When I asked the farmers’ who agreed to be interviewed, when would be the best time to call them for an interview, a common response was, ” Call me after dark and before I go to bed.”
I knew that meant a very short window of time.

The long days of a farmer’s life hasn’t changed that much over historical time. I have been known to water my nursery during drought times with a flashlight in the night. Watering plants by the light of the full moon has been quite ’special’ also.

Lew Nakamura, of Hikari Nursery, called me at 7:00 am before he started work because I had missed ‘his window’ the night before’. He agreed to have any of his interview information posted on my blog site saying, “Yes, you can put it out there!”
He began with telling me he is a University of Hilo graduate in Tropical Agriculture. His first and main crop was draceana, a very desirable interior scape crop and very profitable for many years. But the last few years, there has been huge competition from US mainland and international sources, so his market in the mainland US has dropped substantially. Lew has adapted his crop selection by transitioning some of his acreage in ‘The Hawaiian Beaches State Agricultural Park Lease Land’ to food crops of tomatoes, eggplant, okra, peppers, and green onions. This is a new venture for Lew in many ways in that , growing draceana commercially is a mono crop, sold in bulk in major co-op container shipments to the mainland, therefore no real consumer interaction. Being a nurseryman, he was used to growing in containers so to move into food crops it was more natural to grow and market his vegetables as container plants.

Selling produce on a local level, he said, is all about interaction with the consumer. I asked him what, in his observation of his customers, do they care about when choosing his products. He said the questions asked most often are: ‘What variety is it? Is it organic and if not what kind of chemicals are used and what media is it grown in?” He also said they are most interested in how the product looks, and the price. Least of their interest, in his observation, is who grows it or where it is grown.

Lew’s business is a full time family business which includes he and his wife and sometimes his teenage daughter. I asked him what his definition of a farmer was and he said very definitely, ” A ‘real farmer’ is someone who makes their living off of growing food and plants. There’s too many fake farmer’s and gentlemen farmer’s who get tax breaks and other assistance that they should not get ” He figures these breaks makes real farmer’s look bad because public perception is that farmer’s get more breaks and support than they do and it isn’t fair. He went on to say that full time real farmers need all the help and assistance they can get in terms of agricultural lease land, agricultural loans and water discounts to make agricultural business viable.

With all the hurdles of farming, I asked him what his motivation was to become a farmer. He said straight off, “Independence, it was a way to use my degree to make a living for myself, I was a first time farmer when I started my business. ” Lew started when he was in his mid twenties, and now thirty years later, the next generation in his family, his daughter doesn’t look like she is going to follow in the family business, at least not at this time. But he said if he was to advise someone who wanted to get into farming he would tell them to get into food production. Currently there is a lot of support by government agencies for marketing, grants etc in the area of ‘food safety’.

I thanked Lew for his insights and I was happy to have spent some time to reflect on his career as a farmer who is supporting his family through agriculture.

I am always grateful when a farmer agrees to spend their precious time to talk to me about what their farming life entails. I want to know because I want to understand, through their farming experience why they farm.

My curiosity for interviewing food farmer’s is reflected in a memorable quote in the movie, ‘ To Kill a Mocking Bird’. The main character Atticus said, ” You never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them.” I think a farmer is someone to appreciate and through their stories we can ‘walk around in their shoes’ and then gratefully give thanks for their efforts to bring food to our tables.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2010 at 1:46 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.