hawaii

On a recent cool, crisp spring morning in the mountains of Virginia, the Boy Scouts of America Troop 88 followed in the footsteps of the first “boys” of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC.

The first CCC camp, Camp Roosevelt, was established April 17, 1933 at the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest. Over time, the forest had 14 camps.

Family adversity brought Sam Pesina back home to his family’s Fresno County, Calif., farm.  But it was the love of farming that kept him.

“When my dad got bone marrow cancer, there was never any question that I would return home,” said Pesina. “My dad wouldn’t have trusted anyone else [to run the farm].” So he packed his bags, glanced back at the 12 years he spent in Hawaii working in finance and starting his own mortgage brokerage company, and headed back to Orange Cove to care for his father and the farm he grew up on.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

Many teachers use creative methods to keep their students engaged in the curriculum they are teaching. Some methods work far better than others. For one group in Hawaii, teachers are using gardening to boost their science, technology and math classes, while placing an emphasis on Hawaii’s need for more experiential science learning related to agriculture and sustainability.

On the southwest coast of the big island of Hawai‘i, USDA is partnering with Kona Pacific Public Charter School on a project to restore eight acres of land to the ancient Kona Field System of agriculture and then use traditional cultivation techniques to produce traditional foods for students and the community.

A Forest Service research team has received a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program to begin research using sophisticated topographic models to identify areas within dry forests that have the most potential for ecological restoration.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

When America’s farmers and ranchers traveled from the U.S. mainland to the Aloha state for the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention in early January, they had the opportunity to taste the joys of Hawaiian agriculture – some of the most diverse and specialized in our nation.

Hawaii Exports International (HEI) of Honolulu has successfully introduced its award-winning Kona and Ka’u coffees to the Canadian market with the support of USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) office in Canada, the FAS-funded Western U.S. Agricultural Trade Association (WUSATA), and the Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA).

This month a Brazilian beetle, tested for years by the U.S. Forest Service, is being released in Hawaii to hopefully devourer a non-native fruit known as strawberry guava. Though it sounds delicious, this colorful plant is invading and threatening Hawaii’s native forests and watersheds and has already overtaken hundreds of thousands of acres on the archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Today’s  White House’s release of the report, Policy Framework for the 21^st Century Grid: Enabling Our Secure Energy Future, provides a path toward modernization of the electric grid and can help make our electric system more efficient by investing in technologies that can transform utility infrastructure.

A case in point is the Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC). Currently, diesel generators provide approximately 90 percent of KIUC’s electric power. The island of Kauai has no interconnections with other power systems. So to meet demand, the utility must generate all of its power.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.