I asked my Chinese farmer friend Hanna if the coming year of the horse would be a better year than the year of the snake, which comes to an end on Friday. “Oh yes,” she assured me. “The Chinese believe
I asked my Chinese farmer friend Hanna if the coming year of the horse would be a better year than the year of the snake, which comes to an end on Friday.
“Oh yes,” she assured me. “The Chinese believe that you can travel faster toward your goals on a horse.”
This makes perfect sense to me especially when you consider the limitations and discomfort of traveling by snake. Besides, Hanna is very wise and with 40 centuries of Chinese folk wisdom behind her. I tend to believe what she says.
This got me ruminating on the past year and on the impact it’s had on farmers on Kauai. There definitely were times when I felt like I was on the Anaconda Express sitting in a middle seat in coach. But like all farmers, I’m an optimist (just ask any farmer and they’ll tell you that this is the year that they will finally make some money or if not this year, then surely next). So, I started to think about how really fortunate we are to be able to farm and ranch in such a beautiful place with such a rich agricultural history.
This is not to say that we don’t have problems and yes, I use the word “problems” instead of challenges because the words do have different meanings and I don’t want to downplay what I think we’ll be facing in the coming year. But we’ll save that discussion for another day.
So let’s take stock of what we’ve got: ample land on which to increase agricultural production, enough water to irrigate those lands, soils that have great structure and can be amended to increase fertility and weather that most farmers can only dream about, especially if you’re a farmer from somewhere like say, North Dakota. I also think that we’ve got a mayor who wants to help farmers and a state legislative team that is willing to support us.
After a trip through Kapaa Town traffic during rush hour, which seems to be at any hour of the day now, it’s easy to forget that we still live on an island that’s still a rural place with a strong connection to its agricultural past.
And it’s that agricultural past that is largely responsible for most of the open lands that surround our urban areas. For that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generations of people who worked this land and those who continue to do so.
We still live in a place where the school bus I was following the other day on a back country road slowed to a crawl so the kids could get a good look at the new foal in a roadside pasture.
Lucky we live on Kauai!
• Jerry Ornellas is president of the Kauai County Farm Bureau.
