There’s not much to see at the moment: a vast expanse of old sugar cane fields on the edge of downtown Hilo, next to a cemetery.
But if the largest food bank on the island of Hawaii is successful, in years to come the nearly 25-acre property it purchased last year will play a significant role in the island’s food security. .
Leaders of The Food Basket began scouting for farmland with room for a food processing center and a large community distribution warehouse, after witnessing the surge in the number of people needing food in Hawaii during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The food bank was also struggling with supply chain issues and felt that the surest path to having enough food for everyone on the island might be for the non-profit organization to start to grow their own food, said executive director Kristin Frost Albrecht.
“It’s our best effort to eradicate hunger, which is our mission,” said Frost Albrecht.
The Food Basket is one of many nonprofit groups in Hawaii taking new approaches to strengthening local food production and addressing food accessibility challenges.
The Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center is looking for land to start a “seed to distribution” agriculture center. Malama Kauai is tackling food shortages on the island by finding ways to help chicken and fruit farmers grow their businesses. Hawaii Good Food Alliance is working with the state Department of Health to develop a program for farmers’ markets to accept WIC, a federal program that helps pregnant women.
These groups were all working on local food production issues before the pandemic, but there is new energy and a sense of collaboration among many nonprofits, Frost Albrecht said.
“There’s this urgency – we all feel it,” Frost Albrecht said, adding that nonprofits can often be more nimble than government in implementing new solutions. “We need to act.”
Major projects underway
The food basket has been developing its plans for the Hilo property over the past year as part of a Hawaii County-led coalition working on an agricultural development plan for the island.
The coalition was competing for a major federal grant that would have funneled up to $100 million to various projects, including The Food Basket’s agricultural innovation center. Although the county did not end up winning the grant, the food basket indicates that it is continuing with its plans.
The food basket plan is to address food insecurity on the island by increasing food production, as well as improving processing and distribution for small and medium-sized farmers.
The nonprofit’s grant application says the Hawaii Ulu Cooperative would be the property’s anchor tenant, and the space would include a large-scale dehydration system to turn native crops into flour and other processed products.
The food cart was originally looking for a 3 acre plot but quickly realized they needed more land to accommodate their plans.
“It really became clear that we needed a bigger plot to produce more food,” said Frost Albrecht, pointing out how unreliable the food supply chain was during the pandemic. “What we’re going through right now hits us so hard.”
Frost Albrecht said the nonprofit needed to raise about $75 million to complete the first major phase of its project, which would include clearing 16 acres of land for agriculture, building a food center community and a food bank, and the construction of a food innovation center where local producers could transform their products into value-added products.
Frost Albrecht said his team is working to secure other federal funding, as well as apply for grants and campaign capital. At this point, the first thing the food basket will be able to do is clear the land and incentivize producers to grow food.
The Food Basket does not plan to hire farmers directly. Rather, the goal is to establish small farmers on the land and be able to purchase from them for distribution through the various food bank programs.
One of the goals of the grant application was to expand its DA BOX CSA program from 400 customers per week to 1,000. The program aggregates fruits and vegetables from various local growers for weekly pickup by local consumers. Low-income residents who use food stamps to purchase DA BOX can double their funds, making it a program that helps fight hunger while supporting local producers.
Healthy food for all
Waianae Comp has been growing food on the grounds of its health center for years, said Alicia Higa, director of community health and wellness promotion. Gardeners tend to ulu, avocado, mango and citrus trees – in addition to traditional Hawaiian medicinal plants.
Food grown by the health center is just a small part of efforts to improve food access on the Waianae Coast, including food pantries and weekly food distribution. The center also has a food-as-medicine program, where doctors prescribe fruits and vegetables to patients with chronic nutrition-related illnesses.
To keep up with all of these efforts to improve access to food, the health center is developing plans to expand its food-growing capabilities, through what it calls a “seed to delivery” campus.
The campus – which Waianae Comp is still working to secure land for – would have edible landscaping throughout, a food warehouse, a certified classroom kitchen where community members could learn to cook with fresh grown foods on the Waianae Coast and an incubator kitchen space where community members and growers could get support to create food products to market, Higa said.
Waianae Comp is also working to develop a gleaning program for small producers. There are a number of kupuna in the area who have mature fruit trees and would like to donate food but need help harvesting it, Higa said.
It will take a lot of creative thinking and nimble experimentation to truly bridge the gap between need and production in the state, several nonprofit leaders said.
Both The Food Basket and Waianae Comp are members of the Hawaii Good Food Alliance, a group that gained nonprofit status at the start of the pandemic.
When tourism came to a halt in 2020, the Alliance was able to use federal funds to help food centers and food banks purchase local produce to distribute to local residents in need.
“We want everyone in Hawaii to have equal access to fresh, local, healthy food,” said Harmonee Williams, executive director of the Alliance.
Now that tourists have returned in full force and many farmers have resumed supplying hotels and restaurants, it is clear that there is a gap between the demand for local food and what is produced.
“What we are realizing is that there is not enough food – or the type of food that we have a high demand for on the island,” said Megan Fox of Malama Kauai, an organization at nonprofit focused on increasing food production on Kauai.
For example, Fox said, the nonprofit identified a shortage of local eggs on Kauai.
Malama Kauai therefore obtained a grant for a three-year program to help farmers with education and resources to start egg farms. This year, the nonprofit helped launch 17 new minority-owned egg farms on the island, Fox said.
Now, Malama Kauai buys eggs from these farmers to distribute through the nonprofit organization’s various programs. The new egg farms have the capacity to produce 25,000 egg cartons per year.
The nonprofit is now looking to do the same with the island’s fruit and vegetable growers, targeting specific produce in high demand on Kauai.
By doing market research and providing business training, Fox said the nonprofit is able to help remove the risk of innovation at the farmer level.
“It’s an amazing way to be able to strengthen our food security,” Fox said.
As The Food Basket moves forward with plans for his Hilo land, Frost Albrecht is in frequent communication with Malama Kauai and the other members of the Good Food Alliance.
“We share plans. We share ideas on infrastructure,” said Frost Albrecht. “There is a way to speed up (food security). It’s just that we have to do it collaboratively.
“cultivated hawaiiis funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Ulupono Fund, and the Frost Family Foundation.
