Month: March 2010

March 10, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Maui Gold Pineapple Post a Comment

Maui Land & Pineapple loses $30.4M amid restructuring – Starbulletin

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Maui Land & Pineapple Co., which ceased its pineapple operations late last year, reported a narrower loss in 2009’s final quarter than the same period in 2008.

The company posted a loss of $30.4 million, or $3.76 a share, compared with $70.6 million, or $8.86 a share, a year earlier.

For the full year the company lost $123.3 million, or $15.33 a share, versus a loss of $79.4 million, or $9.98 a share, in 2008.

The annual figure includes a $22.8 million loss due to the sale of the agricultural segment’s assets, employee severance and cancellation of contracts.

In November the company discontinued its 97-year-old pineapple operations, resulting in a 45 percent reduction in work force. Since then, Haliimaile Pineapple Co. started pineapple operations and bought some of its operating equipment and supplies for about $680,000.

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March 10, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Maui Gold Pineapple Post a Comment

ML&P ends ’09 with $123.3M in losses – The Maui News

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Kapalua resort bulk of company business in the fourth quarter

A much-shrunken Maui Land & Pineapple Co. finished 2009 losing $123.3 million, equivalent to $15.33 a share.

The year before, it had lost $79.4 million, or $9.98 a share.

With Maui Pineapple Co. gone and the Community Development segment almost at a standstill, in the fourth quarter the company business was mostly Kapalua resort.

The resort had revenue of $6.8 million, down from $8.5 million in the last quarter of 2008, reflecting the decline in the visitor industry. Its operating loss was $4,672,000, down from $6,621,000 the year before.

For the year, Kapalua had revenue of almost $30 million and losses of $16.1 million. Thus the resort accounted for about three-fifths of the company’s total operating revenues in 2009 of $50 million, and about 13 percent of losses.

Pineapple had continued at a low level through the end of the year, and it continued to pile up losses. The loss from discontinued operations of $24.7 million accounted for four-fifths of the $30.3 million in losses in the fourth quarter.

Since then, ML&P has sold much of its Maui Pine assets to Haliimaile Pineapple Co., run by former employees, who are attempting to revive pine cultivation, although with a market to be limited almost entirely to the islands.

Of all the losses during the year, pine made up $11 of the $15.33 per share.

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March 10, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Maui Gold Pineapple Post a Comment

Aloha, Pine – Maui Magazine – March-April 2010 – Maui, Hawaii

When Maui Land & Pineapple Company stopped planting fruit last December, it looked like the end of an era—and an island way of life.

Story by Jill Engledow

CLICK HERE for a larger image of the Desecration
Pineapple was plentiful when I passed through Kahului Airport in mid-December. A Hawaiian-style Santa beckoned from colorful boxes stacked outside shops, inviting passersby to pick up some Maui Gold for the trip home. So it was a bit of a shock when, returning to Maui just after Christmas, I hit the farmers’ market and found no pineapple on display. Only days earlier, Maui Land & Pineapple Company had ceased its harvest. Though in fact pineapple was still available in some stores, its absence from the farmers’ market was a sad reminder that a crop was disappearing. Suddenly the future of agriculture on Maui looked a lot less sweet.

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It’s hard to imagine Maui without pineapple: the orderly silver-green rows of spiky tops stretched across acres, the dusty laborers in sunny fields, the luscious golden fruit. How many kids paid for college by working summers in the cannery? How many generations earned a decent living growing pine, and climbed from immigrant beginnings to middle class?

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March 9, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Golden Gate [X]press : Researchers abuzz for wasps as pesticides

In the biology department, an assistant professor sits in front of a continuous screen of green letters reminiscent of scenes from "The Matrix."

He is analyzing the gene sequences of wasps –wasps that are being used as an alternative to chemical pest controls in agriculture.

The wasp, Nasonia vitripennis, is being used as a form of chemical-free pest control "whose larvae parasitize various life stages of other arthropods such as insects, ticks and mites," according to a paper published Jan. 15 in "Science."

"In the 1950s, they didn’t know about these wasps, so they used chemicals," Christopher Smith, an SF State associate professor on the project, said. "Now, agriculture chemicals sterilize water systems and kill arthropods. Even household pesticides are a big problem –they reduce biodiversity in the ecosystem."

Parasitoids like the wasp are used nationally and are bred to attack pests that negatively affect agricultural crops.

"It’s where the frontier of science is at right now. When I was in grad school, there were no genomes," Smith said.

Smith is one of a team of researchers contributing to a larger study on the wasps. p>

His job is to receive the insect’s genome, then sequence and analyze the DNA he gets on the computer.

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March 9, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

South Africa protects endangered cycads

Beautiful plants from the time of the dinosaurs now threatened by thieves.

By Erin Conway-Smith — Special to GlobalPost

Published: March 9, 2010 07:06 ET

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The thieves knew exactly what they were looking for when they broke into the Durban Botanic Gardens on a Saturday night. They smashed open the lock on a gate, drove past where security guards should have been patrolling and headed straight for some of the rarest varieties of cycads in the world.

They roughly but selectively dug up 20 of the most highly endangered plants of a collection of 150, a haul worth $65,000, loaded them into their vehicle and rolled out.

It was a brazen theft but not at all uncommon in South Africa, where demand from collectors at home, in the United States and Asia is behind the widespread plundering of rare cycad varieties.

Cycads are the oldest seedling plants on earth, with fossil records dating them to before the time of the dinosaurs. During the Jurassic period they were spread across the earth, but today they are found only in diminishing numbers in certain tropical and subtropical areas of the world.

Now, in a high-tech bid to fight the cycad smugglers, scientists at the University of Johannesburg have launched a DNA barcoding project that aims to create a database of cycad species. The project could eventually help police and customs officials to identify specimens being stolen and trafficked across borders, with the hope of deterring crimes like the one in Durban late last year.

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March 7, 2010 General Ag News and Notes, Maui Gold Pineapple Post a Comment

Pineapple Fields are being plowed under

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Dispite the heroic efforts of Haliimaile Pineapple to resurrect the industry after Maui Land and Pineapple abandoned stewardship if their lands and their responsibility for their former employees hundreds of acres of Pineapple have been plowed under in Haiku Maui.

Despite the trauma individual pineapple plants are attempting to grow. CLICK HERE for larger image.

CLICK HERE for a larger version of this image and snapshots of verdent Haiku pineapple fields before the desecration.
March 6, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Hawaii and Related Agriculture Daily Charts for the week ending 03-05-2010

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The annual charts have bee updated. CLICK HERE to view.

The 360 day comparative price, line and histogram charts, page has been updated also. CLICK HERE to view.

Maui Land and Pineapple (MLP) 03-05-2010
Maui Land and Pineapple (MLP)

Whole Food Markets (WFMI) 03-05-2010
Whole Food Markets (WFMI)

Calavo Growers (CVGW) 03-05-2010
Calavo Growers (CVGW)

Alexander and Baldwin (ALEX) 03-05-2010
alexweek030510

Monsanto (MON) 03-05-2010
Monsanto (MON)

Syngenta (SYT) 03-05-2010
Syngenta (SYT)

DUPONT E I DE NEM (DD) 03-05-2010
Syngenta (SYT)

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March 6, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Fruits of labor – Hawaii News – Starbulletin.com

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Statutes on overhanging trees are unclear, but experts say the fruit belongs to the tree’s owner, not his neighbors

By June Watanabe

QUESTION: A neighbor’s fruit tree canopy extends significantly into our yard and creates an abundance of work and green waste for us to handle. Often more of the canopy is overhanging our yard (and other neighbors’) than the trunk owner’s yard. For more than 20 years, the tree owner concurred that the neighbors owned the fruit over their yards. But the owner recently sold, and the new owner seems to feel differently. Any "right of way" or "common law" created by long-term previous activity? Who is entitled to the fruit that grows over onto our yard? Considering we have to do the cleanup, it would seem that we should be entitled to some, if not all, of the fruit.

ANSWER: While the prevailing law in Hawaii, and elsewhere, is that if a neighbor’s tree overhangs into your yard, you have the right to trim the tree up to the property line, there is nothing specifically addressing ownership of any overhanging fruit.

At least nothing that we could uncover.

However, according to a national authority on neighbor law, the fruit belongs to the owner of the tree, no matter how much the tree overhangs onto your property.

But in Hawaii, where neighbors tend to share any bounty of fruit, the question really hasn’t been an issue. It actually hasn’t been a matter of law in other states, as well.

While many disputes involving a neighbor’s tree have been mediated, "we’ve never had one where one has accused the other of stealing their fruit," said Tracy Wiltgen, executive director of the Mediation Center of the Pacific. The organization formerly was called the Neighborhood Justice Center.

She said she did not know of any law that dealt with that subject.

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