2016-02-22 Game Managemetn Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes—February 22, 2016 ?: Kawika —former president of Big Island Resource and Conservation [unclear] Council VII. Discussion: 1. Jeno Enocencio, Board Member of Meat Slaughter unit of the Hawaii Island Meat Corporation in promotion of a Mobile Slaughter Unit for the benefit of Ranchers, Farmers, and Political Divisions such as DHHL. JE: And his dream was basically to accommodate a lot of the small producers of meat, ah, you know, whether it be sheep, goats, pigs, ah, cattle and, you know, try to alleviate some of the tensions between the producers and the big time ranchers and stuff like that and try to accommodate the — with this mobile slaughter unit. And we got a video presentation —well not a video presentation — it's a slide show— Powerpoint—there's some video involved here — but maybe Mike would like to give a little bit background before we start that. MA: Yeah, so, um, so basically, as I alluded to before, this is a public project— it's been completely funded by grants that have come from either USDA or Hawaii Department of Agriculture, um, and quite a few other county grants that we've received as well, so, we've been pretty successful in actually being able to present a very compelling business case for this. So on the funding part —there's a very heightened sense of obligation back to the community—that this is a service that has to be put in place for usage of the community— which set up a coop structure that owns and manages the unit and members of the community are able to buy into the coop — it's a very low investment to come in and it's also refundable if they chose to leave the coop at any point. So the effective cost of being a member of the coop on an annual basis is $100 bucks and with that it's —the whole intention behind this is the promotion of small scale livestock agriculture on the island —getting agricultural lands back into active production and enabling this at a sufficiently low entry point so that beginning farmers, 4-H students — can actually have a chance at being able to raise a few animals — understand — begin to learn the business and then over time begin to start developing into larger operations if they so chose to go down that path. It also is an entry point for members of the community who are already in ranching but want to do specialty types of products that are very hard for the larger facilities to handle because, um, many of the certifications require a complete segregation from all other processing. So with a unit like this we're actually able to accommodate a lot of that and provide a path to market that simply doesn't exist for most of the smaller scale producers that are on the island. So we've had several years of planning — putting together a very detailed feasibility study for this. I've worked with the UH Agro-business incubator program to come up w ith a 4