Kapaa Rotary - Vocational Service - KCC Food & Agriculture Program

As the greenest Rotary club on Kauai — through our annual green awards program and our zero waste efforts at Taste of Hawaii — The Rotary Club of Kapa`a is pleased to support and contribute to another kind of green effort that is utterly important to our island of Kauai — food sustainability.

On January 27, 2010, we warmly welcomed Kauai Community College Chancellor Helen Cox and Glenn Hontz, director of the Food & Agriculture Career Pathways Program in the Office of Continuing Education & Training at KCC, as we donate $900 to the program. The purpose of the program is to provide interested Kauaians with the training and technical assistance needed to support the expansion of local food production leading to the development of an island-based sustainable system of food self-sufficiency.

According to Hontz, the major goals of the program are to provide the training and technical assistance to the people of Kauai who want to grow their own food and ultimately develop an island-based, sustainable system of food self sufficiency suitable for Kauai — in the areas of home gardening, community gardening and small commercial farming.

The program consists of six interactive, hands-on series of courses designed to evolve as new interests, needs and discoveries evolve:

The Entrepreneurship Series provides the basic business skills needed to succeed in the food industry and other enterprises essential for a prosperous and sustainable rural economy.

· The Growing Food Seminar Series offers ongoing, practical experience in the college’s Campus Garden, as well as other satellite training sites, and covers a broad array of topics, including: methods of organic gardening and farming, soil testing, soil remediation and plant nutrition management, composting, cover-cropping, pest and disease management, harvesting and marketing, and business models for financial success.

· Successful Gardening gives home and community gardeners practical training in the basic skills and knowledge needed to grow food in the semi-tropical environment of Kauai — while they improve their diets and reduce their grocery bills.

· The college sponsors a growing network of Satellite Training Sites at various locations such as privately owned farms, neighborhood churches, public and private schools, home-based sites, county-owned neighborhood centers, and on property leased by non-profit organizations.

· Aquaculture (fish farming) is another area of training that is planned to be held on campus. The focus will be to provide training in order to create a well rounded locally grown food supply, through the inclusion of animal-based protein, by teaching people how to raise chickens, goats and fish.

· The program also offers opportunities for Independent Study and Research for candidates with special interests in the field of food and agriculture

“We’re happy to be able to support such a worthwhile,” said club President Rodney Pascua, one of the program’s initial participants. In addition to our donation, the program is supported by a variety of sources including: government, foundations, public participation, tuition, and product sales.

The significant benefits of the Food & Agriculture Career Pathways Program are both immediate and long-term. “These programs are meeting a significant need in the movement toward food sustainability and self-sufficiency for Kauai,” said Hontz, who also notes that these community-based local efforts can go a long way to reverse the dependence on imported foods. A recent study by the University of Hawaii Research Office, found that the entire State of Hawaii produces only 4.4 to 5.8 percent of its food supply. “The study concludes that if we doubled our production of local food, we would replace $120 million in imports and creating more than 3,000 jobs,” explained Hontz. The study also predicts that farm-related business income would increase by about $64 million.

“And as more and more people are trained — 250 people to date — there is a multiplier effect as they train their friends and family,” Hontz said, explaining that increasing the production and consumption of locally grown food also contributes to improvements in the health of our island residents.”

According to Hontz, “Our dependence on imported food contributes to increasing levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes among the local population. Additionally, the common practices employed by the major food production corporations that ship food to our island are expediting the decline of the planet’s environment. When we buy such food, we are voting with our dollars for the continued pollution of the world’s water, soil and air.”