Back To The Future

Aloha here it is the end of April, since our last event in which we had the showing of King Corn with having the fortune of Chuck Walters and Ian Cheney here, weve been working on developing our next conference on "Body and Soil Health". Recently we were at Hookipa for Earth Day and in Hana for the Taro Festival. At the taro festival we set up selling produce from 18 of our local farmers representing Maui County the Farm Bureau. Being an officer of the board of our local Maui chapter while Irene coordinates the special events I was there to support the running of the booth and also to promote what we are doing and envisioning with Ma'a.
One of the directions that we are exploring in order to promote soil building practices is the development of a equipment co-op,in the building of our soils.
Working on the State Organic Committee has brought that to the forefront in developing protocols through the procurement of equipment supporting our farms the best way we know how that is infrastructural, with practices that lower our energy inputs while raising our yields. Having the Rodale institute in our corner (Dr. Paul Hepperly the research manager is speaking at this years event) with their three decades of research and development around complete farming systems which offer a way to farm without the use of kill things while lowering the energy inputs speaks to the rebuilding of our agricultural system here in Hawaii. Its very exciting to know what we as biological farmers know to be true in a biological system is in fact attainable as a small farmer, through the use of natural protocols. Thus making this years conference an opportunity to build an important bridge between the intellectual and the practical applications of feeding our selfs while stewarding our environment.