Richard Ha mulls the future after decision to close banana farm

All things considered, farming was easy when Richard Ha first started growing bananas in Kapoho nearly 40 years ago.

“You just had to work hard and you could be OK,” Ha, 71, told the Tribune-Herald on Thursday, a day after announcing on his Hamakua Springs Country Farm blog that the banana operation — the largest on the island — would be closing down.

“The last bananas will be the ones we are bagging now, which will be ready around the end of March, and then that will be it,” Ha wrote on the blog.

The past decades have seen the banana farm grow from 25 acres in Kapoho to 150 acres in its current Pepeekeo location.

The farm survived a Kapoho windstorm that forced a move to Keaau. It survived nematodes in Keaau. It was brought back to life in Pepeekeo after banana bunchy top virus decimated the Keaau crop in 2005.

And it weathered the 2008 oil price peak — an event that imposed extraordinary costs on the farm and would have shuttered the business if Ha’s employees hadn’t proposed a solution: switch from cultivating both apple bananas and Williams (a Cavendish cultivar) to exclusively Williams.

The proposal bought the farm time.

Oil is now at its lowest point in 12 years, but Ha said that hasn’t translated into lower costs for its associated products, like fertilizer and plastics.

“Farmers can’t pass on the costs,” he said. That’s especially true for Hawaii farmers, who must import things such as fertilizer from the mainland (even the boxes the bananas get packed in come from a plant in Seattle).

Ha, like all farmers, thinks in the long term — at least 10 years out — and he knows oil prices will begin to rise at some point, again pushing up the cost of raising bananas. He’s also concerned about the cost of fighting bunchy top virus and little fire ants.

“So the question then becomes at one point, do we make the transition?” Ha said. “Because if we wait too long, we won’t have control over our transition out. There’s a lot of different things involved in a decision like this.”

That didn’t make it any easier to tell his 27 employees, some of whom have worked at the farm for more than 20 years, about the decision.

“When I talked to the workers, it was the hardest thing of anything,” he said. “June (Ha’s wife) was in tears. It’s just not easy, you know?”

On Thursday, there was little sign of the farm’s impending closure, with some employees driving tractors through rows of banana plants and others washing and weighing bunches of the fruit inside an open-air packing house. A hum came from a line of ripening rooms, which are temperature-controlled.

The electricity that powers the packing house comes from a hydroelectric plant Ha built in 2013 using an old sugar flume. If it weren’t for the hydroelectric power, Ha said, running the farm would cost about $6,000 more each month.

Away from the packing house, next to the unassuming white trailer that serves as Ha’s office, were rows of empty hoop houses that once were home to a thriving tomato crop. Tomato production stopped in November 2014 because the cost of upgrading hydroponic equipment and greenhouses was too much.

It was shortly after that when the Has began thinking about the future of the bananas.

“The question then became, ‘Can the banana farms survive and make enough of a return to help June and I pay the notes?’” Ha said. “That’s kind of been what’s on our minds.”

The farm is a family operation, with three generations of Has working there, but Ha said he couldn’t in good conscious recommend that his daughter and son-in-law take over the business.

“I just couldn’t tell them that,” he said. “Not that it can’t be done by different people at different scale, but in our situation, I didn’t think I could tell them that.”

Ha said he still believes there is a future for banana cultivation on the island, particularly for smaller family farms.

“I’m sure people will be able to take advantage of what we’re doing and grow a little bit more,” he said.

The farmland itself will continue to be used for agriculture.

Big Island Dairy leases some Hamakua Springs land to raise corn for cattle feed, and will now lease more acreage. Ha said there is also the option of renting the packing house out and selling electricity to the new tenant.

An option that would combine leasing land and renting the packing house is still in its early stages. About six months ago, Ha was approached by a Big Island group that is applying for a medical marijuana dispensary license about leasing land and using hydroelectric power.

“At the start, I wasn’t paying much attention to it,” he said. He began to pay more attention when the need to close the farm became more apparent, and he began to consider his employees’ future.

Ha said he would only partner with the group — which he declined to name because it is still early in the permitting process — if they could give his employees first chances at jobs.

“The medical use of cannabis, I think, is a good thing,” he said. “I’m not in favor of smoking, I have no interest in that, but I think the medical side of that is a growing industry.”

Since cannabis is grown indoors, he said, it’s similar to cultivating tomatoes.

“One thing is for sure — I’m not shutting this farm down because they’re going to do marijuana here,” Ha said. “I’m just going to help my workers get jobs.”

There is no guarantee the Big Island group will receive a license, though.

“That’s what we’re most worried about,” Ha said. “Because if it doesn’t come through, then there’s no alternative for them (the workers).”

In that case, Ha will wait and see what comes next.

When oil prices go up again, “It’s going to become real clear what (crops) are competitive and what’s not,” he said.

Email Ivy Ashe at iashe@hawaiitribune-herald.com.