Can Urban Farming Solve Hawaii’s Food Crisis?
High-tech farming is costly and limited in what it can grow, but techniques could help Hawaii with its dependency on food imports.
By Brittany Lyte
Civil Beat
Sept 27, 2021
Excerpt:
In Hawaii, this new era of agriculture is already underway — and starting to grow.
In a 40-foot shipping container off Farrington Highway in Waipahu, Bee’s Greens Co. grows butterhead and romaine lettuce under LED bulbs. Plants are stacked on top of each other in this vertical hydroponic system, achieving the same yields as a 1.5-acre conventional farm.
On Lanai, a 2-acre, high-tech greenhouse farm by tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison’s Sensei Ag produced 35,000 pounds of produce in less than three months last year. In 2021, the company expects to harvest 500,000 pounds of food for statewide consumption, including Swiss chard, basil, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant, without a pinch of soil.
And by mid-2022, the Florida-based indoor farming company Kalera plans to open a 15,000-square-foot facility, roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool, in Ko Olina in West Oahu. The leafy greens grower’s partially automated vertical farm would be Hawaii’s largest, producing several million heads of lettuce per year, the company says.
The University of Hawaii Manoa’s Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences has identified agriculture systems that use technology to modify the natural environment to boost crop yields as a priority area for future curriculum expansion, according to Theodore Radovich, a professor of sustainable farming systems.
