Hawaii Agriculture

Fifty Northern California farm workers will be flown to Honolulu next month as the first of about 500 seasonal laborers to be offered six-month contracts working crops in Hawaii. George Ortiz, president of the Santa Rosa-based California Human Development Corp., said round-trip air fare, housing and benefits, as well as wages ranging from $6 to $14 an hour, will be paid by Hawaiian growers.

Macadamia nut growers, a mainstay of Hawaii's move to diversify its agricultural base, are pinning their hopes for new growth on preliminary research showing that the nuts with the sinfully rich image may contribute to a healthy heart. Dr. J. David Curb, director of the Honolulu Heart Program at Kuakini Medical Center and research director of geriatric medicine at the University of Hawaii, says people laugh when he tells them he is trying to prove macadamia nuts can be good for you.

God's in his heaven--somewhere over my left shoulder, I think, hidden by the mist on Mt. Hualalai. And here, in Holualoa town on Hawaii's Big Island, the first stop on my day in Kona Coffee Country, all's right with the world. A Beethoven piano concerto plays indoors at the Holuakoa Cafe, where owner Meggi Worbach is chatting with some regulars.

A carpet of tousled sugar cane covered these rolling hills on Kauai for a century, and even gave this dusty hamlet its name--"new mill." Today, orderly rows of emerald-green coffee trees slice across the fields. Squeezed out of the sugar business by lower-cost rivals, Hawaii's farmers are taking their cue from the makers of designer jeans and the vintners of Napa Valley.

In the quiet world beneath the swells of the Pacific Ocean, scuba diver John "Randy" Cates tends his swirling, silvery livestock on a new kind of Hawaiian ranch. He and his crew are raising 100,000 fish in a spacious cage anchored to the ocean floor, two miles offshore from Honolulu International Airport. Invisible from the surface, the fish corral represents a new frontier for the United States: farming the open ocean.

The resounding calls of "ko-KEE, ko-KEE" ring out in a cadence that brings music to Puerto Rican nights. The tiny frog that produces the melody is named coqui after its distinctive two-note call and, because it is native only to Puerto Rico, has become a symbol for the island, its culture and its people. "It's like a part of us, a part of our family," said schoolteacher Lourdes Colon, who hears the frogs each night outside her house in tree-covered hills south of San Juan.

"I have always been an onion freak," said Farlan Myers, senior vice president and director of television programming for J. Walter Thompson Co. in Los Angeles. "I like onions." But, Myers added, there are onions and then there are onions. And that helps explain how he got into an unusual sideline: peddling the rare Maui onion to selected supermarkets and restaurants in Southern California.

Agriculture officials released a tentative spraying schedule Wednesday that indicates aerial malathion applications will end over 467 square miles of Southern California by May 14--only five days beyond a May 9 deadline officials promised last winter amid public outcry over the pesticide program. The schedule represents only a preliminary outline of the May battle plan, and it could undergo significant revision in the next few days.

If all goes well this summer, an Air New Zealand 747 jumbo jet will take off from Auckland this fall powered by fuel refined from the seed of a fast-growing weed. The three-hour test flight could mark one of the more promising -- and more unusual -- steps by the financially strapped airline industry to find cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuel.

Nori Tanaka, a scruffy, gray-haired entomologist, trudges through a converted tuna-packing shed, flicking flies off his face. It is just before the dawn of another humid day. In one corner of the ramshackle building, workers grind out sticky, brown fly food in a cement mixer. In another, fly pupae are sifted through a makeshift device of cardboard, old broom heads and wire mesh. Tanaka reeks mightily of sugar, yeast and other odors that come with the job of mating insects.