It is likely that anyone interested in, or involved in, growing fruit in Hawaii has heard the name of Ken Love from the Big Island of Hawaii. In this episode we speak with Ken about how he became the local pundit on tropical fruit, some thoughts on the most profitable fruits to grow and why, the importance of connecting with local chefs, Hawaii Master Food Preservers, and other musings from this local icon.
Brought to you by University of Hawaii College of Tropical Ag. and Human Resources (CTAHR), and the Seeds of Well-being (SOW) Project. This podcast is supported by the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hawaii Department of Agriculture.
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It is likely that anyone interested in, or involved in, growing fruit in Hawaii has heard the name of Ken Love from the Big Island of Hawaii. In this episode we speak with Ken about how he became the local pundit on tropical fruit, some thoughts on the most profitable fruits to grow and why, the importance of connecting with local chefs, Hawaii Master Food Preservers, and other musings from this local icon.
Brought to you by University of Hawaii College of Tropical Ag. and Human Resources (CTAHR), and the Seeds of Well-being (SOW) Project. This podcast is supported by the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hawaii Department of Agriculture.
Resources:
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The views, information or opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, our funders, or any of the organizations affiliated with this project Welcome to a Seeds of Wellbeing"Experts in the Field" podcast featuring people working in their fields of expertise to provide support for agriculture producers in Hawaii, in the United States and in some cases around the world. These podcasts were made possible by a grant from the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, also known as CTAHR, And the Seeds of Wellbeing or SOW project, and is supported by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. Aloha! We're here with, on Seeds of Wellbeing podcast and talking to Ken Love, who's the Executive Director of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers, and Hawaii Master Food Preservers. Tropical Fruit Growers has a membership of about 2000 or more people and a Facebook group which was started in 2009 that now has 22.6K members and all over the world. And I think Ken's also been involved in 33 years of annual conferences related to tropical fruit that have been held in Hawaii, and is the owner of Love Family Farms in Captain Cook, which is near Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. So welcome Ken, thanks for coming on the show.
Ken Love:Oh no, no problem.
Jim:It is likely that anyone interested in or involved in growing fruit in Hawaii has heard the name of Ken Love from the Big Island of Hawaii. In this episode, we speak with Ken about how he became the local pundit on tropical fruit, some thoughts on the most profitable fruits to grow and why, the importance of connecting with local chefs, the Hawaii Master Fruit Preservers program, and other musings from this local icon.
Ken Love:I keep hearing that about being the owner of Love Family Farms, but I think it's much more. It's grown out of being a personal farm. Were, I kind of view us as the mother repository where Hawaii tropical fruit growers has two acres on every island, including Lanai, and we feed germ plasm into those locations, in order for our membership to be able to get plant material and you know and develop economically beneficial crops. And the people ask me all the time, "Well what's your job?" and I geez, I gotta scratch my beard and go I'm not 100% sure. I try to help farmers make money, you know, I mean, and, and become more sustainable. And that's usually through germplasm and or choices or market development. I mean, when we were talking before you had mentioned about you know, where we where we go from here and it's, new farmers have choices, you know. There's a lot of new farmer grant money and keep pushing people to do this, that and the other thing. Why UH picks the most labor intensive crops to promote is just absolutely beyond me and absolutely absurd. If you look at the USDA Agricultural Statistics Service, I mean, I'm not going to grow coffee or mac nuts or cacao anymore. I mean, it's,you go through all the processes of fermentation and, and picking things by hand, you know, other than oranges. We import 22 million pounds of oranges. It's not, I just picked the orange off the tree, put them in the box and send the box to the wholesaler. It's a whole lot easier than having to pick stuff, ferment it, wash it, dry it, you know, process it, husk it, peel it, you know. Just pick the oranges and send them out.
Jim:could sell well just on the islands in Hawaii or?
Ken Love:Yeah, absolutely. We started with Chef Paul at our culinary school, which is now Palmanui, but it just used to be what you know, West Hawaii Community College. Chef Paul Heerlein had the students utilize, we had a 12 Trees project in ʻ05 I think it was. And to make a long story short, the students were required to utilize a locally grown tropical fruit in each public luncheon two days, three days a week. Those students who are now chefs in various restaurants and hotels around the State remember that and now they're buying more of those locally grown tropical fruit. So we've seen that progression of that first education from you know, almost almost, what 20 years ago, I think ʻ05 to ʻ10, yeah so almost 20 years ago, where it's really made quite a difference and its growers have been able to increase the marketable crop. I've done the same thing by providing material to grocery stores like Choice Mart in Captain Cook. I like to use things that are close to me because I don't like to drive that much. So we used Choice Mart in Captain Cook and they were test marketing a lot of the fruit I mean that we did. Even in terms of finding you know, price point. I mean we can base something on an accurate cost of production which, if I had one pet peeve, itʻs that UH never replaced Dr. Kent Fleming for teaching costs of production to farmers. And there's, the positions aren't here or they don't hold and so there has to be somebody to teach growers cost of production. When I go, it's no fun for me to go to farmers markets when I see 10 tangerines for $1, you know? Six Meyer lemons for $1? It costs you 27 cents to produce one of them. It's not real sustainable when you grow six, sell them at six for $1.
Jim:Well if it helps I know GoFarm is actually pushing cost of production in there AgXcel quite a bit and it's, it's a lot of work but it it opens, it's eye opening, right?
Ken Love:Yep. No, exactly goFarms, Farmlink and Mao are all, all get it, you know. I mean, these are great groups that just get it and get what it takes to to be able to help small farmers become sustainable.
Jim:Yep. Well tell me about. Tell us about how Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers started and maybe the more recent development and creation of Hawaii Master Food Preservers. Just give us some of the history is, like how did you get to Hawaii and why the Big Island and what give us a little bit of your journey and the founding of those outfits.
Ken Love:Yeah, I got sent here in, this was ʻ81 or something or ʻ82. I was with Associated Press and I got sent here to photograph a number of things on different islands and that was the morning the volcano blew off and it was always kind of a dream. In fact, if you looked at the recent eruption from about three months ago the New York Times couldn't get the picture in time of the eruption from three, four, what was it a month ago or so? I can't I can't remember exactly. But they used my picture from 1983 and said what it was. I'd been there. My name was in The New York Times you know under the photo ref you know, photo by Ken love Associated Press, and it was from 1983. But I, people didn't see the date so I was getting all these phone calls and it was it was it was pretty funny anyway. So I got here to do that kind of stuff and went over to Kona and just sort of got hooked on that. Came back in that November to photograph the Kona Coffee Festival and really got hooked on it and said that I'm going to stay here. And it was number of years before we got here, but I bought a farm long before we moved.
Jim:Was that a coffee farm?
Ken Love:Yeah, coffee, but actually we started with 26 acres with my partner, Mr. Takashiva, and then went down to, he sold off his 16 and then I had my 10, which I eventually sold off, and now I'm down to two. The older I get, the smaller the farm gets so I'll be in a little condo in a year or two <laughs>. Now I've got two acres with 300 species on it now. And this provides that germ plasm again, so that we have all these unusual cultivars and varieties of tropical fruit in order to clone it and send it to fruit growers. For example, we have 250 types of figs right now. About 10 types of oranges. I can't wait maybe six, eight types of durian. There really hasn't been a lot of research of what elevation, what microclimates, what type of soils are required for specific things. So all we can do is continue to work to, to get that information. And to be able to provide different things to growers. We'll try these three types of oranges see what works best for you.
Jim:And is that is that data mostly available? Are they mostly available through your Facebook or through that being a member? Or what's the best way to access that data?
Ken Love:Being involved with with the Fruit Growers, and we have chapters and chapter presidents on each island. All that information is on htfg.org. So Hawaii tropical fruit growers org
Jim:And what's what caused you to launch that formerly, HTFG?
Ken Love:Well, I didn't I wasn't involved. That was done
Jim:Nice, and membership is open to anyone, or any certain in 1989. And it was I don't know how many 14-15 members at that at that time. And I got involved I think in 1995-96. And said, well, it could be a lot more than this. And I I kind of had a problem with the way things were done in Hilo where the organization was run out of because they would get federal money to promote the crops in Hawaii, which was usually lychee and rambutan and things we didn't really grow that much of in Kona. Like why aren't you promoting the mangoes and avocados, things that we grow here? Well wasn't they didn't grow them so they didn't promote them. So I got involved in the organization and things changed after that and all of a sudden we have 2000 members on on every island. And we try to be equitable and we try to help small backyard growers as well as larger commercial growers. I mean it's it's said is a Japanese expression that you if you try to serve everyone, you can't stand your own ground. Well, sometimes it gets kind of wobbly but so far we've been trying to balance things so that we make things available to everyone. Try to be equitable. requirements to be a member?
Ken Love:Nope. Just our mission is to promote any and all aspects of tropical fruit, of growing and marketing tropical fruit in the State of Hawaii. We don't really care if you're growing one or two trees or or 5000 trees. You had asked me to mention the Hawaii Master Food Preservers too, which grew out of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers, at least in Hawaii. Every other State the Master Food Preservers are a function of university extension. And when I trained in California and brought the program back UH wasn't interested unless I got ʻum a big grant and I didn't want to lose that 30% and so we wrote the grant for the Fruit Growers and started it. And now we, weʻre always looking for funding to do more classes but we have kitchens, usable kitchens, in Kona, Maui, Hawaii, Molokai and Lanai. So we've done lots of classes on every island except Oahu, because they're still working on their rail. Where we teach it in Hilo, which starts next Thursday actually, the parking is against the Matson yard. And so you can see all the trucks coming in and being loaded into containers and the boat is 50 feet from where I park. And in that 50 foot area, we see the trucks with the produce sitting in the sun for three hours before they get loaded into a container. And you know, no wonder by the time they get there they're pretty bad. The people have no concept of of what they're doing. They have no concept of postharvest. Bob Paull is probably the best postharvest guy in the world and nobody listens to him. I mean, he saved Bulgaria you know in terms of assisting their companies learn about postharvest. And it's the same thing with value added. So when I talk about value added I'm not just talking about jams and jellies. Talking about value added begins in the field. When you harvest jaboticaba or surinam cherry or most of the small fruit that we are developing markets for, or have been developing markets just in the last 10 years. Even guava, you know, which is a lot longer. If you take those and you put them in a box, put the box in the truck and then you go to a different tree, load up another box, put that in the truck, that those guava are gonna last two days, three days. When we harvest, we take it we load it into a cooler, pre chilled cooler at the base of the tree and then put the cooler in the shade until we're ready to drive back to Hilo. The ideal way to harvest jaboticaba and surinam cherry is to load it in a clamshell, put that clamshell in the cooler, and then take that cooler back to the the shed. You get a week instead of three days. So as a chef, or as a produce manager, I want to buy stuff from you that has the longest shelf life possible. And until farmers get that post harvest aspect of helping your customers provide a better product to their customers you know, we're not really going to move forward. And so that's that's really essential. I mean, the things that that, these are the things that UH needs to teach, you know. UH also needs to teach things like with, theyʻre doing a pretty good job of explaining avocado lace bug and what it takes to combat avocado layce bug. The problem is that how many orchards, avocado orchards are nice, neat orchards with trees pruned to eight feet or 10 feet, maybe one or two. Our trees are 40 or 50 feet and these people have been harvesting them for 60 years and however harvest however they harvest them, it doesn't matter. That's what they've been doing and these are the avocados in the marketplace, and now they're not getting them because the lace bugs defoliated the tree. Everythingʻs sunburned and comes down with big blotches when they harvest it, so it's useless. So teach people how to prune their trees properly. You've got if it's one tree. If you want to learn how to harvest avocados come to my farm. I'm the only one you're going to hear bitch about having to bend over to harvest avocados. The trees are that low and we get 150 of them on on 10 by 15 foot trees every year. "Well take you could get a lot more if your trees were higher." Yeah, but how much time? I mean we have to think in terms of cost of of labor. So I can walk around and pick that tree in 15 minutes. And when you're using a stick to have to get one avocado, and then clip the stem off that avocado, you've quadrupled the time it takes to harvest that. But how much is labor worth?
Jim:Yeah, going back to your cost of production reminders. That's kind of key to knowing if it makes sense, right? Is how does that net out for your cost. Iʻve heard you talk about some props that you think are maybe up and coming so I'm thinking of people that are either doing permaculture or looking to grow some tropical fruit on the islands. Any thoughts or suggestions on...
Ken Love:I mean I think first you have to decide whether you want to fit in to something like we were talking about grow the oranges, fit into an existing market, you know, and try to focus on import substitution, or do you want to create a new market? Some of our most successful farmers on this side like Terry Weaver with his dragon fruit, and and what he does with mangoes over here, kind of Yees on Maui with mangoes. Our president of the fruit growers Mark Suiso with
Jim:So from hearing you speak, I've heard you a few times and Makaha Mangoes, he's a grower and aggregator both. They've been pretty successful fitting into either fitting into existing markets or creating new ones. I think the next step is to take a fruit like maparng and not just have one or two trees but have 500 trees. And maprang is also known as mango plum. And it it looks like, see if I get in there close, it's ʻbout a little bigger than an egg but it tastes like mango plum mix. It is fantastic. Delicious fruit that you can get all over Southeast Asia, all over the Middle East where it's shipped in from Thailand or Israel. And it's just a great thing. We have 500 of them in our greenhouse right now, growing growing out, you know that we'll have from seed or we'll graft a bunch of them too. There are some producing trees and in Hilo. Oscar at Fruit Growers has a bunch and some of the other growers over there. The, it's just that kind, there's another one called tampoi. baccaurea macrocarpa, or like Frankie's Nursery has some baccaurea rambi in Waimanalo actually just now saying or indicating that there are a number of fruits out there that are really great and may perhaps be a lot better than the ones that you hear more commonly about, like mountain apple or mangosteen, right. And but there are all these other fruits that perhaps we should be looking at and making markets or helping found or stir up markets to get interested in because, you know, that sounds like there, you see them as easier to grow. taste better. Is that Is that a fair statement?
Ken Love:Yeah, I mean that well, it's it's not only that it's learning about more of them. So let me take mountain apple since you mentioned it. Mountain appleʻs a great fruit. I love to eat mountain apple, but you got two days of shelf life. Mountain apples is syzygium malaccense is the botanic name. Take syzygium samargenses which is called wax apple or wax jambu or just jambu, tastes almost the same, usually a little bit sweeter than mountain apple, and it lasts a week, 10 days. So again thinking in terms of and it produces and grows very quickly, even more than mountain apple, and it's easier to maintain and keep pruned than then mountain apple. So and then you have jambu air or water apple, syzygium aqueum, which is another one. So you have these three cousins that that are for different markets. syzygium aqueum given to women after childbirth in Malaysia because of the electrolytes. So you have a bottle of Gatorade or a handful of water apples and get the same litterallhy benefits in terms of electrolytes. So when we look at nutritional value of all the fruits, that's a whole other topic to get into someday, maybe the next one of these we do. But length, the longevity of shelf life is important. You talked about transporting these things to different islands and that you can't do that if you only got two days of shelf life before the thing starts to get mushy. So a wax jambu is gonna last a lot longer than that. And
Jim:Yeah, and to interrupt, because here's the struggle I have as a producer, right, and trying to decide what the grow is if there's no market, right, to me, it feels like the whole effort that would be required in order to grow a market and to share awareness about something feels like is this massive hurdle. I mean, I think it probably helps to have a chef in the family or a number of chefs in a network that could help get the word out and change pallets. But tell me, am I wrong, that it's not that big, a big a hurdle? Or is it? You know, what's the best way to make that happen?
Ken Love:I mean, you have to you have to work it. I mean,
Jim:How does that work? They're approachable? Like, I feel like when we were doing that, and taking these fruits, we went to a lot of the chefs in Honolulu. I mean, I used to bug the hell out of Alan Wong you know, that to try this, to try that. Sending boxes of stuff to Roy, you know, and Peter Merriman and I go back along those all those guys and Sam Choy and I were born about a week apart from each other. So we, we've I've known Sam for over 35-40 years already. So the educational part, maybe it's just me, but I don't think that's difficult for people to do because chefs are very open to that. There we have chefs meeting every month on, on the Big Island so people are always welcome. You have something you want to talk about, come on in and do it. Contact me. You can contact Chef Paul Herrlein at Hawaii Community College, at Palmanui in Kona. You can try to find some of the chefs on Oahu, the big name chefs. I mean, if you go to Ed Kenny and Alan Wong, they they want to know what you're growing. They want to know what doesn't mean, they're going to buy it, but they want to know. And give them some vegetables. Don't be afraid to, you know, "Here, try some of my mountain apples or wax jambu or water apples" or whatever it is. And they're approachable. I mean, you can bottles, you're taking care of it. Yeah. I would be nervous or wouldn't even know how to approach Alan Wong. But
Ken Love:You walk up to, Alan's a great guy. Lee Anne Wong on Maui, I mean Peter Merriman's on Maui most of the time. So there's chefs on every island that are used to that. And even if those name chefs aren't in the, in the restaurant, the famous guys, there's somebody doing the work in those restaurants. So you go into the restaurant in the morning and say, I'd like to leave this for the chef and my cards in the box. I Peter Merriman always told stories, how this lady kept go, was showing up at the back door of his restaurant in Waimea every day and, and he pretended he wasn't him. And "I don't know when he's coming in" and finally said, "Well, I just want to give him some some, some basil." And he said, "Well, I know we don't need basil, we need tomatoes." So she went home and started growing tomatoes. And fortunately in Waimea, that's pretty easy to do. Getting tomatoes in Kona is another story. But it's it's knowing not only knowing the markets that are there, but finding a market. So it could be if you're working with wholesalers, like our wholesaler Adaptations, finding out what they do want, you know, I mean, Well, I've got I've got two acres I mean, what should I grow? I usually, when I when I get asked that which is like weekly, say "Well, what do you like to eat?" "Well what do you mean, what do I like to eat?""Well, you got two acres, you got to grow something what do you want to eat?" "I don't know." Well, I can't decide for you. You have to decide for yourself, what you're going to grow, what you're going to market, what you're going to cook with or make value added products from. You know, you've got lots of choices. I mean, we have 1500 species, you know around here to work with so you've got you've got a lot of choices in you know, talking. The more people you talk to in terms of chefs, wholesalers, you can go right to Foodland, you can go right to Suisan, you can go right to D. Otani or strong arm, I, Armstrong Produce. Oops, it's like my favorite slip there. You have to do the work. Nobody's gonna sit and tell you something and make it easy. And then said, Oh, I'm going to need, we're going to need, let's say, mountain apples or lettuce. You know, we need lots of romaine lettuce. Well, by the time you're you go back there and have all this romaine lettuce when we got that three years ago, you know? I mean, what do you got? Now we need we, you know, we need tree tomatoes. Oh, I don't have any of those. Well, it's back to the stuff. So you have to diversify. I mean, I like to diversify by month, not just two or three crops, but basically 12 crops. Because if I like to blow one off and go to Japan for a month, I don't want to have to worry about it. But I want to fruit in the month club. You know, that way, there's always going to be some overlap, there's always going to be some income. You know, rather than then having everything fall by the wayside. The people who only have Kona coffee are hurting with all the coffee leave rust and the coffee berry borer
Jim:Fruit of the Month Club strikes me as a great idea for a couple of reasons. Right? It's, if that's a real thing, right, you could introduce some of these fruits that you're talkinʻ about through you're Fruit of the Month Club to get people to know about them and interested. Yeah, yeah. Is that actually something you do is fruit of the month club?
Ken Love:No, no, not at all. I mean, Well, I just grow things. So that every month there's something different. And people know to stop by our Saturday fruit stand and see what my wife has that's new this week. I don't even keep up with what she harvests sometimes. I'm too busy looking at the new stuff, or more, more seeds. So our greenhouse has, at any one time, you know, 10 crops in it that have some kind of potential for the future.
Jim:That's I think one of the tougher things for some producers is fruit trees and trees in general, right is you have to have to be more patient. You don't, you have to wait a few years, right, so before we even know what you have, so maybe it's good.
Ken Love:That's exactly right. Now, there are some things and well, bananas are quick, figs are very quick. You know, you have a papaya is very quick. So you have things like that where you only have to wait one or two years. And then you have mangosteen and jaboticaba, it's like Rip Van Winkle. You might as well just go to sleep for 20 years. It takes time to make sure those things are going to develop. But you know, Mr. Takashibu, my teacher was planting mangosteen seeds in at 98. You know, and these are going to be 20 years to produce? You plant for generations. Like in Japan and the UK there's forests where they plant trees to fix the churches in the temples every four or 500 years. So we we have to think in terms of the generations. If it's not for us, I mean, people gotta eat. If we thought about 50 years ago, all of this wouldn't be such an issue now, the sustainability or self sustainability for the State.
Jim:I think there's a saying there. I'm trying to remember the quote, so maybe I'll look it up after this. And maybe, maybe,
Ken Love:You know, the best time to plant a tree, you know, yesterday. So it's all of those. Yeah, there's there's a few like that and it's worth taking them all to heart. I think. That the idea is to do something and whether or not it's right or wrong, it's it's something you know. And in terms of ag planting, something is better than nothing. So a lot of times people will spend three years deciding what to plant. Well, in that three years they could have got been halfway there. So plant, plant different things now. You can always take ʻem out and replant ʻem. Or you can always work to find markets for ʻem. Some things like FarmLink and some, some of the other producers I know on this island or the Big Island, they just want something to make pickles with, you know, they want to pickle. Not just mango, but they'll pickle anything. You know, other people want to make jelly from anything. We take a fruit like bilimbi, which is a extremely sour starfruit relative, and you juice that. It's 86% moisture so you get a lot of liquid. And then you have it's about 6% acid. So you can make hot and sour soup, you can make salad dressing, we make mango chutney with it. It's endless what you can do with it. So utilizing these fruit for something outside of the in room amenity basket, and the buffet line are, is what's important. I mean, it's got to start moving forward at a faster rate. You know, we've got to make things a little bit easier for the next generation. And the generation caught in the middle. It's not like this generation and that generation, there's all kinds of middle folks. And they're kind of like they're pulled in both directions.
Jim:And the Seeds of Wellbeing project right, is funded to look at some of the stressors of those ag producers. And what we found is the younger ones, especially, are are more stressed. So any suggestions or advice you'd want to share with those younger farmers?
Ken Love:Stressed because, why are they stressed?
Jim:Financially funding markets funding labor, just the name a few. Pests, pests and disease pressures.
Ken Love:We solved a lot of that by communications, you know, and and stressing the need for better communications between farmers, chefs, wholesalers, ranchers, fishermen. We need more of those types of conferences. And, the same guy Kent Fleming I talked about who did the cost to production studies and taught Ag Econ put together a lot of these conferences and that I helped him do in the in the 90s and early 2000s. And when he retired, that was it. So we need to do a lot of those because those taught certain communication skills between farmers and ranchers. Those also made introduction because Peter Merriman talked up there, Sam Choy talked up there, and hung around so that those growers and chefs had a chance to interact with them. You know, Alan Wong and Lee Anne Wong would come to a conference, you know, and talk to people so that they could see"What do you what do you have, you know, I mean, what we grow this are you interested" and no but we would be interested in this or Lee Anne would be interested in that. The communications was there and so I think having that is is really, really important. And getting UH to sponsor those conferences, getting the money to hold those conferences. I mean, we this is our gonna be our 33rd year, it'll be on a Oahu sometime in October perhaps at at University of Hawaii, West Oahu, I think is where the confer, I'm not 100% sure because they're still trying to work out the details but we won't have the chef's there. This is just fruit growing conference and a little bit on nutrition and wellbeing and health this year.
Jim:More communication and more communication with chefs and and
Ken Love:wholesalers food
Jim:distributors got it.
Ken Love:I like to talk about food, huh?
Jim:and grow and make sure you're growing something that you love, right? makes all the difference.
Ken Love:Obviously you and I like to eat, so.
Jim:<laughing> No, no problem there. So one last thing I noticed that you referenced Japan a few times. And so just wondering what the connection for you there is and how that evolved and how that's evolving.
Ken Love:I got, I got sent there by AP about the same, it might have been the same year I first came to Hawaii in the very early 80s, maybe 1980 or 81. And I got hooked on that too. And I've been back every, I've spent two or three months there a year from that 1981 to 2019 when the pandemic stopped everything. And so now I'm a little I'm so busy teaching the food preservation systems or something to do with ag that as soon as I get two free weeks I'm out of here man. I'm in Tokyo I gotta go shopping. You know, people think it's so expensive there. No, it's way cheaper than Hawaii, especially for agriculture related tools. So cut and hold pickers are 180 bucks in Kona and 27 at the home centers in Japan, you know, outside of Tokyo. So, my, my, my really good pruners are like eight bucks there and theyʻre 70 some dollars here. It's the difference is is is pretty unbelievable. So yeah, I gotta go. Iʻm running out everything. Even my 100% soba noodles, you know,
Jim:Bring bring an extra empty suitcase with you right, to fill.
Ken Love:Um, I just buy another one there because those are so cheap, but they the wheels happen to stay on when you buy a suitcase in Japan instead of fall off. Even, you know, one trip on Hawaiian Airlines, your new suitcase for Macy's or Ross or something is in pieces, but not the ones from Japan. So I you know, what can I say?
Jim:But if there's anything else you'd like to share with our audience,
Ken Love:I mean, I do a lot of things that UH says not to do, you know, in terms of pruning practices, in terms of irrigation, in terms of fertilizing. So that's those three main things. I mean, everybody says water at the tree line, I never water at the tree line. You know, for the first three, four years, if I plant this small seedling tree, or grafted tree, you know, that's maybe two, three feet tall. I water right close to the trunk. Oh, you will rot everything out. No, I don't rot everything out. I just give it a little bit of water every day rain or shine. But it may be three minutes of water, but they like the regularity. What we found, that after five years of doing that, that getting that water right there, yeah, the roots don't go out but that much, but you have 15 times the root mass. So then you move the water out over overhead past the tree line, and you have 15 times the roots, or 8 to 15 times depending on the species of roots moving out. So that was a big difference we found I mean. My new farm is eight years old and people can't believe the size of the trees here because we've done it that way. Water is life. People don't irrigate here, even in wet, wetter areas, they don't irrigate. And the trees are very stressed when they had that. You water for production as well as to keep trees alive. So if you want to have good water, you want to have good production, then you got to have, you got to have water. Yeah, no, I spend about I don't know, not quite$500 a month for water, but pretty close.
Jim:Yeah. And are these techniques that you learn from a teacher that you had or just experience?
Ken Love:This just experience mostly. Well, I won't, I shouldn't say that. I mean pruning techniques all came from studying in Japan and, and India. I lecture at the two universities in India and three in Japan. So a lot of that's been been reinforced over the last 30 years to 40 years already. Man it goes by quick, don't blink. That's what I advise everybody. Don't blink man, itʻs just like, real quick.
Jim:I think in Hawaii we are lucky enough to have you as a resource on the Big Island on Saturdays it sounds like, at Love, Love Family Farms and also on the Facebook group anywhere. I see you as one of the the frequent responders and sharers of knowledge there.
Ken Love:Yeah, I try. The other thing it was a pruning too is that Mr. Takashibu was, he always said "It takes guts to prune." And which it does, you've been watching this tree grow for 10 years and then you whacked the top of it off. I mean, it just scares the hell out of people. Richard Campbell, from Florida who has many mango pruning videos out. I mean he's really well known working heʻs worked with mangoes, and previously the curator at Fairchild Tropical Garden or he, it takes guts to prune as he whacks this beautiful mango tree down to next to nothing. And then, you know, a couple minutes later, you see how the trees filled out next year with 8 million mangoes on a tree that you can touch the top both. And so there's, there's these sorts of tricks that need to be learned. And not everything that we in Hawaii applies elsewhere. And not everything from elsewhere applies to Hawaii. Not but not everything that I do on the Big Island applies to Kauai. I mean we have every microclimate imaginable in this state and they all need something different. So you have to do the work, you have to know your farm, you have to know your trees. The same orange tree that I worked with in Kona will not perform the same way where you are. As an example, so at our, we have these two acre repositories. Now I took a kampong mauve sugar apple from Kauai which produces nice you know, purple fruit on like cheromoya relative. And we planted on Molokai and they were twice the size. Grafted from the same source tree. Beautiful fruit. You know, and in Kona, nothing. Little dried up hard pebbles of nothing. Never had a fruit here in eight years, where we get all these beautiful fruit on on Kauai and Molokai and all from the same source. So what explains that? Well, you know, microclimate.
Jim:Ss does it really, does it really just have to come down to trial and error, and you just you won't know until you try?
Ken Love:Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you, we keep telling people just go see what your neighbor has. "Well, I don't know my neighbor." Well look over the damn fence. You know, I mean, you you got to do some work. I cannot tell you what it's and it's the same thing here in Kona, I mean, I plant things that the top part of my farm and the bottom of my farm, and they respond differently.
Jim:We hope you've enjoyed this talk story with Ken love and we thank him for the time and information he shared about growing tropical fruit in Hawaii. For even more information about growing food in Hawaii please check the show notes for links to his 90 minute Hilo County Farm Bureau presentation. Mahalo.
Ken Love:The other thing we used to do is with bananas, and I can leave you with this, it's kind of funny, is that the bananas are you know, you cut your bananas up and you take them to your customer neat in the box. And I can remember taking them to one of my chef friends on the whole, you know, rack of bananas that you know, four foot long five foot long rack of bananas. And I have it tied up on a teepee in the back of my truck and "Bill come on and look at this." So it was chef Trask and he comes out there. "What the hell am I gonna do with that?" "You're gonna put it on the buffet line." "Are you nuts?" "Yeah, let's just put it out there and see what happens. I won't even charge you for it. You can just have this rack of bananas." He just shakes his head, helps me carry it in. We
put it, this is about 5:30 in the morning before the buffet line opens, and we put it in the middle of the table and then they start putting all the dishes around it. People couldn't get to eat breakfast that morning because everybody was in front of it getting their picture taken with the rack of bananas. So you these kinds of changes. Now when you walk through to your room at Four Seasons, they have all these wooden teepees with racks of bananas on them just hanging there. And people are welcome to just take a banana off and eat it if it's ripe, or the kids push him and play with them. And they come in different colors, it can see blue bananas and red
Jim:That's, that's a good story. I mean, it's another bananas, and of course, yellow and slightly orange bananas. That makes a difference. So it becomes what we do with the fruit becomes part of the whole visitor industry as well. I mean, there's everything is connected to everything else. And so you have to look at that as as as well. And bananas are a good example of that. example of a theme that I'm hearing from you, which is be, be fearless, right? And try something and, and see what happens and
Ken Love:Give stuff away. I mean, it's worth it to get to get a movement started, you know, I mean. You know, to get to give that was the best bunch of bananas. And you know, I mean, I wasn't exactly well to do then, well, I'm still not, but back then it was even harder to ask, "Do I really want to give these bananas away to Bill?" It was the best thing I ever made because it cut my labor time in half. I didn't have to buy boxes, you know, or go get used boxes. And he just just bring the rack in, you know, bring me three racks and then you want it to come for two weeks and it was great. It just made it made a change. Nice, you know, was he was he was at the first farmers chef conference here in ʻ92 when we had a farmer chef conference. All of these things we need to revitalize now because it's it's a new generation of growers really, because the old timers like me, don't do it anymore, or can't physically do it. And you've got a new generation that is more interested, they want to get out. They want to do things where we kind of just sort of fell into it.
Jim:The intention of this podcast series is to create a safe space for respectful and inclusive dialogue. With people from across a broad and diverse spectrum involved in growing and making accessible the food we share together. A diversity of voices, perspectives and experiences can serve to deepen mutual understanding, to spark creative problem solving and provide insight into the complexities of our agricultural system. If you our listeners have experiences with Hawaii agricultural ecosystems, from small holder farms to large even including multinational agricultural industrial companies, or anywhere in between and you would like to share your story, please contact us. We welcome your voices and perspectives