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Rice Cultivation on the Big Island
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07-17-2008, 02:11 PM
quote:Ouch [B)] Actually, you would may be surprised that there are a number of farmers out there that are trying to give Taro away and get more farmers to grow Taro here. If we can all help each other out now... it will really benefit EVERYONE in the future, is the thought behind the farmers getting more people to farm Kalo.[^] ------- Rally For the Plan
07-17-2008, 02:12 PM
quote: The UH program is no longer giving away free Hulis. ------- Rally For the Plan 
07-17-2008, 02:24 PM
Thank you
___________________________
Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
07-17-2008, 02:32 PM
If there are farmers out there giving plantable taro hulis away, I pledge to take a weeks worth of pickup loads of them. I will hire kids to plant them. No joke.
What has been lost is evident. Taro is a hassle compared to a Big Mac, and a Big Mac at this point is half the money. You'll pay near 2 bucks a lb for good taro, or more, and you can near buy ground hamburger for that. I'm not kidding. But give it 8 months. Intelligence is the ability to project into the future. Any chicken can derive the present.
07-17-2008, 02:55 PM
Fitz - If you have 100 huli in the ground... your off to a great start. If cultivated correctly, you should be able to double that huli quantity every year until you have more then you can handle.
The farmers I know that are giving away starts, are typically giving to the "Start-up" independent gardener just looking for a few starts to get themselves growing Taro. It's really not that difficult. [  ]I don't think any farmer would just give away thousands and thousands [ ]------- Rally For the Plan 
07-17-2008, 03:57 PM
With potatoes, you can take one potato, put it in compost and let it sprout. Each sprout will go up a couple inches and then make roots. Once they do that, you can cut them off the potato and plant them so one potato can make dozens of new ones buy this method. Can something similar be done with taro? Would half or a quarter of a taro sprout and grow?
They were giving away a few huli up at the Waimea research center several months ago and we have ours growing real happy in the fish tank but if we plant them out in the yard the geese might eat them and are taro leaves bad for geese? Kurt Wilson
07-17-2008, 04:49 PM
"Taro will grow in place that everything else will die." ...this sounds like cassava to me, inasmuch as cassava will grow in awful rain-leached nutrient-depleted tropical laterite soils (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laterite) where nothing else will and in that cassava roots are basically just blocks of starch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava). Tender new leaves of the cassava are edible, too, though not terribly tasty (a bunch of us subsisted on boiled cassava leaves and peanuts for a couple weeks once upon a time when a bridge on our supply route was washed out and food supplies ran very low). In the Amazon the indigenous people make a fermented liquid called cheecha out of cassava which is colorful in both its process of manufacture (the wives chew the raw root and spit it into a gourd), flavor, and effect. Cheecha has the consistency and approximate flavor of yogurt or keefer and does not taste bad at all, in my experience. Best though, was a wonderful steamed and then fermented form of cassava I used to eat in Indonesia called tape (pronounced Tah-pay) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_%28Ind...cuisine%29). Tape is absolutely delicious when fried like a banana in butter or oil with a bit of honey on top. Medical anthropologists have told me the fermentation process adds all sorts of nutritional value to cassava (which is otherwise just tapioca beads of gluey starch).
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07-17-2008, 05:07 PM
Quote:
"This land is NOT viable, but it is the source of the "alternative/ecological/sustainable/permaculture" crowd. Ok, but as the pressure comes on, a lot of land down there is going to be re cleared from "invasive" trees and the rest and be put back into production crops. Fine, but that action will utterly recreate the rainfall patterns in Puna." ______________________________________________________________________ Crops recreating the rainfall patterns? In a tradewinds weather system doesn't the prevailing weather determine the growth patterns and not the other way around? I thought that's why it's greener here on the windward side.
07-18-2008, 03:02 AM
Regarding
"This land is NOT viable, but it is the source of the 'alternative/ecological/sustainable/permaculture' crowd. Ok, but as the pressure comes on, a lot of land down there is going to be re cleared from 'invasive' trees and the rest and be put back into production crops. Fine, but that action will utterly recreate the rainfall patterns in Puna." and "Crops recreating the rainfall patterns? In a tradewinds weather system doesn't the prevailing weather determine the growth patterns and not the other way around? I thought that's why it's greener here on the windward side." ...I'd wondered about those points myself. Seems like the magnitude of the windward/leeward island precipitation pattern would far eclipse effects of evapotranspiration from vegetation in most situations, the possible exception being in marginally xeric zones. Decades ago my professor Otto Soemarwoto described the water competition between fuelwood agroforestry versus foodcrop agriculture with the conclusion (if I remember correctly) that trees generally use up more water than do most food crops. This note on evapotranspiration rates of eucalyptus trees versus groupdcrops looks consistent, just glancing at the data (http://www.ramin.com.au/creekcare/transp...port.shtml). The thick haze which forms over many Mainland forests on hot afternoons is a visible indication of all the water the trees are transpiring. An island, though, even an island as large as the Big Island, is perhaps too small for forests to essentially create their own small weather system of sorts since they are not present in vast tracts as in the interior region of Alaska or around the Great Lakes. So, if that all holds up as accurate, then it seems like a mixed tree-and-groundcrops system (polyculture, with different levels) in relatively wet places like Puna, Hilo, and points northward along the Hamakua Coast would actually come out ahead over pure agroforests in terms of water retention (though it seems like soil conditions and not water shortage would generally be the limitation there). I'd think the places where exactly what is planted and in which configuration might matter most as regards transpiration versus growth is in the zones where conditions are semi-arid, as suggested by this paper "Why tree-crop interactions in agroforestry appear at odds with tree-grass interactions in tropical savannahs" by Ong (http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/kl...1/00236109) As for the other point, "This land is NOT viable, but it is the source of the 'alternative/ecological/sustainable/permaculture' crowd" I'd agree one is doomed from the outset if the only model of farming one has in mind is that of plowing soil with a tractor, mule, or babushka. In many places in Puna that would be plowing rocks more than plowing soil, per se. This does not mean, though, that overall productivity of even very rocky land cannot be quite high when that rocky land is blessed with abundant rainfall and sunlight. I've seen the "alternative/ecological/sustainable/permaculture' crowd" do some amazing things with raised beds and integrated polycultures tying together plant and animal productivity (such as rabbits, chickens, and fish with raised beds, trees, and ponds). This is nothing new, either, though the Rodale folks and some others like them appear to have made some nifty improvements on some aspects of traditional homegarden systems. In Indonesia the combination of rice cultivation in fields with diverse productivity of everything else in pekarangan (homegardens which mimic the trophic energy and nutrient capture levels of natural forest but with cultivars directly useful to humans) sustained dense populations and high civilizations for thousands of years (that useful term "pekarangan," by the way, is pronounced "Peck-ahr-Rrrrang-an" -trill the r). Here are some good refs on that traditional homegarden approach: http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-0fnl2.2--00-0--0-10-0---0---0prompt-10---4-------0-1l--11-en-50---20-about---00-0-1-00-0-0-11-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=fnl2.2&cl=CL3.66&d=HASH0149e1432e7023d7127fa8ec.1.7 "The Javanese home garden as an integrated agro-ecosystem" by Otto Soemarwoto, Idjah Soemarwato, Karyono, E. M. Soekartadiredja, and A. Ramlan, Institute of Ecology, Padjadjaran University, Bandung, Indonesia. http://books.google.com/books?id=4ZWtqbHQ0pwC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=pekarangan+homegarden&source=web&ots=jlHNkbS7jw&sig=w1YV0uOVM0PJYtJz5MZQYyjSO1w&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications, by Robert McCredie May & Angela R. McLean. http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:cjcdEmJihtUJ:www.gerrymarten.com/traditional-agriculture/pdfs/Traditional-Agriculture-chapter-06.pdf+pekarangan+homegarden&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a Traditional Agroforestry in West Java: The Pekarangan (Homegarden) and Kebun/Talun (Annual/Perennial Rotation) Cropping Systems, by Linda Christanty, Oekan S. Abdoellah, Gerald G. Marten, and ]ohan Iskandar. So, I'd by no means discount the potential agricultural productivity of even very rocky places in Puna as long as there is abundant water, sunlight, access to information on viable traditional systems, and the will to adapt those approaches to local conditions.
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Astonishing skill! This archer is a real-life Legolas and then some! http://geekologie.com/2013/11/real-life-...rs-anc.php )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'( )'(
07-18-2008, 03:04 AM
[quote]Originally posted by alaskasteven...
Does anyone know for sure (as via having experimented, or from childhood memories) if rice can be cultivated successfully on the Big Island? If so, then which sorts of varieties and where? ==================================================================== /quote] I would like to know about red rice also if it will grow here. it grows in India. It is really good and SB & I hauled back from Calif a 10# bag in our luggage in Dec. It is nutty in flavor and also lowers cholesterol. |
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