Part 4a: Cultivating Community to Build Regenerative, Local Food Systems
Ok, But What Can I Do? Information and Inspiration towards Nature-Based Land Stewardship Perspectives and Practices
The people we’ll hear from today will show us a wide array of niche opportunities to see ourselves in their shoes, as land stewards, so that we might take up the work of land stewardship.
Our first discussion is going to be about leveraging networks to build regenerative, local food systems.
Anne: Rose, Can you tell us a bit about who you are and the organization you support?
Rose: I am a volunteer/pro-bono/sometimes paid contractor for Malama Kauai. Malama Kauai is a non-profit organization that focuses on advocating and educating — driving action toward a sustainable Kauai (Hawaii). They partner with the government, other NGOs, farmers, and consumers to try to increase the quality of the food that’s grown in Kauai, and the quality of the food that’s consumed in Kauai — driving everyone to be hyper-local.
Anne: As a soil nerd, hyper-local food systems are at the top of my mind. Being a hyper-local consumer can drastically cut your emissions footprint. Imagine the difference between an avocado that is grown in your backyard, versus a pear that is grown halfway across the world, and then packaged and shipped to the grocery, where you purchase it. There’s a lot of inefficiency there. And the money doesn’t even go back into your local communities with that pear. Especially living on an island in the middle of the ocean, it seems that all imported food would have an enormous carbon footprint.
Can you share a bit about the local food system on Kauai?
Rose: We’re doing a survey of the farmers right now. We see that a lot of them are what we call “uncertified organic” and some are “certified organic” -- so there are a lot of protocols that you need to follow to be “certified organic”. If I was to estimate it, I’d say we’ve probably split into thirds -- one-third of traditional agriculture with chemicals, one-third non-certified organic or permaculture, and one-third that are certified organic.
Right now 80-90% of our food is imported from off the island, and only 10-20% is produced on the island. Of that 10-20% currently we don’t have any animal processing facilities on the island. So our cattle get put on a boat, taken to the west coast of the US, finished on grain, and then are processed and sent back to be sold, and with branding as “Kauai Raised Beef”. There’s federal money that got distributed to the state, which got distributed down to the county and needs to be spent by the end of the year, to start producing grain — to finish the cattle for the grain-finished beef. (It’s quite popular that even if the cows are grass-fed, they’re grain-finished to get more marbling — it’s desired by a lot of customer taste.) So we’re going to be growing the grain here, and then building some meat processing stations. I don’t know if those will be mobile stations or if they’ll be at fixed points, but we’re going to make a significant effort to try to keep those animals on the island and process them locally. So that’s a step in the right direction.
We’re also trying to motivate government organizations, for example, the Department of Education and the local prison, to start buying more local food and providing that through their feeding program. So the Department of Education, right now, has almost 100% of its food imported. They represent a significant portion of the amount of food that’s consumed on the island — so if we could get them to convert to being all local, or even just 70%, that would be a significant change. All of this is driven by cost. We also have Costco on the island, and 2% of what Costco sells is a local product - some granola - but I don’t believe any of their produce is local.
Anne: The organization seems to be aiming for powerful leverage points to change the food system on the island.
What program are you currently supporting?
Rose: Kauai currently has one food hub that our organization helped get funding for and is now run by a different non-profit. The project I’m working on is to create the island’s second food hub. Our vision is to have 5 or 6 of them around the island so that they’re all driving distance from producers. The current hub we’re working on is in a food desert. The nearest grocery store is over 10 miles away, and this would be a place then, where people could come and get food locally, and then all of the food that we have would be locally produced.
Anne: This sounds like a fantastic way to build a hyper-local food system, leveraging a webbed network of producers and consumers, so that everyone can have access to local food and the market for local food. It drastically decreases the schlepping that needs to be done and increases the economic drivers that support the island's food markets.
What challenges are you coming across in this work?
Rose: You have to work incrementally with the resources you have. It is incredibly constrained fiscally. It isn’t that there aren’t people to do it — there isn’t the funding to execute the project to put in place a sustainable business model. So the level of capital investment that needs to happen upfront to make it happen — that’s just not there. If we had that, we could stand these up everywhere in a year — start to finish — we could have them all in place, but there’s no money to do it.
Anne: Does your passion for local food systems affect the way that you eat?
Rose: I try to live my life very consciously and mindfully. The majority of the food that I eat is locally produced. The other food that I have is all food that I’ve inherited from people who have given it to me — like, for example, someone was in a vacation rental and they left a bunch of pasta sauce, so I inherited some pasta sauce. I will eat it because it was free food, but it's not local. But what should I do? Should I put it in a landfill? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. I try to eat locally.
I pretty much am vegan, but I try to be a gracious vegan. So if I am dining at someone’s home, and they have cooked nothing vegan, I’m not going to say I can’t eat. I’m going to go graciously eat and enjoy it — and I would never want an animal to have died in vain. If the choice is to throw it away or to eat it and honor it, I’ll eat it and honor it.
Anne: Your diet consists of local, available food, and you honor the life within that food. The work that you do seems to show reciprocity with the earth for the foods that you consume.
How much impact do you think the organization you volunteer with has on the island?
Rose: I think the work we do has a significant impact on the island. Since COVID-19, we pivoted and went into emergency response mode — and it’s not the first time we’ve done that. We do it after natural disasters and flood events, and things like that, too. We developed the Kauai Local Food Connector. It’s an online information hub that lists all the farmer’s markets, all the grocery stores that carry local produce, lists of resources for farmers, and we feature all the farmers there with their contact information, and it’s all geographically based so that people can find access to healthy local food. We promote that significantly on social media. We’ve had farmers give us feedback that it really helped them, that they’re still getting calls from it, and that even though farmer’s markets are back, people are saying “I found them on the website”. That really helped to sustain them through that period.
The other significant thing that we did was to secure some private as well as some federal funding to do CSA bags. So we distributed 18,000 bags of produce — some of them had goat cheese in it as well — through drive-through and home delivery models. We had it set up as a farm-to-school program, where families could come and drive through and get a bag. We had those one day a week at five different locations around the island. Monday we’d start on the north side, then by Friday, we were on the west side. And those farmers all got paid for that. So they were being paid a fair wage for that food. It was $40,000 a week (1,000 bags) -- so 18 weeks x $40,000 = $720,000 went into the hands of farmers. Especially at a time when farmer’s markets were not around. And all those families got healthy food, they got it for free, and we tried to feature a real variety of products — some of them were traditional Hawaiian foods, like breadfruit and taro, which some families (even Hawaiian families) did not know what to do with. So we also spun up blogs that had recipes for all of these foods, and that’s all on our website. So anyone can come and get those recipes and now buy those foods at local farmer’s markets. We were really trying to engage people’s tastes, you know -- instead of eating something that’s highly processed — to get them to start to learn that you can do fun things with bananas and kale, microgreens, and things like that.
We also provided $220,000 in direct grant support to farmers to help them through. We helped deliver technical assistance — we helped them apply for grants in addition to the grants that we directly gave to them. We help them with translation services and accounting. I think our impact has been significant.
Anne: The organization was able to adapt to changing conditions and provide community connection during a time when they were deeply disconnected due to the COVID-19 lockdown.
Do you have any advice for new land stewards?
Rose: Get involved with an organization. Everybody’s got a skill to share, whether they know how to code a website or do marketing. Most of the work that we do is not actually direct land stewardship. We’re supporting the people who do the direct land stewardship, but we’re giving them marketing resources, we’re creating logos for them, we’re helping them to become compliant with whatever programs the government sets up that they need to be compliant with in order to be eligible for grants. There’s a tremendous amount of things that you can do if you’re just passionate about it.
Anne: Thank you so much, Rose for joining us today. The work that Malama Kauai is doing is to reshuffle the connections within the food system by building more stable and community-focused access to a local customer base is very inspiring. This drastically limits the cost, resources, and greenhouse gas emissions required to produce, transport, sell, and consume food on the island. Food hubs can provide washing, and packing facilities, local support services, and opportunities to build collaborative relationships between farmers and the community.
This is part 4a of the manuscript I drafted for the final project of my Biomimicry master’s degree. I feel it could help you to understand the impact that each of us can have on our hyper-local ecosystems as we step toward stewardship practices that heal the soil.
— Anne LaForti —
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