To Market To Market

Richard Ha writes:

The weather was beautiful Saturday morning, slightly breezy, no rain, and it was a nice day at the Kino‘ole Street Farmer’s Market.

Our neighbors at the next booth always have sweet papayas.

Rocky Freitas came by. Since our first annual Hamakua Springs tomato recipe contest last year, when he was a judge, HCC Chancellor Rockne Freitas has been a big fan of heirloom tomatoes. He told me he didn’t eat tomatoes before that. At the Farmer’s Market he’s always first in line and our biggest customer.

Note that Kapono, left, is 6 feet tall.

There was a talk on jatropha this week—its use for biodiesel, and its place as part of the solution to importing oil for transportation. We were told about a company working on cloning a high-yielding jatropha plant that is uniform in stature, so it lends itself to mechanical harvesting. They have plans to grow millions of jatropha plants. The speaker said Kamehameha Schools is planting 2,500 acres of jatropha plants in Ka’u. He said there are 130,000 acres of land on the Big Island suitable for jatropha cultivation.

Jatropha beans are picked by hand when they are ready, much like coffee.

I asked how much farmers would make, and he said that there are many steps along the way where farmers could be compensated. I offered this simple analysis to help him:

If oil is selling for $100 per barrel and there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, then a gallon is worth $2.38. There are approximately 8 pounds in a gallon, and therefore each pound of oil is worth 30 cents. If it takes three pounds of jatropha to make one pound of oil, the maximum a farmer can earn for the jatropha is 10 cents per pound. I told him farmers would not farm jatropha for that price.

He said that jatropha likely would not make enough money just as an oil. He said its usage as a byproduct, for plastics, etc., is key. I told him our market is too small to justify a byproduct production plant. I told him that I admired his entrepreneurial spirit and that I was not against his project, but that I just wondered if farmers would be motivated to grow jatropha for biodiesel. I don’t see it.

Last week, David Ikeda gave a class on simple hydroponic lettuce growing. Once planted, no more care is needed. This absolutely works. I can attest to it.

Lettuce in gallon jugs of water. Once it's setup, there's no need to replace or refill water.

More people are discovering the Kino‘ole Street Farmers Market. We had record sales this week and last. Since we started there, we have tripled our sales.

We’ve been focusing on heirloom tomatoes for the last several weeks and now lots of people are buying and enjoying them. Maybe they will buy them at KTA now, too. And we have found that people are very comfortable with our living lettuce, but it really is about freshness. When the lettuce is fresh and crisp, people buy it. When it is wilty, they don’t. We now know what our job is.