Maui News NRXINTRC.HTM
Author: Richard Allen

# The Maui News

## OFF DEADLINE

#### HARRY EAGAR

Tuesday, June 27, 2000

It turns out there may be free lunch after all, at least if you are a cow on Oahu.

You may think, so what? But for those of us who would like to see Maui continue as a farming community, there's a lesson in lunch.

The national and California governments pay big bucks to raise Mediterranean fruit flies in Waimanalo. The boys are then sterilized by radiation, and up to 300 million federal flies (plus huge numbers of state flies) are shipped to California each week.

There they are expected to mate with fertile wild females (if any have penetrated quarantine) and interrupt the breeding cycle.

Fruit flies are little buggahs, but 300 million a week ain't hay. It's corn and wheat -- 6 tons a day of leftover corn cobs, wheat bran, wheat germ, sugar and yeast from feeding the flies.

The federal growing facility has been paying $100,000 a year (and California a similar amount) to dispose of the spent fly chow, though the stuff looked palatable for cows, especially since, as Eric Jang of the Agricultural Research Service notes, cows are not finicky eaters. They will happily consume up to 7 pounds per day of dry Portland cement powder, for example (a cheap source of calcium for milkers).

The problem, says Jang, is that the government is leery of endorsing just anything for feed for animals producing meat and milk. The heptachlor problem on Oahu decades ago has not faded from memory.

So for years, the leftover fly feed was either dumped in a landfill, sent to a nearby biomass converter or taken by pig farmers.

The converter business bothered the neighbors, the dumping charge kept rising and the arrangement with the pig farmers was just casual.

So Jang, a nutritionist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Hilo, and Harvey Chan (since retired) collaborated with University of Hawaii entomologists led by James Carpenter to make sure that nothing toxic was produced in the spent food by the flies -- many of whose tiny corpses remain behind.

No poisons were found, and ``the really neat thing,'' says Jang, is that the insect parts enhanced the protein in the feed, up to 28 percent.

The federal facility alone produces 12,000 pounds a day of spent fly chow, enough to replace perhaps 10 percent to 15 percent of the expensive imported feed Hawaii ranchers use. (The lack of local, affordable supplies of high-protein feed was one reason Haleakala Dairy had to close its doors.)

An Oahu rancher who is feeding his beef cattle on fly chow is very happy with the results, Jang says, but now that fly chow is proven safe, there are even more lucrative possibilities open.

The stuff probably could be pelletized and sold to aquaculturists, as koi chow.

For a long time, says Jang, it was cheaper to dispose of spent fly chow than to go through the tedious and unprofitable work of finding a use for it.

But imaginative techniques, he suggests, are going to have to be found more and more if Hawaii agriculture is to thrive. (At least Hawaii's insect breeding program produces mild plant wastes; in Texas, the government raises trillions of sterile screwworm larvae on an astonishing daily input of pork lungs, which otherwise would end up in Vienna sausage. Jang says he doesn't know how the Texans dispose of screwworm chow, but the cost must be high.)

And the future will not depend merely on on-farm innovations. Doug MacCluer, the farming manager at Maui Pineapple Co., points to thousands of acres of former cane land on the west side that are ``just blowing away.''

A crop needs to be found for that land. That will not be easy, but whatever it turns out to be, it won't be like sugar or canned pineapple, which can take a slow boat to market.

That produce will have to be flown out, and MacCluer says the Kahului Airport runway needs to be lengthened and strengthened for that. (Which would also benefit Maui Pine's fresh fruit business.)

Alternatively, the abandoned acres on the west side might be slowly restored to the native dry forest that was there before pipi (cattle) were allowed to run wild. They trampled the native forest, causing a visitor to Lahaina in 1845 to observe that the town ``beats anyplace in the world for dust.''

Sugar and irrigation laid the dust after 1860, but it came back with a vengeance earlier this year.

Nobody has proven that a native dry forest can be regrown, but Rene Sylva, whose opinions on native plants carry great weight, tells me, ``It can. It can.''

I'd like to see the county, Amfac, Kamehameha Schools, the Department of Land and Natural Resources, the West Maui Taxpayers Association and the Native Hawaiian Plant Society start a small experiment along that line.

##### Harry Eagar is a staff writer for The Maui News. ``Off Deadline'' is a weekly column that allows staff members an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on issues of the day, or to just talk story.