Category: Vegtables

December 5, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

Chayote a healthful addition to garden

by Diana Duff Special To West Hawaii Today
Growing food is becoming increasingly appealing to Kona gardeners. When considering what to grow, we need to choose plants that grow and produce bountifully here. It also helps if their growth habit fits into our garden and their flavor fits into our personal palate preferences. Chayote squash can offer all this and more for many local gardeners.

Chayote is a vining member of the Curcubitaceae, or gourd, family. The vine can grow on the ground or onto any support, spreading as much as 20 feet from the roots. Chayote is a perennial tropical vegetable and a valuable food source that is cultivated today throughout the tropics. In addition to producing edible fruit nearly year round, chayote’s stems, tuberous roots, heart-shaped leaves and vining tendrils are also edible. Once the small, cream-colored flowers that appear beneath a leaf or branch are pollinated, they mature into the edible pear-shaped fruit.

Chayote is a native Mexican plant. It was an important staple in the diet of the Aztecs and its name is derived from the Aztec word chayotli. The Mayans ate the fruit as well as the starchy roots and added the stem shoots, as a green, to their bean dishes. Chayote remains an important ingredient in the Mexican diet today.

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November 28, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Globel Warming, Vegtables Post a Comment

An Almanac of Extreme Weather

THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.

My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.

He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.

In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours. The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map.

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November 17, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

State gets tougher on farm, fair taxes

A chaotic scene broke out last month at the Kailua Open Market when tax agents clamped down on so-called “cash economy” businesses, leading to cancellation of the 36th annual Mayor’s Craft and Country Fair Saturday and prompting state tax officials to meet with vendors this afternoon at Makiki Park.

The crackdown by the state Tax Department’s year-old Special Enforcement Unit comes as dozens of vendors and small businesses across the islands have begun holding holiday craft fairs in homes, parking lots and large halls. The tighter enforcement requires sellers to show proof of general excise tax licenses, keep records of sales and provide sales receipts to tax agents to comply with Hawaii law.

The city Parks Department Monday announced that the fair at the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall had been called off.

Randy Yasuhara, a recreation specialist for the department, said the decision was made because the state is more strictly enforcing laws on vendor sales, and that vendors without general excise tax licenses could be liable for fines.

Tax officials have been invited by city parks officials to speak to market vendors at a meeting today at Makiki Park, said state Tax Director Stanley Shiraki.

Sakhone and Griffin Twigg, owners of West Valley Farms in Waianae, were issued a $670 citation at the Kailua Open Market on Oct. 28, allegedly for failing to produce records of transactions for their produce sales that day.

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October 29, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

Farm owners face new charges

HONOLULU – The owners of Hawaii’s second-largest farm face new federal charges that they exploited dozens of Thai workers by lying about their wages and confining them to the farm.

A federal grand jury re-indicted brothers Alec and Mike Sou of Aloun Farms on charges that they lured the Thai workers to Hawaii with false promises of high wages, and then kept them working by threatening deportation and confiscating their visas.

The Sous initially reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors but then disputed some of the facts they had earlier acknowledged. Chief U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway last month rejected the deal, and the Sous instead pleaded not guilty.

The Sous would have faced up to five years in prison under that agreement.

Now, the Sous could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of the new charges handed down Wednesday.

Attorneys for the Sous said Thursday that they would plead not guilty today to all 12 counts.

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October 14, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

$196K returned to Aloun operators

A federal judge has ordered the return of $196,000 the operators of Aloun Farms had previously paid as restitution for 24 Thai workers they are accused of exploiting.

Brothers Alec and Mike Sou paid the money in August after they pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit forced labor in connection with the importation of 44 farm workers from Thailand.

The money was not distributed but held by the court. It was to be distributed to up to 24 workers at $8,000 each worker. At the time the Sous agreed to pay the restitution, the government had identified 21 workers as victims of human trafficking.

The $8,000 represented up to half of the upfront money the workers paid recruiters to get the farm jobs on Aloun Farms.

The Sous withdrew their guilty pleas last month and are scheduled to go to trial next month.

$196K returned to Aloun operators – Hawaii News – Staradvertiser.com

October 9, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

The Garden provides plenty at Common Ground

It’s an uncommon dining experience: you turn mauka off the highway in Kilauea, there are no advertisements, no string of cars looking for parking, no delivery trucks dropping off packaged food. No, it feels more like you have stumbled upon a 60-acre farm that happens to have a tranquil, open-air restaurant, where bananas and coconuts hang from the doors. A few feet beyond the tables are herb gardens. Beyond that is a massive garden, with rows and rows of vegetables. “You can sit down and look at where your food is coming from,” said Jay Sklar, chef and food-services director.

The Garden restaurant at Common Ground — a resource center for the community with many projects focused on sustainability — is leading the way to show what is possible for restaurants who embrace the “farm-to-fork” concept. When Common Ground — formerly Guava Kai Plantation — began the farming process over two years ago, the old guava trees, which were no longer able to produce fruit, were cut and chipped into a nitrogen-rich compost to make the soil healthy. They now continue to make their own compost with various materials on site, and mix it with oxygenated water in order to make a “tea” they spray on the crops. Sklar said they use no petro chemicals, and the practice of permaculture is used, meaning the landscaping is edible and plants are strategically placed in order to naturally benefit each other.

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October 3, 2010 Agricultural Equipment, General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

Amid mounting safety concerns, technology helps track food from farm to table

Recalls push more companies to adopt digital tools that can prevent or contain the harm caused by contaminated food.

By P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from San Jose — Inside a Silicon Valley company’s windowless vault, massive servers silently monitor millions of heads of lettuce, from the time they are plucked from the dirt to the moment the bagged salad is scanned at the grocery checkout counter.

That trail can be traced in seconds, thanks to tiny high-tech labels, software programs and hand-held hardware gear. Such tools make it easier for farmers to locate possible problems — a leaky fertilizer bin, an unexpected pathogen in the water, unwashed hands on a factory floor — and more quickly halt the spread of contaminated food.

This Dole Food Co. project and similar efforts being launched across the country represent a fundamental shift in the way that food is tracked from field to table. The change is slow but steady as a number of industry leaders and smaller players adopt these tools.

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September 29, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

In the Garden – The Cult of Garlic Cloves

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
Are you beguiled by pyramid schemes, but loath to lose a fortune? Deanna Stanchfield has an offer for you.
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Here is how it works: You send Ms. Stanchfield, 42, and her partner, Scott Jentink, 47, a nominal sum — say, $12. They mail you a half-dozen bulbs of garlic from their Swede Lake Farms and Global Garlic in Watertown, Minn., out past the golf course suburbs west of Minneapolis. They have the bulbs — 40,000 of them — curing in a hayloft, suspended from the rafters like bats in a cave.

If you bury each clove separately in October or November — think of them as seeds — you should be able to harvest 30 to 35 new garlic bulbs in July. Split those bulbs and plant the cloves next fall, and you will have 150 garlic bulbs by July of 2012. The following year will deliver 750 heads, and the summer after that, 3,750.

And the year after that? Now we’re getting into Bernard Madoff-style math. At this point, you can surely spare a few bulbs to start your neighbor’s garlic garden.

Still not sold? Six years ago, Mr. Jentink said, “we started with 14 pounds.” His planting this fall, he said, “will give us in theory, at least, a harvest of about 20,000 pounds.”

“All by hand,” Ms. Stanchfield added.

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September 21, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Vegtables Post a Comment

Editorial Observer – Hawaii Forgets Itself in an Ugly Human-Trafficking Case

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

This is a story of two farmers, Laotian immigrant brothers who grow vegetables in Hawaii. People love their onions, melons, Asian cabbage, herbs and sweet corn, and their Halloween pumpkin patch is a popular field trip for schoolchildren all over Oahu. They count local politicians and community leaders among their many friends, and run a charitable foundation.

Though they are relative newcomers, their adopted home is a state that honors its agricultural history, where most longtime locals are descendants of immigrant plantation workers. The brothers fit right in.

But they had an ugly secret. A captive work force: forty-four men, laborers from Thailand who were lured to Hawaii in 2004 with promises of good wages, housing and food. The workers sacrificed dearly to make the trip, mortgaging family land and homes to pay recruiters steep fees of up to $20,000 each.

According to a federal indictment, the workers’ passports were taken away. They were set up in cramped, substandard housing — some lived in a shipping container. Many saw their paychecks chiseled with deductions for food and expenses; some toiled in the fields for no net pay. Workers were told not to complain or be sent home, with no way to repay their unbearable debts.

The news broke last August. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice filed charges of forced labor and visa fraud. The farm owners agreed to plead guilty in December in Federal District Court to conspiring to commit forced labor. They admitted violating the rules of the H-2A guest worker program, telling the workers that their labor contracts were “just a piece of paper” used to deceive the federal government.

I wish I could say that at this point the case so shocked the Hawaiian public that people rushed to aid the immigrants, who reminded them so much of their parents and grandparents. That funds were raised and justice sought.

But that didn’t happen.

In an astounding display of amnesia and misplaced sympathy, Hawaii rallied around the defendants. After entering their plea deal, the farmers, Michael and Alec Sou of Aloun Farms, orchestrated an outpouring of letters begging the judge for leniency at sentencing. Business leaders, community activists, politicians — even two former governors, Benjamin Cayetano and John Waihee, and top executives at First Hawaiian Bank — joined a parade attesting to the brothers’ goodness.

The men were paragons of diversified agriculture and wise land use, the letter writers said. They had special vegetable knowledge that nobody else had, and were holding the line against genetically modified crops. If they went to prison, evil developers would pave their farmland. Think of the “trickle down impact,” one woman implored the judge. Besides, their produce was delicious.

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