Seeds Of Wellbeing - SOW

Ep 61. Hawaii's Ag Legislation Hunter

• Jim Crum / Hunter Heaivilin • Season 4 • Episode 1

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 41:17

Many Hawaii agriculture producers we speak with feel stressed and a bit confused by the workings of politics and the bills in the legislature. They want to see important changes happen, but are unclear what agriculture-related bills may be in session, or how individuals can be more involved to help things change. In this episode we speak with Hunter Heaivilin, Hawaii Farmers Union’s Advocacy Director and founder of Supersistence to try to get a handle on the state of things in early 2026 and what folks can do to help impact the changes they want to see.

Brought to you by University of Hawaii College of Tropical Ag. and Human Resilience (CTAHR), and the Seeds of Well-being (SOW) Project. This podcast is supported by the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hawaii Department of Agriculture.

Resources:

Find out more about us:

Human Resilience, our funders or any of the organizations The views, information or opinions expressed in this affiliated with this project. Welcome to a Seeds of Wellbeing"Experts in the Field" podcast episode are solely those of the individuals involved, and do featuring Hawaii agriculture producers and affiliates working in their field of expertise to support agriculture in Hawaii, in the United States and in some cases around the world. These podcasts are made possible by a grant from the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, also known as CTAHR, and the Seeds of Wellbeing or SOW project, and is supported by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and My research now looks at the interface of global systems, Agriculture, and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. global market systems in particular, and Hawaii's agri-food system development, and how that shapes and reshapes the risk that we face in our food system, particularly harkening back to that initial intrigue, or that initial motivation of, what if the ship stopped coming, but now looking at it from a much, many, many more lenses than just believing that planting in my garden might make the change I wish to see. Many Hawaii agriculture producers we speak with feel stressed and a bit confused by the workings of politics and the bills in the legislature. They want to see important changes happen, but are unclear what agriculture related bills may be in session or how individuals can be more involved to help things change. In this episode, we speak with Hunter Heaivilin, Hawaii Farmer Union's Advocacy Director and founder of Supersistence, to try to get a handle on the state of things in early 2026 and what folks can do to help impact the changes they want to see. Aloha. Welcome to another Seeds of Wellbeing "Experts in the Field" podcast. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Hunter Heaivilin from Supersistence, among other things. I think of Hunter as kind of the person I reach out to if I have any questions or want updates about legislative issues that impact Hawaii ag producers, but let's hear from Hunter. Hunter, introduce yourself and say hi and let me know, or let us know what you think is your role and and your function in Hawaii ag or in Hawaii? Sure, yeah. So yeah, happy to be here, Jim. Thank you for having me. As you said, I'm Hunter Heaivilin. I think of myself as an agricultural planner and increasingly, a policy consultant. I have a consulting firm called Supersistence that I've has been my container for all manner of consulting efforts for the past 15 plus years, I think. And that's really run the gamut from garden design, school garden education, a lot of primary research data analysis and increasingly, a lot of policy work. And so one of my long standing professional roles and as a consultant has been supporting the Hawaii Farmers Union as the Advocacy Director, where I do all of our government relations work and some of the outreach with our membership, trying to understand emerging issues. And some cases, maybe we could say some new takes on long standing issues to inform our policy platform. And then I represent us at the state legislature as a lobbyist each year, and increasingly dabble in some of the county and federal federal work as well. And I can put a link to your website in the show notes. I'll put links in general that in the show notes, which folks can can get a lot more details about you on your website. There's some great info there, and it shows, I think it illustrates, your history well, of what you've done over the years. But what got you to this point? Specifically, it seems like it's an interesting choice that you've made, and you could have made a lot of different choices and a lot of forks in the road. So what got you here? Yeah, I see, I guess my my professional work and my academic work have long been intertwined. So I grew up here in Hawaii, mostly on Oahu, some on the Big Island, and in my time here, spends a lot of time outdoors and Boy Scout, hiking, hunting and spending time in our wonderful natural environments. And I think as I was finishing high school and looking at kind of what sort of impacts and how I wanted to live in the world, the interest in I think what I now term, kind of radical self sufficiency came about the long standing narratives of, you know, if the boats stopped coming, our food import dependence and so forth, pushed me towards an interest in, you know, what could be seen as like a back the land style movement. And certainly my years, years on the Big Island, found many, many compatriots and good friends interested in similar things, and so from that interest grew participation in the permaculture movement and permaculture design. So I ended up taking a permaculture design course, and that really got me fired up. I was, pretty much, from the outset, just taken with the notion of working with the intersection of, I guess what I now term, sort of landscape architecture, sustainable agriculture and community development. So for those who might not be familiar, permaculture design approaches the really kind of a human centered design that really tries to take into account through an ethical set of ethical lenses of Earth care, care for people, and resource redistribution, or fair distribution of resources that tries to bring in components from indigenous agriculture, perennial agricultures and a variety of other systems that needed to be integrated to sustain to sustain people in a given place. So this could be waste management, water resources, economic systems, and even beginning to focus on social structures. So after many years of working as a permaculture educator, as a designer, both in Hawaii as well as an international development contexts, I oriented my education to follow kind of a similar track. So I ended up doing my associate's degree at Hawaii Community College there in Hilo, in the Tropical Forest Ecosystem and Agroforestry Management program. I was really actually transferred from a bachelor's program at Manoa to that program, just out of the fascination and intrigue with agroforestry and complex production systems and that work in, I guess, what I now think of as kind of site design gave way to a bachelor's in sustainable community development with a interest. And my, my guess I call my thesis there looking at the intersection of disaster risk reduction and permaculture design really informed by my work in disaster response in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 and looking at other ways that this design lens could inform how we can wield natural systems to reduce risk and to have natural systems ideally play a role in sustaining us through crises, not just blue sky periods. So that went from kind of the ecosystem to the the site design, if you will, to where, you know, social structures beginning to integrate. And then I pursued a master's degree at University of Hawaii Manoa in the Urban and Regional Planning Program, and again, did a another focus in disaster management and their Disaster Management Humanitarian Assistance certificate. My research at the time was really starting to get a little bit more more spatial at a broader scale than just an individual site. So my capstone project for my planning degree looked at the spatial extent of the potential for urban agriculture in the primary urban center of Honolulu. So started to kind of interface with what are some of the permaculture parlance, the invisible structures, if you will, the regulatory systems, the zoning rules and otherwise that were potentially acting as barriers could be wielded as supports for building a more productive urban area. And subsequent to my master's program, I enrolled in the Geography and Environment Department at UH, where I'm now a PhD candidate looking, hopefully to finish my dissertation this semester, because the University has concluded it would be high time for me to get out of here, which I agree You were actually working on your your doctorate this morning, weren't you? I'm, yes, so I apologize if the academic language slips in a little too much, but my research focuses on, you know, again, kind of that graduating scales that somewhat intentionally years ago, put into my my academic track is that my research now looks at the interface of global systems, global market systems in particular, and Hawaii's agri-food system development, and how that shapes and reshapes the risk that we face in our food system. Particularly, you know, harkening back to that initial intrigue, or that initial motivation of, what if the ships stopped coming, but now looking at it from a much, many, many more lenses than just believing that planting in my garden might make the change I wish to see. Right? Or just having a community garden in Honolulu, it's not actually going to be enough, right? Yeah, and, well, I think it's I think sometimes I maybe get too critical about one strategy or another, especially as I maybe depart one filling my life for a different tack. But increasingly view these as all of these activities, you know, as strategies. And that there is, there is no real silver bullet and the world and its systems are increasingly complex, and so having a bevy of solutions at our disposal and things that are accessible to a wide variety of community members is important. Yes, I was hoping you would just give us a magic bullet and we could fix it in the next couple of weeks, but... Yeah, but once the dissertation is done, that'll be it, yeah, just so as long as somebody wants to read the read a book, Okay, your business card says you're a Political Agroecologist. Is that right? Oh, yeah, I think it's got a few things, few things on there. Like my website, my business card is sort of a long, maybe a vestigial thing. It's got a few things listed on there. So Political Agroecology, so sort of a variant on the field of political ecology, which looks at the politics of people and place. And so as a geographer, I'm really looking at the way that people landscapes interact, how they shape one another, and the political ecology lens. Then layers in, what are the politics? What are the power structures that frame and constrain activities and different actors within, you know, those relationships? So the appending of the agro portion in there really draws upon agro-ecology, which sometimes referred to as, you know, the science of sustainable food systems. And so I think of my work not just coming from a critical lens of a political ecologist, but also coming to some degree, from a from a given perspective, and that being that my work is focused on the transition to sustainable food systems through policy and the mechanisms that govern the power and the resource distribution for agriculture and food, That sounds equally complex to me. What can you offer for Hawaii ag producers related to politics and perhaps how to stay on top of things, how to participate, how to help make changes that they want to see happen in the legislature. Yeah, big question I'll answer bit by bit. So I guess in my role as the Advocacy Director with Hawaii Farmers Union, the Farmers Union, you know, as a as a chapter of the National Farmers Union, which is the longest running farm membership organization in the United States, has long had three pillars of cooperation, education and legislation, or maybe taking a turn now towards framing it as advocacy. The cooperation piece has has been a key mechanism that brought farmers together in communities across the country to collectively address, you know what issues that may have otherwise been experienced individually, Right? So this could be insurance. This could be inputs, this could be marketing, and that's a key mechanism that has brought people together. Fortunately, once you have a lot of people together talking about what their issues are, at some point, you know, the market mechanisms that are out there may not be the only thing that needs to be addressed, and that's where the legislation or the advocacy work really comes in. And so with auwai Farmers Union, we have 16 chapters across the islands, and that robust membership affords an opportunity for me to go and learn from you know producers all over all over the islands about what it is that they're facing, what it is that they're trying to address in their community. What are the emergent issues? And there are many, I think, as any agricultural producer knows whether it's invasive species, market and lack of market information. In a asymmetries and access to water and land resources, or maybe some forms of state subsidy. There are myriad opportunities. Or I could say there are myriad reasons to weigh in with with your local government, with your state government, with your federal government. I think part of what's what's really interesting, and looking at some of the data from the last legislative session Hawaii Farmers Union, in my role, we're one of the more active lobbying organizations in the state, as was the Hawaii Farm Bureau. And I think it begs the question of, why is it that agriculture, and a state that has robust history of of agriculture in varying forms. Why is it that agricultural entities need to be so active? And I think it speaks to the structure of the structure and the headwinds that many agricultural operations face, right? We are have a, not a quickly growing land base. I don't know if anybody's planning on farming Lōʻihi anytime soon. Think it'll be a while. So land is not expanding, water resources, and those land resources have long been consolidated under a few interests, both public and private, and the legacy of plantation agriculture has a state largely focused on certain scales of production that don't necessarily represent the broadest diversity of agricultural operations that we have. And so when we look at the history of capital, agrarian capitalism and capital and agriculture, there tends to be a asymmetry of power distribution, I could say again, apology for the academic language. Been working on my dissertation all morning. Sounds very politic to me as well, the way you phrase it. Yeah, I think part of it right is that I, you know, I came from school gardens and permaculture design and growing, you know, growing all my own and this desire to have a kind of white knuckle grip on my own means of production and processing and all of that. And as anybody who's in the field knows, you know, building it all yourself ain't easy. And I think as I went through my education, it gave me a different appreciation for the status quo. Not an apologism, but a maybe an empathy for the difficulty of building and maintaining complex social and infrastructure systems while trying to navigate questions of equity and who should benefit. And so I view, you know, the opportunity to weigh in in political work as trying to combat, maybe the the inevitable inequities in power that come from having a large land base or having a large capital base and trying to ensure that state subsidies in particular are oriented towards those who embrace what, again and apologetically academic language, embrace what could be seen as labor intensive agriculture versus capital intensive agriculture, right? And so many of the small holders and family farms across the islands don't, aren't, do not have a fund backing their activities. They don't have necessarily even a large labor base at home or even within their community based off of land rents and housing costs and all the other things that have shifted who participates in agriculture. Let's, let's get a little more specific, related to legislation and and what's going on in 2026 what may be of interest to Hawaii ag producers. And so what's going on? Yes, a lot is going on. We are just a couple weeks into the legislative session. So if you're just listening to the podcast, my hair is even grayer than it was two weeks ago. The currently, there's over 5000 bills this session. Every year, I go through and make a list, what I always hope is a short list, and what always ends up being a very, very long list of bills. I think in the tracker that we have set up, there are about 400 that I'm keeping an eye on. Many of those will drop off soon. There are bills carried over from the first year of the fiscal biennium. So every two years, the legislature operates for bills introduced in the first year will tend to get will get carried over in the second. So a number of those quickly will hopefully fall to the wayside and I'll have a little bit less to track. But we have a list of priorities. So if you go to HFUUHI.org/policy, we can share that link to you, I've set up a dashboard that shows the long list of those, you know, hundreds of measures, the top priorities. And those priorities are framed, I guess I could say, by my outreach to our chapters over the past year, and then our membership gets together at a convention, and in that meeting and convention, we actually have a prioritization process. So this year, we use something called quadratic voting, which, the prior year, I employed a tool called ranked choice voting. So essentially being able to set the order of priorities, the quadratic voting essentially allows you to place an order and a weight. So it allows me and our legislative committee to get a sense from that membership who were there. Of you know, this is number one, this is number two. But how close is number one to number two? And what came out of the last convention was a strong interest in agricultural housing. So there are a couple measures carried over from last year, slightly modified, that are to create an agricultural workforce housing working group that would have Hawaii Farmers Union, Hawaii Farm Bureau and others, working together with other parties to understand what some of the hurdles are, what some of we could say the political barriers, be they zoning, be they other forms of regulatory oversight that are frustrating the ability for an agricultural workforce to be housed and rates that make it likely that they want to stay in agricultural workforce, and my hope is that this would also explore what some of the regulatory hurdles may be for just living on farm, particularly in private property, because public land asset management is a whole other issue, and there are other bills related to that. So that was our number one priority for the year. There are some other long standing issues. We've been advocating for a healthy soils program within the state for the past half a decade. This is following in line with some of the work that I do with the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, which we joined after having been advocating for it in Hawaii for about a year or so. And that is a network of organizations across the country that have either successfully or are continuing to advocate for Healthy Soils programs within their state, of which there are a number of states that have programs that already run this. Are these types of of efforts, really? I view it as being a complement to the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service incentive programs, right? So many states run these as various forms of incentive. Currently, Hawaii does have a compost reimbursement program, which was a pilot that then passed into being a permanent program that's housed within the Department of Agriculture. We had advocated as well and successfully to create a cover crop pilot program that unfortunately was never promulgated by the state, despite it passing into law and having funds allocated for it. So there are, hopefully, in the coming years, going to be more programs like compost reimbursement program, like a cover crop reimbursement program and other forms of incentive to help coax folks into the world of regenerative, sustainable, however you want to frame it, conservation agriculture, or ideally, as well, help support folks who are already internalizing these environmental costs of agricultural production. And we want to make the state's commitment to viable and healthy natural resources enshrined in some ways in our state constitution, something that is actually acted upon. And I view Healthy Soils program as one, one mechanism to do so. And talking on a zoom the other day, where you were talking about the state of the bills and the legislature, and I saw that you make that available. The Farmers Union makes that available to non members as well as members. It sounds like the website that you mentioned earlier is available to anyone? Correct, anybody can go, go there and see what it is that I'm tracking and weighing in on and every three weeks or so during the session, and immediately thereafter, I'll be hosting a webinar, giving a whole rundown, a breathless 30 minutes of trying to summarize the, you know, dozens to hundreds of bills that are moving. And then there's a Q&A where I give myself a break and drink some water and then get a chance to respond to questions from from whoever happens to show up. And so while it's framed as being, you know, a it's put on by the Hawaii Farmers Union, and certainly is to support our members, there's no, no requirement for membership to participate, though, we would hope that you would maybe at least induce one to consider the value of membership. And because that advocacy is certainly one of those things, and being able to represent ourselves as speaking on behalf of a growing base of the agricultural industry, here is a key mechanism for currying favor at the state capital. Yes, I'll definitely put the links in again, in the show notes and to the to the Zoom series that where you're giving the updates, if that's agreeable, if that's okay, yeah, that'd be great, yeah. And both on up the our policy web page, it has a link. Okay, great. We got it covered then. So you said there's 400 bills at the early stages. What does that whittle down to by the end? Well, it varies year over year. In any given year, I think it's around 10 to 12% pass it is a sprint and a marathon and a continuous exercise in hope. Yeah, it really varies. I mean, each year there's always some, you know, some positive outcomes. And we try to, try to grow the pie, year over year. Since I've been involved, it's been, you know, every year there's a reason, and usually a pretty good reason why there isn't a lot of funds available at the state to pursue new ideas or good ideas, whether it's COVID, Maui wildfires, the you could say, changes within our federal administration impacting state coffers. So there's a, you know, a fiscal reality that has to be considered if we're trying to effectively move policy forward. And that's part of the work of the legislative committee, you know, and it's also part of, part of my my role is to track some of those ins and outs of what's happening in terms of state budget, how that's going to influence the capacity for ideas to move forward at the capital. So, for example, while we advocated for the past five years to create a healthy soils program and fund it, the measures that we're looking at this year are mainly focused on just creating the container. Within this year, we're actually working with the climate commission to house something there, and then in future years, we can then pursue, you know, the establishing piloting, and then, ideally, the establishing of a variety of incentive programs. So that's part of the kind of the calculus of trying to get things across the finish line. Got it, and we actually spoke with NRCS. That was our last podcast for 2025 and and we heard what a tumultuous year it's been, politically and and funding wise, for them, and it has been for so many this past year. So what's the current climate of the legislature in Hawaii? Is there an impact on that I imagine? Yeah. I mean, not just on the aggregate, on the legislature, but there was a legislative briefing I participated in. It was a joint briefing, if I recall, with the Senate Agriculture and environment and judiciary committees in the summer or fall of last year. And I believe one of the stats that was put forward was that there was over $100 million lost to the agricultural sector, just to the agricultural sector, right? And this was in the form of a various various grants funding mechanisms supporting everything from climate smart commodities to regional food business centers and a variety of other efforts. So the the impacts cannot should not be understated. You know, this is a drastic change at the federal level, and it in many cases, is rolling back programs that have taken a long time to establish, and the potential harms of that are are are difficult to overstate. One example that I think is instructive is right here at home. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Hawaii decided to essentially decimate the Hawaii Agricultural Statistics Service. That entity had been in cooperation with USDA or federal entities for decades, and in some cases without even, I think, a whole lot of other federal support had been compiling market information within the islands. So through PASS and its precursors, I could tell you how many eggs were produced in the month of July 1952 on a given island, but with the removal of that service in 2008 it's difficult for me to tell you how many were produced in the state last year, and any of that accounting is largely done by the federal service, and while the state, Yeah, sorry when you said $100 million is is gone. Is that in Hawaii? That's just in Hawaii. Just in Hawaii. So, yeah, yeah. So other programs like that that are gone. Like, do you have any examples? of programs that are gone in Hawaii? Yeah, so the climate smart commodities program was one. There was a which was a partnership of a variety of entities stewarded out of out of UH. There was a regional food business center that Hawaii Good Food Alliance had been administering that had many entities in Hawaii, as well as other island jurisdictions under the United States, as well as Alaska. So 10s of millions of dollars just just in those programs loan, not to mention the whole slew of other smaller cuts and rollbacks. And so those rollbacks, you know, making the case that they are significant in terms of an individual program that gets cut, but when we see shifts in staffing availability, like has happened in a lot of USDA departments, we in Hawaii don't have to imagine what those effects are like, because we are currently living them right? The the state deciding to roll back our ag statistic service in 2008 means that we don't have good market intelligence today to inform effective farm planning. For the past few years, we've been advocating, and the Department of Agriculture has a bill again this year to reestablish, or, you know, expand, portions of that Agricultural Statistics Service, but all of the relationships that have been built up over decades, with enumerators out visiting with farms, having folks you know at the in their Rolodex and who are happy to take the call all that infrastructure is gone, and so you can imagine at the federal scale, then what the potential impacts can be long term, and how difficult it will be to rebuild some of these structures. Okay, well, now that I'm thoroughly depressed, There are some foils, though I've got. Well and you said it's an exercise in hope. I think I heard you say something to that effect. So what can we do that may give us hope or Hawaii ag producers, hope? Like, you know, I'm, like, about 75% of Hawaii ag producers, I'm small scale, you know, less than 10 acres, trying to do regenerative ag, trying to connect with the community, trying to maintain a foothold. But there are legislative issues that I think could be important to me to see pass. I mean, I can look at your portal, I can see what's going on with those bills. But can I take action? Should I give testimony? Should I get more involved? Like, what can I do? Yeah, all the above. You can check out that portal. I somewhat intentionally, well, half intentionally, didn't bore everyone bill numbers, and also, because there's 5000 of them swirling in my head, I haven't committed them to memory yet, but the opportunities to get engaged are many. You know, if you just want to to to bone up on what, what exactly is moving, we have emails that go out regularly, social media posts that share about some of those bills, and again, the webinar, webinars. In terms of taking action, weighing in, providing testimony and support, or put giving your two cents on a given bill that that website I mentioned, as well, the hfuhi.org/policy has a bit of a very succinct, or I attempted to be succinct, overview of you know how to get signed up at the legislature to provide testimony. So that's one mechanism. I think, as you mentioned, you know, connecting with your community is another, right? And so we have chapters across the islands. They have meetings with varying cadences and community events and potlucks and trainings and speakers and movies and all manner of of activities. And while you know, everyone is never short of things to do, notifications that are, you know, vying for our attention, I think the relationship building within your community is really the fundament of of not just political action, but of good social action, then really may be the fundamental society overall, right and and that I see as the foil or the the opportunity that that really comes clearer into focus, particularly as challenges to our democracy rise, that having good community relationships, I think, is again and again being highlighted as a mechanism, as a critical mechanism for building whatever can resist some of those changes and build, and surely is a critical mechanism in building whatever comes next. So I think the you know, political advocacy side of it, ideally is something that no one has to do alone, right? I'm not doing this in a vacuum. We've got membership all over the islands. We've got interested folks all over the islands, and it really is trying to leverage the those relationships and the understanding and the care that people have for their communities is what informs, you know, my role and this work of the Hawaii Farmers Union, Yeah, so it sounds like start local, get involved, and then hopefully it will grow from there, right? Very much. And that's that's really the ethos that comes from from the national level, too. I can say, having attended a couple of our national conventions, it is chicken skin. It is just heartwarming and awe inspiring. It's awe inspiring being in the room with folks who have dedicated their lives to working with their communities, farmers from every you know, corner of of the country, who have committed themselves to not just farm production, but to environmental management and to social betterment of their themselves and their peers and their communities. And so I think that real there's the the Thursday meeting when you've already had a long day is rarely a grand rarely glimmers in one's calendar, but the relationships that are built there are the sinews that that afford us the strength to make change. And one of them, one of the mechanisms as well, that we are looking at this year in terms of bills, is is the cooperative side of things. So Hawaii cooperative laws have been in the books for some time, and we're allowed consumer cooperatives and agricultural cooperatives. However, we don't have a general cooperative law that's as flexible as what many other states have already have implemented, so we're seeking to update that, as well as have been in discussion about what some local cooperative development might look like on behalf of the farmers union itself. And I view the cooperatives as being such a perfect example of, you know, an expression of the values of this organization and of so many of the folks who are involved in smallholder and family farm agriculture, right? It's, it's about a good environment that's safe for everybody, with healthy food and an economic system that benefits the many. And so yeah, we've spoken, we've spoken with the Ulu Co-Op. Oh, great, yes. And I think you've done work with them, perhaps? I've done some work with them that we're, you know, compatriots on this cooperative bill, and I've also worked with them in the food hub network. And so that's, you know, I think another great example of the type of social organizational infrastructure, the food hub hui itself actually, was, was supported that sort of initial coordination through the Farmers Union, as were the creation of a couple of different food hubs across the islands, and so viewing that as a collective infrastructure that increasingly, as they've grown in their capacity, I view as as really trying to bridge the, we could say, the small parcel size and the increasingly global market that one has to compete against. We thank Hunter for taking time in his very busy schedule to talk with us about his work to move the needle for Hawaii agriculture and help Hawaii Farmers Union and others track and advocate for legislation that's important to local agriculture producers. Use the links in the show notes to learn more, connect with others and perhaps find ways to make a difference and have your voice heard. Any closing comments you want to make to Hawaii, AG, producers, I hope that the work that we do on behalf that the Farmers Union does, on behalf of its members, on behalf of the Hawaii agricultural sector, is something that's impactful, something that approaches the kind of impact that farmers are making every day, in their in their fields and in their in their families and in their communities. So if any of this has piqued your interest, please don't hesitate. Reach out our way. You can join up with your local chapter. You can weigh in on a bill of interest, you can lend an ear during one of our webinars, or pipe up with questions that are relevant to you and your community, and that's that's really what we're here for. So yeah, appreciate the opportunity to share some of my takes. Get a little respite from my dissertation, and I'll be dashing off the legislature here shortly, so thank you so much. The intention of these podcast series is to create a safe space for a respectful and inclusive dialog with people from across a broad and diverse spectrum involved in growing and making accessible the food we share together. A diversity of voices, perspectives and experiences can serve to deepen mutual understanding, to spark creative problem solving and provide insight into the complexities of our agriculture system. If you, our listeners have experiences with Hawaii agriculture ecosystem, from indigenous methods, permaculture, small holder farmers to large including multinational agricultural industrial companies and everywhere in between. And you would like to share your story. Please contact us. We welcome your voices and perspectives.