2008-09-19 TGREENWELLFARMS - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

WOODWARD: Well, the question I have then, it sounds more like this is a business arrangement than it is an arrangement for your farm, to be quite honest with you. And it seems like you are getting into the business of supplying Central American labor to other farmers in the community, making a profit from it. And you don’t really know how many of those people that may come in legally don’t leave. So there’re several problems I have. Maybe you can address that. GREENWELL: Okay. You know, actually, Greenwell Farms in the last two years started – or prior to that, we’d help other farmers pick their coffee. But we started a farm management program, and it kind of started accidentally; a lady from, a local lady, moved to the mainland, her farm was not being taken care of, and she asked us if we’d help her, a 14-acre farm. And so we started going there, we cleaned it up, and she’s very pleased with it. Since then we have about, off the top of my head, I think 15 active farms that we are maintaining. For Kawakami’s – he’s 85 years old, you see, he no can already – that’s seven acres. We have a gal that’s up in the Honaunau area; she is physically impaired, we are taking care of her farm. We have some elderly people up in the other side of Holualoa area. Basically, we saw a need here. If we are going to keep ag really going, we have to keep these people farming their land. Otherwise, they are going to turn into just waste. So we decided this is the reason why we are going for the Special Use Permit (sic), so we can work these other farms that we are managing. WOODWARD: So you’ve created essentially a farm management corporation. Is that right? GREENWELL: Yeah, I guess. MELROSE: Just let me add another element to that. And that is that the real core business of the Greenwell Farms is to have their own farms and their own family farms that they do manage and manage others, but the core business is in the processing of coffee; they are not unlike a number of other sizable coffee processors who take and buy cherry from lots of other farmers, provide that market collection place, and then they dry, roast, and deliver and market that product under the Greenwell Farms name. So a big portion of the business model is in taking that coffee both what they manage and what people sell to them and putting it into other places in order to secure that flow of coffee, being able to create the relationship and secure the farms, you know, farming of the other farmers that that’s what makes this business plan work for them. And I think they’ve done so in a very responsible way as a partner and brought the industry an understanding that really this is about taking responsibility for labor circumstance that, one, already exists; there are 1,000 people in this region today coming in and doing that. Greenwell has simply stepped forward and said, well, we want to do it the right way, we want to be responsible in the way we are doing it, and we want to go through the rules and get the permits and do things that are necessary. So under the general tone that no good deed goes unpunished, I can imagine there will be things we have to deal with as a result of that. But there’s a lot of intention to try and do it in the right way, and that’s what this is an effort to do. WATANABE: Mr. Housel. EXHIBIT B 10