The post Foodshed Cooperative Is Growing San Diego’s Small-Farm Economy appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>After half their farm’s crops were wiped out by a devastating heat wave in 2018, Ellee Igoe and Hernan Cavazos, co-founders of Solidarity Farm, changed their practices with the explicit goal of adding more carbon to the soil, or “carbon farming.”
The farm grows seasonal fruits and vegetables on 10 acres in the semi-arid, unincorporated area of Pauma Valley in central San Diego County, on land it rents from the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians; they partnered with the Luiseño to create a “carbon sink demonstration farm.” Here, they educated other local farmers on how to farm with more regenerative practices such as cutting down on tillage, growing cover crops, and integrating compost.
Ellee Igoe and Hernan Cavazos. (Photo courtesy of Foodshed Cooperative)
Like most of the small local farms in the area—more than 3,000 farms in San Diego County grow food on fewer than 10 acres—Solidarity Farms has been hit by a range of other of climate events since then. They’re at the whim of extreme seasonal changes that can ravage crops with bouts of extreme heat and heavy rainfall. Last year, heat waves in San Diego broke records in many parts of the county; in the first few months of 2023 alone, San Diego had more rainfall than it had in all of 2022. This instability has required small local farms to be ever more adaptable in order to survive.
After receiving a grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Healthy Soils Program, Solidarity Farm hosted a carbon sink convergence event in 2019, at which a new idea—brought forth by the collective minds of participating local farmers—was born; a small farm distribution company called Foodshed Cooperative.
“We recognized that we needed to scale our distribution capacities, and it made more sense to do that, not just for ourselves, but it was more economically viable if we grew that capacity for lots of farms,” Igoe explained by phone recently.
Scaling up small farms often means more risk, which may not be practical for farmers who lease land. Growing businesses in cooperation, Igoe thought, could expand the reach of small farms—reducing costs associated with investing in things like trucks or market research while ensuring that food reaches the people who need it most.
“We recognized that we needed to scale our distribution capacities, and . . . it was more economically viable if we grew that capacity for lots of farms.”
In November 2019, Igoe applied for a climate justice grant to pilot the idea of a cooperative food distribution company. They were successful, launching their pilot on March 1st, 2020.
“The idea came before COVID and our whole argument [for the grant] was . . . if we have a climate event, all the fresh local food will go to the tech savvy highest bidders, and the small, BIPOC farmers will primarily be left out of that because they won’t have the capacity to respond quick enough,” said Igoe.
As a result, she explained, historically underserved communities would be dependent on whatever leftovers they could get from food banks.
Then, when the pandemic hit, much of that prediction came true. Big farms went online. “Their CSAs grew by the thousands and the little guys were getting left out. And so Foodshed was perfectly timed to swoop in and be like, ‘we got this,’” said Igoe.
Today, Foodshed purchases produce from 60 farms in San Diego County, prioritizing BIPOC-run and -owned farms, as well as farms using climate-smart farming practices. They have a collaborative crop plan with around 20 farms, that involves communicating with farmers three to six months in advance to tell them what to grow for the co-op in order to ensure a diverse mix of crops.
“They’ll [say], ‘Hey, are you able to fulfill this?’ or ‘Are you able to grow that?’ I think it’s quite holistic and quite a symbiotic relationship,” said Byron Nkhoma, co-owner of Hukama Farm, a 4-acre operation in the town of Ramona in central San Diego County.
In addition, the cooperative—which was founded by Igoe, Cavazos, and four farmers—has created a food resource hub that serves as a go-to place for farmers. It provides both new and experienced growers with everything from mentorship on transitioning to carbon farming practices to assistance with business development support and tools from a lending library.
“Market research is actually something that you need to pay someone for,” said Byron. “The competition with big stores [and] big farms is always a hurdle for the small farmer. But if there is one voice for a bunch of small farmers, it makes a lot of sense.”
Farmer to Farmer Networks Growing Nationwide
Foodshed took inspiration from FEED Sonoma, which does similar work as a cooperative aggregator and food hub network that supports more than 50 farms in Northern California engaged in ecologically sustainable practices. The Wallace Center, Igoe says, was also a huge help. The nonprofit, which focuses on promoting sustainable and equitable food systems in the U.S, helps support local food systems by assisting with anything from technical assistance on business development and sustainable farming practices, to helping connect local food producers with new markets and stakeholders.
The benefits of small-scale farms working as cooperatives is slowly gaining recognition, with Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico) and Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) who recently introduced the Farmer-to-Farmer Education Act. This bill, which is proposed for inclusion in the 2023 Farm Bill, aims to build networks of small farms, particularly in historically marginalized communities, in order to facilitate conservation education. The goal is to create better farming practices, part of which included lowering cost and risk by sharing knowledge, equipment, and capacity to respond to extreme weather events.
“For a really long time, it has been about, ‘buy the produce,’ and that’s really important. But now more than ever, it’s ‘get more involved in supporting policy around this work’,” said Igoe.
While Foodshed built its foundation on emergency funding during the pandemic, it has been able to pivot, becoming more established as a business using money from the American Rescue Act Plan, as well as a $5 million grant through U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Partnership for Climate Smart Commodities to incentivize farmers to increase their regenerative practices while paying them a premium to distribute their food into historically underserved areas.
Partnering with Food Banks to Meet a Growing Need
As part of their resource hub offerings, Foodshed has also layered in their ability to manage grants and help support small-scale farms like Hukama Farm—which recently received a grant from the Pine Cone Foundation through Foodshed. This money can be integral when it comes to buying equipment such as shade structures and hoop houses, critical in not only helping mitigate the impacts of extreme weather, but also in establishing a farm’s legitimacy in new markets.
In June of this year, Foodshed and the San Diego Food Bank began a groundbreaking local food purchasing partnership. It has enabled the Food Bank to purchase from small local farms on a consistent basis, typically once a week, at a scale that can meet their demand.
“We cannot build a better food system on the backs of farmers taking more risk.”
When the pandemic hit, the San Diego Food Bank went from serving 250,000 to 500,000 people per month. Even now, it continues to provide for roughly 400,000 people each month, and it distributed about 44 million pounds of produce in the last fiscal year.
“Working with Foodshed has been a game changer for actualizing [an] initiative that we’ve been wanting to do for years,” said Kayla Thompson, San Diego Food Bank’s procurement manager.
While she and others on staff had a strong desire to support the local food economy, Thompson explains that the primary challenge of collaborating with small local farmers revolves around the time required to coordinate and meet the demands of a food bank covering such a vast area—roughly 4,300-square-mile radius for the county in addition to El Centro in Imperial County.
“The amount of work that it takes to establish a relationship, and also meet the scale that we’re used to working on [is a challenge]. Thankfully, we have the means to do the purchasing. It’s just the logistics behind it, both for the farmers and also for food bank staff, who are used to being able to execute purchases on a larger scale,” Thompson said.
Some of the produce offered by Foodshed at their Saturday Market. (Photo courtesy of Foodshed Cooperative)
This year, the food bank aims to increase the proportion of produce distributed from 30 percent to 50 percent of the total food offered. While the partnership with Foodshed currently provides flexibility by allowing it to accept surplus food from farmers’ markets distributed by Foodshed, the food bank plans to shift to a more traditional model that incorporates a crop plan, ensuring that the food hub’s farms are well-prepared ahead of time and have reliable purchasing to depend on.
In looking to the future, Igoe hopes to tap into the healthcare industry—establishing new market streams with Medi-Cal for fruit and produce prescription programs—as well as to get more compost for small farmers.
Igoe is busy these days; she squeezed interviews for this article between two trips, one to meet with Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that works with local municipalities to facilitate compost purchasing, and another to Kansas City, where she was going to learn about how to implement another climate-smart grant.
She’s working overtime to help bridge the farming industry with the nutrition and the anti-hunger sectors—and she hopes that doing so will help build the infrastructure that’s needed to meet the needs of both people and the climate.
“We cannot build a better food system on the backs of farmers taking more risk. We’re already in the riskiest job there is,” said Igoe. “Climate change is not a simple problem. If we keep funding everything in its individual sector, we won’t have enough money. We have to overlap our investments. And carbon farming and local agriculture—I don’t know of a better place to overlap that money. Health, economy, and climate all intersect there.”
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]]>The post How Do School Meals in the US Stack Up Against Other Countries? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The pandemic revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s school meal programs. In some cases, this unique time led to opportunities for local farmers to provide food directly to school districts. It also ushered in a wave of emergency allotments, which offset family food costs and significantly decreased food insecurity. However, when those funds came to an end, it exposed how many families struggled as the costs of groceries ballooned and universal free meals disappeared in most states.
“We’ve made them seem like charity handout programs, but they’re multi-sectoral, complex programs that actually contribute significantly to economic development, short and long term.”
In 2021, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF), a nonprofit that provides global monitoring and advocacy to support the development of school feeding programs, ran a survey to capture the state of school meal programs across 139 countries—representing 81 percent of the world’s population.
This is the second GCNF global survey (the first was in 2019) and it collected data for the school year that began in 2020, highlighting 183 programs with large-scale meal programs. The goal is to track the programs’ progress and standardize their evaluation of coverage, beneficiaries, funding, links to local agriculture, and more.
Arlene Mitchell, GCNF’s executive director, believes school meal programs are misunderstood. “We’ve made them seem like charity handout programs, but they’re multi-sectoral, complex programs that actually contribute significantly to economic development, short and long term,” she said.
We spoke with Mitchell about what the survey revealed, how the United States’ program stacks up to other school meal programs around the world, and how it can improve.
What does a good school meal program look like?
There are a number of factors that we consider. One is, are they covering the need? [And then] how comprehensive it is—is it more than just feeding kids? [Does] it include some nutrition education, some knowledge of where food comes from? In some cases, it includes things like children helping to prepare or serve the food. They’re actually engaged in the program more meaningfully.
A third factor that we look for is a set of things that can contribute to sustainability, or to keep the program going. Are they engaging meaningfully with local farmers so that there is some economic opportunity locally alongside the program? Do they have a healthy relationship with the private sector in their country? Is it creating jobs? Is it in the national budget in a way that means that it can be sustained?
You look at countries at all levels of income and development. Which of the low-income countries stood out to you? Which ones did an exceptional job working with the resources that they have?
There are some pretty stunning examples of low-income countries actually trying harder, proportionately, than some rich countries to address hunger and nutrition in their school-aged kids. For years, one that has been astounding to me is Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. Something like 89 percent of the budget for school meals is coming from the government, a very high percentage for a low-income country. And they’re covering almost 100 percent of their [elementary] school students, which is just extraordinary.
After the Millennium Development project in the early 2000s took off, several African countries pledged to implement new programs. Ghana has a very impressive program. Kenya has a pretty impressive program. Nigeria is new to the scene; their program now is very impressive and expanding quickly.
“There’s a lot to be proud of in the program. But one of the biggest issues is that the country has lost its excitement about it.”
Let’s jump to the U.S. What are some of the strengths of the programs here?
I think the pillars of the National School Lunch Program are admirable. They link to agriculture, they link education, they link to nutrition. If you neglect any one of those three, the program is not going to be as strong. That starting point is excellent. It’s reaching the kids who really need it. The fact that it is supported relatively sustainably by the national government is hugely important. If this was turned over to 50 states to run independently on their own, it would be a mess, because you would have 50 different standards, 50 different budgets.
And yet states have the flexibility to improve or change or tweak their program. They don’t have total flexibility if they want government funding, but they do have some flexibility. So it allows for local government input and local community input, but there are some national standards and guidelines and criteria, which I think is important for a country as large and diverse as the United States.
Where does the U.S. stand up against other more well-resourced countries?
There’s a lot to be proud of in the program. But one of the biggest issues is that the country has lost its excitement about it. It’s not getting a huge amount of public support or interest. That’s not true in some of the other relatively wealthy countries. For example, Japan has an excellent school meal program. Finland is probably the best in the world. France and Italy have decent programs.
I had an Italian friend who used to bring me menus from the school meal program, and it reads like a fancy restaurant menu. And not only is it really cool food, but they also give parents advice on how to complement what they have at school with what they’re going to have for dinner. Those programs are getting much more public attention and support. I think parents and others are much more engaged, much more involved than in much of the U.S.
The U.S. program has succeeded in feeding kids relatively nutritious food for decades, which is pretty darn important, but I do think it could be improved.
“Probably the biggest issue in the US is the [larger] food environment. We are dealing with advertisements and marketing and fast food and what’s cheap and available in your neighborhood.”
How can it be improved?
In the U.S., time is money. And one thing that really upsets me about the school meal programs is that they’ve gotten squeezed in time. The more time you have at lunchtime, the more likely you are to eat a full menu, including fruits and vegetables. There also needs to be time to socialize over meals; it’s hugely important.
Countries that are doing a really spectacular job [have students] actually spend time at the lunch table and they learn things like table manners, nutrition, and how to serve and receive food politely. There’s just no time for in the American school lunch program. By the time you get your meal, you’ve got five, 10 minutes maximum to actually eat it.
Keeping it national is another thing. This movement for universally free school meals is really important. But if it becomes a state-by-state thing with no comparable rules and procedures across 50 states, it could get pretty rocky.
We need to simplify the school meal rules so that your average parent can understand it, your average school lunch [worker] can understand it, and the community can figure it out and support it. I think we can do a better job of integrating a food and nutrition education into our curriculum. School lunch is a separate thing in the U.S. It’s not, “Here’s where your food comes from and here’s how it’s grown.” There are gardens in a lot of schools, but not everywhere. And it isn’t just integrated into [most students’] everyday thinking and activities.
Probably the biggest issue in the U.S. is the [larger] food environment. We are dealing with advertisements and marketing and fast food and what’s cheap and available in your neighborhood. That is surrounding every nutritional problem in the U.S., including school kids having choices, particularly adolescents. We’re not effectively addressing that and it’s causing huge, expensive problems of health and financial issues in the U.S. which largely link back to what food kids are eating.
They do a whole child’s approach in Finland. So it’s everything outdoors, indoors, exercise, sports, lunchroom, manners. The kids are involved in planning and implementing the school meal program. They have meals together. There’s respect for their different cultures and food needs and desires. They have the children and parents involved in deciding what vending machines can provide. They have them involved and testing and approving menus. It’s an integrated approach with nutrition, education, and knowledge about where their food comes from built right into it. It’s really a fabulous program and it has been going for over 100 years.
In looking at the results from these global surveys, what limitations might there be? What gaps in information did you notice?
The biggest gap we had was probably how many jobs were created by the program. There were very few countries who thought of that aspect as a job-creation mechanism for youth and for women. We have very spotty data on that.
What was the biggest standout from the last survey?
I think the number of emergencies suffered is just astounding. The pandemic was on top of those emergencies. So it’s earthquakes, floods, civil unrest, drought—anything that affects your program. Climate change is clearly there. And again, it’s usually those who need food the most who are having the biggest struggle.
“You can train thousands of teachers, but kids won’t learn if they’re hungry or malnourished.”
In both the 2021 and 2019 surveys, we put in a question about whether they had issues with waste, fraud, or abuse—corruption kinds of questions. And everybody said, “Nobody is going to answer that honestly.” But in fact, we got quite a few pretty decent answers about corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse.
We also asked a question about what good came out of the COVID pandemic. We got some fabulous answers, mostly about improved hygiene conditions at the schools. But that was another one that I thought no one would have anything good to say about it.
We have a whole new section on climate questions this time around, because it’s clearly impacting us much more than the world was tuned to.
Is there anything else that you want to make sure our readers understand?
Without the combination of good nutrition and good education, good investment in agriculture and nutrition . . . our future is stuck. You can spend all kinds of money on a school building and kids will never come if they’re hungry. You can train thousands of teachers, but kids won’t learn if they’re hungry or malnourished. School meals are a multi-sectoral investment, and it’s the three pillars of development: education, health and nutrition, and agriculture. And that means you’re investing in the pillars of development for the short term for the kids who are eating. And you’re creating a future that is healthier and more successful and productive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Supermarket Food Waste Is a Big Problem. Are Strategic Price Cuts the Solution? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Picture yourself grocery shopping. In the bread aisle, you see two loaves identically wrapped; both are perfectly edible, but one is a day older and costs half the price.
In the produce section, you see two baskets of avocados. The ones in the front are ripe, will need to be eaten today, and cost 75 cents less than those in the back, which will last for a few days. Which do you choose?
This is a business practice called dynamic pricing, and it may be coming soon to a supermarket near you.
Dynamic pricing is not new; for decades, the airline, fashion, and hospitality industries have all found that dynamic pricing—the incremental adjustments to prices to reflect inventory, demand, and supply—has helped companies cut waste and save money.
In 1988, American Airlines saw that the proportion of empty seats on its planes fell from 15 percent to 3 percent when it made slight adjustments to ticket prices closer to when flights departed. In the 1990s, Marriott Hotels found that it could sell out rooms on less popular days of the week using strategic pricing that varied with the length of stay and time of year.
Can this strategy also work at grocery stores, where an estimated 119 billion pounds of food gets wasted each year?
A recent study from U.C. San Diego’s Rady School of Management suggests that it might. Robert Sanders, the study’s author, used economic models to show that if grocery retailers used dynamic pricing to adjust prices for perishable foods based on how long they’ve been on the shelves, retailers would likely dramatically curb food waste.
Sanders says this isn’t to be confused with simple last-minute clearance sales. “It’s gradual discounts throughout the shelf life of the product,” he adds. “You don’t do discounts just at the end of the last day. The price is changing throughout the [time] horizon.”
The study zeros in on the question: What does more to stop food from being wasted from grocery stores—food waste diversion systems or smart pricing strategies?
The results point to the fact that stopping waste at the source is more effective—environmentally and economically. In this case, that means finding a home for food before it reaches its “sell by” date.
The Big Downsides to Grocery Store Food Waste
Having static prices for foods that vary in freshness across their shelf lives not only doesn’t make sense, Sanders says, but is a market failure that largely contributes to food waste and therefore climate change, through the release of methane in the atmosphere. “Prices serve a very important role,” he says.
The study found that dynamic pricing could reduce food waste from grocery retailers by 21 percent. And with the high costs of groceries, especially for fresh food, lower prices can also do a lot to meet peoples’ economic needs.
Every year, about 130 billion meals, or $408 billion in food, are thrown away in the U.S., according to Feeding America. Meanwhile, roughly 25 percent of adults reported food insecurity in 2022. All of this food waste—35 percent of the U.S. food supply—results in “annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 42 coal-fired power plants,” according to a report released by the EPA in November 2021.
Across the country, states have begun to implement strategies to divert food waste from their landfills. Vermont established a universal recycling law that requires separation and diversion of food scraps from the waste stream. Several states, including Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts have food recovery systems to collect and donate edible food to food banks.
California, which has a reputation for leading on environmental issues, has a goal to divert 75 percent of food waste from landfills by 2025 by mandating residential and commercial organic waste collection systems and edible food recovery programs across the state.
While creating such systems, especially the infrastructure to separate food waste to turn into compost, are critical to the fight against climate change, there is also a growing emphasis on prevention. For example, legislators have introduced bills such as AB 660 to mandate clear labeling and better education around how shoppers should be interpreting “sell by,” “use by,” and “best by” dates—which have been widely shown to confuse people and lead to edible food getting discarded.
Sanders sees all of these efforts as necessary to effectively reduce waste. “They’re complements; I don’t think they’re substitutes,” he says. “Even if dynamic pricing reduces waste 50 percent, there’s still going to be 50 percent of the waste that’s there.”
Some think asking large retailers to change their pricing structures in such a significant way, however, is too large of a task. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, says that although it could be a helpful strategy, the average retailer doesn’t want to be seen as selling anything but fresh food.
“Most stores are really concerned about their brand image and want to be seen as selling premium products,” Lapis says. “Selling produce is not the same as selling airline tickets.”
But with proper education, Sanders thinks that dynamic pricing could be used as an opportunity to help more customers understand the meaning of these discounts. “It can be done in a really classy way, if you actually frame it as a sustainable discount [and] you put signage indicating this is for the benefit of waste reduction,” he says.
The Role of Technology in Dynamic Pricing
Successfully implementing dynamic pricing means tracking what’s on the shelf in real time—and that will require coordination between grocery retailers, manufacturers, and point-of-sales systems. Technology can and does play a significant role in managing inventory data, which can also be labor intensive and inconsistent.
Barcodes, one of the bigger barriers to implementing dynamic pricing, could be used to communicate to grocery retailers not only when to mark down their food items, but how often.
“The standard UPC barcode doesn’t track physical items and doesn’t track expiration dates,” says Sanders. “They may know the total number of SKUs, how much they have on the shelves, but there is nothing in that barcode that tells them when it’s going to expire. But this technology actually exists—GS1 extended barcodes—you often see it used for expensive things.”
At the grocery store level, technology varies with each retailer, making a transition to a more nuanced system to track individual items a challenging task. Errol Schweizer, an industry expert who led the national grocery program at Whole Foods for almost a decade, says that what this study points to is the pitfalls of inventory management, notoriously a weakness amongst grocery stores in terms of forecasting and holding on to the right amount of inventory.
“There are a lot of hurdles to [implementing dynamic pricing],” Schweizer says. “I think it’s theoretically possible, but it’s another one of those things—do they have the right enterprise system? Do they have the labor? What’s their financing?” Yet, he added, those are all decisions a retailer can choose to make if it was committed to cutting out waste. “This isn’t rocket science.”
For a grocery store to be able to change prices throughout the day means either paying someone to apply markdown stickers in real time, or investing in the technology to automatically adjust the price displayed.
Companies like Wasteless, a startup based in Israel and the Netherlands, have helped stores in Europe and soon, in the U.S., integrate a technology that uses artificial intelligence to help capture data to study how products move within stores. Using an algorithm, the technology is able to understand how fresh products move and take into account how customers react to freshness and respond to discounts.
“We see a lot of differences between store locations,” says Tomas Pasqualini, Wasteless’ vice president of global operations. He explains that in residential areas where people shop once a week, they might look for products that have a longer shelf life than stores where people shop daily or multiple times a week.
In the store, Wasteless deploys electronic shelf tags that adjust pricing in a way that corresponds to specific expiration dates, which are encoded in the products’ barcodes. Wasteless reports that hundreds of its partner stores have reduced food waste by 39 percent.
But the greatest challenge, Tomas says, is introducing disruptive technologies in an industry that’s a bit more technologically traditional. Wasteless will be put to the test soon when it launches its service at a Midwestern supermarket chain later this year.
Sanders, the study’s author, stresses that reducing waste may be a good reason for disruption. “When prices function properly, they allocate all of the goods and services,” he says. “But when prices don’t work in the right way, when prices can’t adjust flexibly because the item is going to expire, that actually has a social cost.”
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]]>The post How Centuries of Extractive Agriculture Helped Set the Stage for the Maui Fires appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The catastrophic fire that just ravaged more than 2,000 acres and at least 2,000 homes on Maui, and claimed 114 lives and counting is inextricably linked to the island’s agricultural history.
Lahaina, the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was once a thriving, ecologically diverse landscape full of fish ponds and diverse crops that included sweet potatoes, kalo (taro), and ‘ulu (breadfruit). But colonization, and the extractive agricultural systems that came with it, had a devastating impact on reshaping the landscape ecologically, culturally, and economically—not only depleting soils of fertility but making much of the island more fire-prone.
As these maps of historic sugarcane lands and pineapple lands illustrate, the two crops covered vast portions of West Maui.
A map showing the 1937 area of pineapple and sugarcane lands. (Map credit: Hawaii Statewide GIS Program)
The sugarcane and pineapple industries reigned for nearly two centuries, with monocropping farming methods made exceptionally profitable with indentured servitude. This process transformed natural ecosystems, as the companies diverted water from wet areas of the island to irrigate the fields in the drier parts.
As workers slowly gained rights, profits plummeted, and Brazil and India became competitors of cheap sugar production. Maui’s last sugar mill, the 36,000-acre Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, Co. (HC&S), shut down in 2016, and the land was left in the hands of management company Alexander & Baldwin.
Now, tens of thousands of acres that had been used for sugarcane and pineapple production sit untended, much lying fallow, some overrun with non-native grass species, or in the hands of development companies who aim to offset the economic loss of agricultural production with tourism. Meanwhile, local communities are engaged in an ongoing battle for water rights as the residents of Hawaii look toward rebuilding.
Civil Eats spoke with Noa Lincoln, an assistant professor of Indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, about water diversion, deforestation, and Big Ag’s impact on Maui.
Will you briefly describe the history of sugarcane? When did it get to Hawaii and what were some of its benefits?
Sugarcane was introduced to Hawaii probably about a millennia ago by Polynesians. It played a pivotal role in a broad range of traditional cropping systems before Europeans’ arrival.
We have very recent work that shows that it has high nitrogen fixation potential, and it was probably critical in the long-term sustainability of our dryland systems for nitrogen dynamics. It plays really important hydrologic functions in certain systems, acting as a windbreak. It’s one of the world’s highest biomass producers, so it was critical for mulching and labor maintenance in terms of weeds and covering the soil.
And sugarcane itself is actually a tremendously powerful tool, when applied properly, and it enhances soil health and ecosystem function within agricultural systems. Which then, of course, becomes very ironic in terms of how the plantations then [put] a horrible, detrimental end to our soil quality.
What conditions did the sugarcane thrive in originally?
Pretty diverse conditions. [Many] varieties of sugarcane tend to be much more grass-like, much more acclimated to dry habitats. When you look at the wild occurrence of these sugarcane ancestors, they occupy everything from inundated bogs, all the way to pretty dry mesic habitats. Polynesians, as they traveled across the islands, occupied a broad range of habitats, and selected varieties that performed across a broad spectrum of habitats.
Chinese contract laborers on a sugar plantation in 19th century Hawaii. (Photo credit: Hawaii State Archives)
While everyone always thinks of sugarcane as a very thirsty crop [that] can take up a lot of water, it is also actually drought adapted. It’s coated in wax to reduce water loss. It has amazing stomatal control, so it can really close itself up and reduce its water loss. So, yes, if you pump them full of water, you are going to get more production. But, actually, sugarcane can perform and produce across a range of habitats, including pretty dry habitats.
Can you describe the diversion of water for sugarcane?
You could grow sugarcane without irrigation in the wet areas of Hawaii, but you had lower sunlight, so you got lower yields. A lot of the plantations wanted to exploit the drier, mesic areas of Hawaii, which have better sunlight and significantly better soil. A lot of the big water diversions are to move water from these wet areas out into the mesic areas that don’t have flowing surface streams. It’s not that they needed irrigation everywhere, but they did need irrigation to establish these plantations in areas that probably shouldn’t have been supporting plantations.
On Maui, most of the sugarcane cultivation is in the Central Valley, which is largely a mesic habitat. Alexander & Baldwin, one of the early, large sugar plantations, created a really extensive irrigation ditch that cut across 27 windward valleys; they completely de-watered those streams and took all 27 and diverted them into this canal that went into the Central Valley so they could irrigate an area that was not wet enough for sugarcane cultivation.
Where do those water diversions stand today?
It’s fascinating and unprecedented in our country, because [at the time the plantations were planted] Hawaii was an independent monarchy. The monarchy eventually got overthrown, and Hawaii became a territory, and eventually a state. There’s really not a parallel in U.S. law or U.S. history. It’s a unique case study.
There have been very long fights over the water in East Maui, because obviously when they took all the water from the stream, that displaced the ability for the downstream Native communities to cultivate, for instance, the flooded irrigated Kalo, which was their main production and food staple. This has gone through a lot of legal fights.
One of the big culminating cases that went to the Hawaii Supreme Court and is actually taught in a lot of water law courses today is the Waiahole Ditch case, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that cultural applications of water are protected under the public trust doctrine for governing water law.
That opened the door for a lot of other traditional users to fight for these water returns. And so on that East Maui irrigation ditch, there have been some victories over the last decade in terms of reestablishing inflow streams standards and guaranteeing a certain amount of water for downstream users.
How much land in Maui is currently fallow?
It’s pretty high. Maui has probably one of the lower percentages [when compared to other islands across the state], but more than 50 percent of our agriculturally zoned lands are fallow. It’s estimated that only something like 15 percent of our ag lands are actually used to grow active crops.
How are farmers working to regenerate the soil on former sugarcane land?
Unfortunately, it’s hardly on the radar, because there are so many larger struggles just to operate in agriculture in Hawaii today. The biggest is that our state does nothing to protect or value land for agriculture. And therefore, the land value of ag land is tied to its development potential.
On the north shore of Oahu, if you want to get an acre of land, you’re talking like half a million dollars. And the costs of land, water, and labor in Hawaii are so high, it’s very, very challenging to just exist as a farmer. Because of that, if you’re thinking about regenerative agricultural practices, that is a further investment on the farmers’ behalf; it’s taking a longer time horizon. [Organic] amendments are more expensive than industrial fertilizers. If you’re doing tree crops, that takes longer [than annual] crops. All these things amount to additional economic investment on the farmer’s behalf in an already extremely challenging economic landscape.
An aerial view of a sugarcane field next to the community of Paia, Maui. (Photo CC-licensed by Forest and Kim Starr)
Because of that, the vast majority of people who are engaging in regenerative agricultural practices are not strictly farmers. There’s a lot of nonprofit education or social enterprises that subsidize farming through youth engagement or cultural education, and that allows them to engage in more regenerative practices without being beholden to the bottom line.
You have a lot of retirees or people who work other jobs to support themselves. That farming is more of a passion and, in some cases, a hobby. And they have the luxury, I would say, of engaging in regenerative practices. But in terms of where the food production is coming from in Hawaii, there are very few food-producing farmers who can do that. It’s just economically restricted.
How much of the former sugar ag land is going toward development?
Since the 1950s, we’ve lost about 1 percent of our farmlands annually. That’s being rezoned for residential or other development purposes. There are no restrictions, really, of what you can do with agricultural lands in Hawaii. There’s a tremendous amount of ag lands that are supporting gentleman’s farms where people come in and buy 20 acres. They put up a mansion; they have a horse.
How did the history of the sugarcane industry lead to this month’s wildfire?
In some of the old Hawaiian language newspapers, Lahaina used to have significant wetlands and lowland flats. They would say, “Lahaina sits in the house of the Ulu trees,” or the ancient breadfruit grove Mala Ulu o Lele.
“Our state does nothing to protect or value land for agriculture. And therefore, the land value of ag land is tied to its development potential.”
People just describe almost the entirety of Lahaina town as this forested area filled with breadfruit. And as the plantations came in, they were cutting down a lot of these trees. It got to the point where they passed a law that made it illegal to cut down an ulu tree. And so plantation owners started to pile their bagasse, their spent sugarcane pressings, around the base of the tree and burn it.
After three or four burnings, it would kill the tree. They weren’t breaking the law. They weren’t cutting it down, but they were very systematically and deliberately eliminating the trees from this region.
Those trees probably had a very significant effect in terms of the region’s moisture. Deep-rooted trees are able to tap into the water table. If you look at the rainfall, Lahaina was always way too dry to grow breadfruit. But the fact that you had this huge breadfruit growth and all these wetlands essentially speaks to the fact that the trees were tapping into this subterranean water table, lifting moisture up to the surface, redepositing some of that moisture through leaf litter, allowing for additional rain capture, for reduced evaporation, increased carbon in the soil, and holding additional moisture.
You basically just had an entirely different ecology of that region for two reasons: the undisturbed flow of the river, which allowed the recharge of the subterranean water sources; and these extensive treed landscapes in that area. The plantations removed both of those. They diverted the river in its entirety and eliminated the tree cover. I think the long-term ecological implications of those changes were a huge factor in [the conditions that led to] the fire.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
It’s not a new concept, but it’s important to recognize that agriculture provides a lot of different services, most of which are not valued. Our country has, over the last century, become increasingly aware of the negative externalities of agriculture, in terms of soil loss, groundwater poisoning, and eutrophication and dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. As a country, we’ve started to acknowledge and at least begin to address the negative externalities of agriculture.
I would like to see the conversation shift to focus on agriculture’s positive impacts. Basically everything that can be done negatively, agriculture can also do it positively. Agriculture can contribute to soil remediation, improved water quality, and biodiversity. How do we encourage those activities? That work really needs to be accelerated and expanded. In Hawaiian culture, really any Indigenous culture, agriculture is the fundamental way that people interact with their environment. To me, it really sets the tone for our entire society.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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