Brittany Anderson and her husband Bodhi have had great success transforming 10 acres of former industrial farmland on the Big Island into a thriving ecosystem.
“It was completely deserted, but in four years with this kind of diversified pasture management we have grass, we have birds, we have worms,” she said. “It’s just jammin ‘.”
The Andersons sell organic beef, chicken, lamb and pork from their pasture in Honomu. Restore your land and make a living Selling sustainable meat was a challenge, but nothing compared to how difficult it was to navigate the housing bureaucracy.
As part of our Hawaii Grown series, we explore solutions and ideas that could help smallholders in the state produce more local food. While affordable housing is a problem across the state, it is especially difficult for farmers who make low profit margins and farm workers, who often have multiple jobs or have to live in unapproved housing to make ends meet. Our latest edition of the Hawaii Grown podcast explores one proposal to help farm owners afford housing and another to provide affordable housing for farm workers.
Challenges in building
The Andersons wanted to live on their Honomu property not only to prevent agricultural theft but also to avoid commuting to and from Hilo. Since their land is classified as earmarked agricultural land, there is a tax break for keeping it in production. Now that there is a house on the property, this tax break no longer applies.
“I’m all for using taxes to fund roads and schools, but I produce a lot of food and it seems like my property taxes should be a little lower,” she said.
It would also cost nearly $ 80,000 to bring electricity to their property, so they are 100% solar powered.
“Not voluntarily, but out of necessity,” she said.
Megan Fox has been trying to find a solution to these challenges for more than five years. As managing director of Malama Kauai, As a nonprofit food sustainability nonprofit, she often asks farmers what would help them make more money growing local food.
“Farming is a full-time job and right now a lot of new farmers have to do another full-time job in addition to starting a business to keep a roof over their heads,” she said. “It’s a challenge that is very difficult to master.”
The nonprofit outlined an idea for a community of small houses and a residential complex next to active farmland. Instead of each farmer building a house on their own land, grouping the houses would reduce infrastructure costs such as power poles and sewer systems and allow farmers to use every acre of land.
“We wanted to make it small, affordable, and reproducible,” she said. “In this way, it can be placed in multiple locations on multiple islands.”
Fox had backers willing to invest in the development if it could find a landowner who could provide at least a 30 year lease to justify the cost.
“Landowners either don’t want this kind of development on their land, don’t want to make a long-term commitment or – I’m not sure what all of their reasons are – but there has been a lot of opposition from pretty” every option we looked at “, she said.
She turned to the state Agrobusiness Development Corporation to seek a private-public partnership, but she said her phone calls and emails never went down.
“There are a million obstacles in the way and we were on the verge of removing many of them,” she said. “We just couldn’t find the country.”
Malama Kauai eventually got a 15-year lease in Moloaa, but they had to give up their housing plans. There are about 70 commercial farmers leasing land around the property and a food center should be operational soon. But it’s still hard for Megan to hear how farmers she works with struggle to find affordable housing.
“It’s rare that you find enough people to pull this off to feed our island,” she said. “Doesn’t matter to feed our economy beyond Kauai.”
Fox wants the state to incentivize landowners to offer longer-term leases to farmers who want to build houses on their land. And she believes that if the state donated some of their land for development, nonprofits and private companies would be more likely to invest in purpose-built housing for farmers.
“I think this type of private-public partnership should be something that could be explored and developed as a model, ”she said.
Building houses for an agricultural economy
After successfully mastering the long and expensive process of building their own home, the Andersons realized that their business had grown enough to warrant hiring a few employees.
“Lots of people hire WWOOFers,” said Anderson, referring to a program where people volunteer on organic farms in exchange for housing. “Agriculture has this image problem where people don’t really appreciate the farmer or the farm worker, and I want to change that and make the people who work on the farm make money.”
Anderson wants someone who sees farming as a profession, and she knows that expecting someone to volunteer results in Hawaiian residents being excluded from farming. But when she looked at the building process for a farmhouse, she was shocked at how complicated it was.
“Hawaii has grown so used to farm workers living in poverty.” -Brittany Anderson, Sugar Hill Farmstead
The application requires a lot of personal information and requires the farmer to describe the employee’s specific tasks and exact working hours. Anderson said this deprives her of the ability to be flexible and evolve and evolve the position over time.
“I don’t want to put myself in a situation in which I filled out the application and now either have someone standing for a position that cannot exist without an apartment, or I had it built and then maybe the job will change, ” She said.
Anderson said she now understands why more and more small and medium-sized farmers are neglecting the provision of housing, but low wages combined with a lack of affordable housing mean farm workers are suffering.
“Hawaii has gotten so used to farm workers living in poverty,” she said. “This application is a big hurdle.”
Are Tiny Homes an Answer?
Marcy Montgomery also knows many farm workers who live in unauthorized shelters or lie and say their RV is actually a recreational vehicle.
“You don’t have to live in fear,” she said.
Montgomery is the managing director of Sustainable living on an island, a nonprofit that owns an organic farm on the Big Island and helps farmers in Hawaii, California, and Washington.
In 2016, One Island started bringing farmers and farm workers together to brainstorm how to create more affordable housing in rural areas.
“Up to 100 people came because there was so much interest at the time,” she said.
Those involved came up a suggestion: Streamlining of the application and approval process for agricultural dwellings to specifically allow small houses. These small apartments are larger and more durable than a motorhome, but are still easy to move around.
Montgomery said many farm owners like the idea of tiny houses because the units are solar powered and have composting toilets so they could avoid building expensive power lines and wastewater treatment plants.
The group helped draft a bill that included financial support for farmers to buy and build the units. It had widespread support and passed both houses of Hawaii State Legislation in 2017.
But Governor David Ige vetoed the bill This year it said that since the building code laws already allow peasant apartments, there is no need to specifically change the permit to allow mobile tiny homes.
Montgomery said existing laws prioritize large farmers with existing capital.
“The County of Hawaii has a certain number of additional homes that you can build on your land based on the number of workers you have, but that is for someone who has already built a business of the size (that) up for it can qualify, “she said.” There is no quick or small mechanism like the one we have proposed to help the smallholder, and I think the governor did not understand that. “
The group made similar proposals in 2018 and 2020, but the momentum was gone.
“We’re kind of waiting to see who will be the next governor,” she said.
One Island is now working with smallholders who live in the San Juan Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Northwest near British Columbia. If she can point to a successful implementation of her idea, she hopes that Hawaiian lawmakers will consider changing the rules.
“If we want local food we have to be willing to invest in it,” she said.
Hawaii Grown is funded in part by grants from the Hawaii Community Foundation‘s Ulupono Fund, the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Marisla Fund, and the Frost Family Foundation.
