islands.

The nonprofit also collects produce harvested from the community and donates it to community partners. And it helps farmers build capacity through internships, grants, grant writing and management services, and educational programs.

Photo: courtesy of Mālama Kaua‘i

Now in its second year, PEEP helped increase the number of Kaua‘i egg producers from four to 27, says Megan Fox, executive director of Mālama Kaua‘i. The nonprofit plans to use the program’s third year to support graduates who want to scale further.

“Because obviously, the more production everyone’s doing, the more food that’s available for the community, and these are the people that were the most excited on the island about taking it seriously and bringing it to that level,” she says.

PEEP farmers provide the eggs that Mālama Kaua‘i sells through KauaiLocalFood.com. Anni Caporuscio, PEEP program manager, says the online food hub is selling about 150 dozen eggs a week at prices competitive with mainland eggs, whose prices have sharply increased over the past year.

Higher prices for mainland food means “local food is starting to become pretty competitive and in some cases is less expensive than imported food,” Fox says. “And it just tastes better.”

KauaiLocalFood.com became an essential facilitator for farmers and customers when farmers markets closed early in the pandemic. It currently serves over 1,200 residential and commercial customers across the island. Customers can pick up their groceries or pay $5 for delivery. Fox says the food hub has helped the nonprofit reach more low-income residents; about half of its residential customers use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

Photo: courtesy of Mālama Kaua‘i

Mālama Kaua‘i is planning to scale its food aggregation and distribution efforts with a new food hub it’s building in Moloa‘a in partnership with the Moloa‘a Irrigation Cooperative, a hui of 70 farms on more than 600 acres. The two-story Moloa‘a ‘Āina Center will have a commercial kitchen, cold storage, processing equipment and a marketing office. Fox says this will take some burden off producers so they can focus on growing food.

“Having to run all over the island to sell $50 worth of stuff , it’s not worth your gas,” she says. “But if (Mālama Kaua‘i is) already going to do that run in the vans and whatnot, it makes a lot of sense for us to aggregate.”

The new facility is scheduled to be complete this summer.

The nonprofit wants to keep expanding access to healthy local food. One of its newest grant programs helps farmers like Parbo address shortages of broccoli, watercress, carrots, liliko‘i and other crops, and to sell to food pantries and other food access channels.

Mālama Kaua‘i’s 2022 food insecurity survey found that one in three participating Kaua‘i households were unsure if they would have enough to eat each week, and two in three households had to decide monthly between paying bills or buying food. The survey was based on responses from 177 Kaua‘i residents who represented 472 food-insecure individuals.

Fox says Mālama Kaua‘i has accomplished a lot in the 10 years she’s been with the organization, but says she is especially passionate about how it has helped people. Its vendors saw an average 5.9% increase in sales from 2021 to 2022. One of its farmers even reached six figures in sales last year.

“It’s really cool to see all those big numbers when you do good work, but it’s cooler when you see that one person and how your work impacts that one person and their business and their family and their kids and, at the same time, you get to see smiles every week of all the people that love their food,” she says. “We’re just pretty lucky we get to do what we do.”

Commercial fishing in Hawai’i was banned during World War II and slowly resurfaced by the early 1950s. The United Fishing Agency launched the Honolulu Fish Auction on Aug. 5, 1952, and it celebrated its 70th anniversary this year at Honolulu’s Pier 38.

The agency says it’s the only fish auction in Hawai‘i and the only large-scale tuna auction in the Pacific this side of Tokyo. Michael Goto, who has been running the auction for a decade, says seafood is a much bigger industry in Hawai‘i than many people might realize.

Michael Goto is both manager of the Honolulu Fish Auction and its chief auctioneer. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

“The whole business has been over-looked over the years,” Goto says. “It is the number one food-producing industry in the entire state of Hawai‘i. No one else comes close to this industry as far as food production.”

Sales from Hawai‘i’s longline fishing boats are worth between $100 million and $120 million a year at the ports before the fish hit the wholesale and retail sectors and gets marked up, he says.

He says more than 90% of people in the state consume seafood regularly and seafood is a big draw for tourists too. “Tourists come to Hawai‘i not to eat chicken or beef, but what we’re known for: fish,” he says.

Based on Japanese Auctions

Honolulu’s fish auction is based on the system at Tokyo’s historic Tsukiji Market, opened in 1935 and famous for its tuna auctions. Goto says the Honolulu auction is a big draw for Japanese tourists because “it’s a very familiar culture for them.” Tours are by reservation only; book one at hawaii-seafood.org/auctiontour.

Goto says an estimated 140 vessels are in the local fishing fleet and those with catch to sell pull up by Pier 38. The auction is open Monday to Saturday, with crews unloading fishing boats in the wee hours.

Fish are weighed and tagged, and their temperatures taken for health and safety reasons. The fish are then put on pallets and iced.

Bidding begins at 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t end until everything is sold – up to 90,000 pounds of fish a day. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Bidding kicks off at 5:30 a.m. with the fish auctioned individually in the order that each boat arrived. Buyers bid against each other until the day’s entire allotment is sold, with Goto as the auctioneer. On a busy day, 70,000 to 90,000 pounds of fish will be sold. On such days, Goto might spend as many as 14 hours on the job.

“As much as it varies day to day, depending on the vessels that come in, it is a very systematic operation with the sole goal of getting the fish out to the vendors as quickly as possible to be sold to consumers,” he says.

Imports are the Main Competitor

The Honolulu Fish Auction operates like a consignment store. It receives fish from independently owned vessels and sells them on behalf of the vessel owners. The auction collects a commission before paying the vessel owners.

Some of the wholesalers who buy from the auction have satellite locations on the Neighbor Islands, so a lot of the fish is shipped out “to all the major destinations on all islands,” Goto says.

Photo: Aaron Yoshino

He says the auction’s only major competitors are foreign imports because seafood, including ahi, also comes from places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Marshall Islands. This can substantially change the price of fish on any particular day.

“It’s a gamble for anybody to own a commercial fishing vessel,” Goto says.

Kim Lu of Vak Fisheries, a vessel owner, says it’s expensive to maintain a fishing boat. Costs include pay for the captain and crew, bait, fishing gear, specialized apparel for the crew, supplies, maintenance and diesel fuel.

The pandemic hit Lu and other vessel owners hard. Lu describes it like a domino effect: Buyers lost customers, wholesalers lost buyers, the auction lost sales and most vessel owners struggled to run their businesses.

Goto says, “We were in the middle of auctioning fish when all of a sudden buyers started walking away because flights were getting canceled and restaurants were closing down.”

Later in 2020, business began to pick up as restaurants opened for takeout, but Goto says it was a “rough two years for the business.”

The Honolulu Fish Auction stayed open throughout the pandemic so fishing crews could keep working, Goto says.

“We didn’t make money at all, but we also couldn’t stop the flow of seafood in Hawai‘i,” he says.

The auction’s post-pandemic rebound was no surprise to Lu: “Fortunately, we live in Hawai‘i where everyone knows fish and everyone loves fish.”

The global accelerator Hatch uses its Kona branch as part of its mission to reduce the footprint of farmed and alternative seafood.

Co-founder and partner Wayne Murphy calls Hatch the world’s first aquaculture accelerator. “There’s an amazing array of aquaculture technologies that we have invested in. We’ve sent out a global call for applications pretty much every year since we started” in 2017, he says.

Hatch has three locations: in Norway and Singapore and at Kailua-Kona’s Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park, also known as the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority.

The 2019 cohort was in-person and its 14 startups began their accelerator training and development in Kona before moving on to Norway and ending in Singapore. Due to the Covid pandemic, the 2020 cohort was completely virtual and included eight startups.

Crystal Johnson, who is in charge of business development for Hatch, is from Ha‘ikū, Maui, and was mentored by her father in the seafood industry. She says he gave her an in-depth knowledge of seafood development and procurement.

The Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kailua-Kona. | Photo: courtesy of Hatch Blue

The Natural Energy Laboratory is an excellent location for Hatch, she says.

“NELHA in Kona is one of the world’s premier aquaculture parks. Almost nowhere else in the world has what this park has,” Johnson says.

Water is pumped into the park from the bottom of the deepest underwater sea cliffs in the world. The water’s temperature allows for cold water species to thrive and if surface water is added, warm water species can be grown too.

“You can grow a variety of species in warm or cold water where in most aquaculture parks you don’t have a choice,” she says. “It provides a huge range.”

No startups from the Hatch portfolio are based in Hawai‘i, but one team from the 2020 cohort spent about a year in Hawai‘i. Sea Warden, co-founded by Zack Dinh and Shelby Oliver, provides monitoring solutions that allow seafood companies to share and trade data.

Related stories: Hawaiʻi is the World’s Shrimp Breeding Capital, Entrepreneurs Inspired by the Ocean, Aquaculture Ahi: The Holy Grail of Fish Farming

“Hatch has been such a wonderful boost for us and a treasure trove of knowledge and networks,” says Dinh, who credits the accelerator for putting his company on the map and helping it to “quickly pivot toward pond aquaculture.”

Sea Warden “produces data that is useful for farmers. We can warn them about potential hazards like disease outbreaks and provide advice,” he says.

Hatch says it has invested up to $150,000 in each of over 30 companies around the world. At the beginning of the year, Hatch received enough funding to continue its accelerator program for another four years.

“It gives me and the Hatch team an opportunity to invest in further resources in Hawai‘i,” co-founder Murphy says, and to do “what I hope will be a very successful job of attracting international talent and investment to Hawai‘i and to NELHA from an aquaculture perspective.”

In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named the Phyllostegia glabra, a member of the mint family that grew in the moist forests of Lāna‘i, as lost to extinction.

It’s a familiar story in the Islands, where about 44% of the nation’s endangered and threatened plant species live a precarious existence. Scientists believe the isolation that allowed so many unique species to develop here has also left them vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem.

Today, about 90% of Hawai‘i’s flora are not found anywhere else, says Tim Chambers, rare plant program manager for the Army Natural Resources Program on O‘ahu, which partners with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. About 10% of Hawai‘i’s original flora are already extinct, and over 30% are endangered, he says.

The Army’s seed conservation lab at Schofield Barracks works to stem the loss by maintaining a permanent stock of rare seeds, both to serve as “a kind of long-term Noah’s ark,” as Chambers puts it, and to propagate more plants. It currently houses 22,482,131 seeds.

To get them, field crews scour the Wai‘anae mountains for rare plants, traversing both Army lands and surrounding areas owned by the state, the Board of Water Supply and Kamehameha Schools. A sister program runs at the Army’s Pōhakuloa Training Area on Hawai‘i Island.

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

The seeds are painstakingly extracted, counted and weighed by hand, here by lab manager Makanani Akiona. They spend a month in dry chambers, a low-humidity environment that naturally extracts the seeds’ water without using damaging heat.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Then it’s into the freezers for storage – sometimes for 20 years or more. Most seeds are stored at regular freezer temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius, but some need even colder temperatures to remain viable, from -80 degrees to -196 degrees Celsius.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Seeds are regularly brought out of the freezers to germinate in the lab’s growing chambers, which mimic day and night, as well as the temperatures the plants like best.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Here, tiny seedlings have sprouted in a petri dish of clear agar gel. They’re then moved with tweezers to a container of artificial soil, where they grow into robust Schiedea trinervis, an endangered member of the carnation family found only on Ka‘ala, the Wai‘anae Range’s highest peak.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Once they get hardier, these and other varieties are transported to greenhouses or returned to the wild. About 2,000 endangered plants are replanted each year, along with 11,000 common plants. 

The seed lab also works to recover habitats, protecting plants from rodents, snails and other hungry creatures. Kapua Kawelo, natural resources program manager of the Army Garrison in Hawai‘i, says one of the program’s first successes was saving the Cyanea superba from extinction.  

In 1995, two years after the seed program began, there remained only five of the trees, whose Hawaiian name is haha. “We controlled the predators, secured the fruit and cultivated the plants for replanting,” says Kawelo. Now thousands are growing. “The Army is really a big player in Hawai‘i for the conservation of natural resources, in particular the conservation of plants,” she says. 

If you walked into a grocery store on Kauaʻi in March 2020, you would have found the shelves bare. A delayed barge in July 2021 left the island short of burgers, pet food and more.

“Kaua‘i is at the very end of a 45-day fossil-fuel based supply chain of food from the Mainland,” says Megan Fox, executive director of Mālama Kauaʻi, a nonprofit that works to increase local food production and access on Kauaʻi. “So when there’s a shortage, we’re going to be one of the first to get caught up.”

Pomai Weigert, an agribusiness consultant at the UH agency GoFarm Hawaiʻi, says the dependence on outside food sources is a statewide problem, especially during the pandemic.

“There were so many blind spots in the food system. It really brought to light that we don’t grow enough food in Hawaiʻi to feed everyone,” Weigert says.

Many people turned to CSAs, organizations that sell local food directly to residents. Some CSAs, which stands for community supported agriculture, saw orders spike more than 300% in a week, Weigert says.

Oʻahu Fresh’s orders jumped from 200 a week to 1,500, says Matt Johnson, owner of that CSA and co-owner of the O‘ahu Food Hub.

It was good timing for farmers who lost their sales to restaurants closed by a lack of tourists and local customers and by government restrictions. CSAs also became an outlet for wholesale suppliers to reroute their crop supplies.

A Mālama Kauaʻi customer picks up a CSA package along with a free Food to Grow kit from UH that helps families grow their own food. | Photo courtesy of Mālama Kauaʻi.

“It kept our growers in business. It gave us a chance for all of the food that was already planted,” says Maureen Datta, co-owner of Adaptations Inc., a Kona farm and distributor for other local farmers. “It had a significant impact on keeping farms in business and employing their staffs, and also feeding kamaʻāina.”

Ashley Watts, owner and operator of Local Iʻa, a company that buys seafood from local fishers and sells direct to consumers, says she’s seen residents making more of an effort to seek out direct sources of food and to visit farmers markets.

The pandemic reinforced the value of farmers growing a variety of crops; that way, when one is no longer in demand, the others keep the business afloat.

Weigert says the agricultural market is always changing, “for the consumer and also for farmers. We have to be aware of that and keep our flexibility, not put all of our eggs in one basket.

“We should hope that CSAs never go away because having food access for ourselves, even in times of crisis, is going to be really vital to our survival,” says Weigert.

The Aloha+ Challenge is an online dashboard run by the state government to educate the community on social, economic and environmental challenges. Among its measures are how much food is grown and sold locally, how much land is designated farmland, and the number of local food processing facilities and farmers markets.

Kaimana Bingham, Aloha+ dashboard and partnerships manager at the nonprofit Hawaiʻi Green Growth, says CSAs help Hawaiʻi’s efforts toward agricultural sustainability. However, she says, the Aloha+ challenge goals are broader and include reducing hunger.

“It’s not necessarily just tied to how much food we produce,” says Bingham. “We’re currently looking at our whole local food production goals and diving deeper into other metrics of food security, low food security, vulnerability, community food security, resilience, justice equity. Those are all factors that are going to contribute to whether we can achieve our goal.”

Some of the people interviewed for this story also believe in educating people about local farming and its importance, building new food processing facilities that can be shared by many small businesses and encouraging families to grow their own produce.

“Without local ingredients, (Meadow Gold) doesn’t really have a long-term sustainable position in the market,” says Bahman Sadeghi, a Hawai‘i Island dairy farmer who bought the Meadow Gold brand and most of its Hawai‘i assets in April 2020.

“So, we have to go back to basics and say as a local processor, we have to produce local ingredients, local products. And therefore, we have to invest in local dairies, for example. But before you invest in local dairies, you have to invest in local feed because without local feed, local dairies cannot exist. We can’t depend on Mainland feed – bring in their feed to feed the cows here to make milk. We have to produce the feed here.”

Sadeghi did not buy Meadow Gold’s former 2-acre headquarters on Sheridan Street near Ala Moana Center, but instead acquired a new facility in Waipahu. He is also planning to expand Meadow Gold’s Hilo plant to increase production.

His blueprint doesn’t end there: Meadow Gold is finalizing plans to release a line of almond, soy, oats and macadamia nut beverages, made with local ingredients, Sadeghi says. Megahn Chun, marketing manager for Meadow Gold, hopes these products will be on sale by the end of 2021 or early 2022.

Making Meadow Gold’s ingredients and products in the Islands means more jobs and money in the local economy, Chun says. A new cohort of interns is part of Meadow Gold’s vision of keeping Hawai‘i’s people interested in developing local agriculture, she says.

Sadeghi also wants to continue Meadow Gold’s long history of supporting the community.

“We’re involved with the University of Hawai‘i athletics department and working with local organizations to support them and create partnerships – for example, the Children’s Discovery Center, working with Pow! Wow! and we did a campaign with POG for the vaccination process. So, any opportunity to give back to the community, I think I see that as one of the pillars of Meadow Gold’s missions, to be engaged and continue to invest in its partnerships.”

POG is Meadow Gold’s popular passion, orange and guava beverage.

2022 will be Meadow Gold’s 125th birthday in the Islands, a reminder of the importance of emphasizing local ingredients and production.

“It’s really to continue working on sourcing lands, so that we can grow local feed and create more dairies and increase dairy processing here in Hawai‘i because they all work in tandem with each other,” says Chun.

“If you don’t have a processor, where is the dairy going to process our stuff? … If you don’t have the feed, where does the dairy have to go and get their food? From the Mainland, which is super expensive. So, all of these three things need to be set up so that we can create a sustainable blueprint for Hawai‘i.”