A Letter From John
We Need a Hand Up
I invested 10 years and my life savings into creating Kulahaven Farms: Hawaii’s first rainbow trout aquaponics farm. The facility was only one-third of an acre but we were able to produce at least a portion of over 200,000 meals annually with no chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. We also recycled virtually all of our water. But like so many other undercapitalized small businesses still working to secure financial footing, staying the course amid numerous natural disasters from the pandemic to storms proved difficult. The Covid shutdown hurt us badly but we got very little support. And then a freak island-wide power outage in August 2022 cut off both electricity and water – we lost $60,000 worth of fish and crop production and, along with it, our lease. Ironically, we had just reached profitability and had far more demand for our trout and produce than we could possibly meet. That was the first commercial test of our trout aquaponics system design. Our intent was to expand to full scale and use our farm as a model to create numerous small partner farms, spawning a new industry for Hawaii and producing millions of pounds of nutrient-dense food.
We had completed our R&D but had no room to expand and we were not allowed to host farm tours or trout fishing there, which would have been highly lucrative. We already knew that we had to move on and I had already been working for a year to find capital partners. As things now stand, we have all of our tanks and equipment, a skilled and dedicated core team, established customers and huge market demand for our products but no way to build out a bigger better farm. It appears that I’m much better at raising trout than capital. We need to make some fundamental changes so that farmers who know how to care for the land can spend their time doing that – not putting together investment pitches.
We need to support our small farmers, because if there’s anything we’ve learned from more than a century of plantation ownership and the legacy of the fallow agricultural lands, is that corporate, unilateral control of our food system and natural resources threatens our chances for survival, as evidenced by the wildfires that devasted Maui last year.
We also need better jobs to keep our children in Hawai‘i. Modern, high-tech agricultural can offer that, while also stimulating our economy in ways that extractive businesses cannot. Hawai‘i imports at least 85% of our food, draining $6 billion out of the State annually. And the dire reality is that too many of Hawai‘i’s food producers – farmers, ranchers and fishers – are old guys like me. It’s imperative that my generation pass on our knowledge, experience, and our operations, so that future generations can thrive.
There is a lot of buzz about high-tech investment in Hawai‘i with spectacular amounts of federal and state dollars combining with private capital to fund high-tech startups. But none of that capital has gone to agricultural producers. I’m a firm believer in the need for better technology – we cannot meet the world’s increasing food demand without it. But if investment is focused entirely on growing capital, what are we going to eat?
Tech is the business of today. But food is the business of the future. Without food we have no future. Many people talk about these things. Some of us are actively working on them, especially farmers because we are the hardest working people you’ll ever meet. We’re not asking for a hand out. Just a hand up.