This summer, Kona coffee farmers will have a new tool in the fight against coffee berry borer.
Legislation was approved last year to give farmers $500,000 in subsidies for spray. However, House Bill 1514 had to be tweaked this past session to include the manpower needed to put the aid into play. Once it’s in effect after the yearlong delay, it will be the third subsidy available from the state to farmers of the island’s signature crop.
With the passage of a new bill creating a position and a yearly salary and benefits package worth $75,000 for a temporary manager for the program, the subsidies should now gain traction, said Scott Enright, chairman of the state Department of Agriculture. The funds will be available to farmers until 2019 and will cover 75 percent of the cost of the spray until June 2016, and 50 percent after that.
Enright said the fight against CBB will go on, with continued HDOA grants to fund research at the University of Hawaii and a push next month for more federal funding at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture.
“Every coffee growing region in the world has CBB; it now becomes a matter of controlling it,” Enright said. “We want to contain it where it is, on the Big Island. It is also now on Oahu, and the growers on Kauai and Maui would like it to not spread there.”
As coffee growers planned their budgets for the coming years, some were wondering why the subsidy wasn’t yet available. The matter was subject of discussion at the last meeting of the board of the Kona Coffee Farmers Association.
The funding that farmers have not been able to access up to this point will not be lost, Enright said.
The spray is not cheap. A gallon of the pesticide runs $190, and the organic version is $280, said Bruce Corker, a Holualoa coffee farmer. The annual cost to treat a 4-acre orchard — the typical size for a Kona coffee farm — is around $2,000, Corker said. The spray’s active ingredient is a fungus that takes a heavy toll on the beetle.
The two other grant-funded subsidy programs available to coffee farmers over the past couple of years have been complicated and offered varying rates to farmers, Corker said.
“What was important about H.B. 1514 was that it mandated and funded a subsidy program to be directly administered by the HDOA — something that makes practical sense and should have been implemented four years ago when CBB was discovered here,” Corker said.