What Should I Grow?
Several times a week I get asked the question: “What should I grow?”
There are so many ways to answer. Some answers are trite but true, like ”Grow what you like to eat and what you can”. Other answers include a quick list of wanted plants: basil, beans, peaches, potatoes and on and on. Some of these could be grown here in Hawai‘i, depending on your elevation, rainfall, soil, etc., and others….well, not so easily.
Usually, I answer with a set of questions, the first and most important being, “Why?” There is no wrong answer, but the more deeply and honestly this question is answered, the better the choice of crops will be. People often have several reasons for growing plants, sometimes at cross purposes to each other. For example, a person may want to buy a farm, put in a large garden to become self sufficient, improve their health and make $2000/month land or mortgage payments. The self-sufficiency and health crops may have a very different agroeconomic profile than the profit-making crops. For self-sufficiency, the crop value may be measured in meals per hour and reliability of the harvest. Crops that fit this bill include bananas, breadfruit, coconut, squash and yams. These crops provide high food value for low care or time allotment. They may sell, but not at a high dollar per hour value.
To earn $2000 per month off the garden, high dollar value per work hour crops need to be grown. These include crops such as tomatoes, lettuce and specialty vegetables. The reason they are high value is they are not as easy to grow. They will require skilled labor and equipment.
To grow high dollar value crops a person needs to answer a detailed set of questions that basically creates an agricultural business and marketing plan. Questions like “How much land is available to grow on? How much time do you have for the project or how much labor can you afford to hire? How much money can you invest before getting a return? What rate of return is expected from your total outlays? What is your horticultural skill level? What business experience do you have?” These questions need to be answered.
This eventually boils down to whether a person has the time, money, and skills to match their expectations and therefore be able to keep their promise to the market.
There is a continuum of plants to consider. The easiest would be plants that already grow wild and just need to be marketed. Passion vine fruit (lilikoi) is an example of this type of plant. The hardest may be tomatoes or strawberries. Passion vine once established requires no fertilizer, no pest control, and no weeding . . . just harvest what falls.
Tomatoes require daily attention and an almost monk-like routine of pruning, feeding, watering, spraying, adjusting temperature, changing varieties with the season and much more. They are grown in highly controlled greenhouse environments. Strawberries require bird protection, mold sprays, slug control, pest controls, and most of all backbreaking constant picking.
A person can care more for a passion vine and get greater yields or care less for a tomato and get lower yields. How a crop is grown, can be considered a horticultural system. The horticultural system you design, the quality of the labor (especially your own) in terms of skill and efficiency and the knowledge of your customers determine your dollar per hour wage.
In that sense, the answer to the question of “What should I grow?” can be answered by knowing how many meals per hour or how many dollars per hour you are willing to work for. And whether you are willing to expend the resources needed to create a quality horticultural system.
Tane Datta grows certified organic crops on a 7.5 acre farm in Honaunau, Hawai’i. He is on the crop advisory council for the Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) and is a commissioner for the Mayor’s Agricultural Committee on Hawai’i Island. He is an environmentalist dedicated to ecological community development. Tane and his wife, Maureen, run Adaptations Inc., a 100% local foods distributor. Adaptations Inc. distributes island-grown produce to over 60 hotels, restaurants, and health food stores on all the islands, and also through a CSA called Fresh Feasts on Hawai’i Island. Adaptations buys produce from over 100 local farms. Adaptations, Inc. can be reached at 808-328-9044, or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.