Withering loans – Hawaii Business – Starbulletin.com

starHawaii farmers find that loans are fewer, smaller and more difficult to obtain in this economic slump

By Allison Schaefers

POSTED: 01:30 a.m. HST, Aug 23, 2009

Wall Street is as far as you can get from the 8-acre Steelgrass Farm in Kauai where the main attraction is chocolate, but the trickle-down impacts have made for bittersweet returns.

"We just got turned down for a loan again," said Tony Lydgate, who helped his children, Emily and Will, purchase Steelgrass Farm in the 1990s. "Our revenues are in the low six figures, but we can’t even get a $20,000 line of credit."

The Lydgates, who have about half of all the cacao trees on Kauai, offer tours to supplement their farming income. Still, they need more capital to establish an agricultural cooperative that harvests cacao for commercial distribution.

"We can’t expand at the speed that we would like, too," Lydgate said.

The Lydgates are not alone. As the economy has slumped, more farmers in Hawaii and elsewhere have found that the crop of loans available to them has withered.