That’s made many who support pesticide use, including local farmers, reluctant to speak on the record. The result often advantages one side of the debate: While it’s likely you have heard or seen people protesting pesticide use on the North Shore, the voices of some of the individuals most closely involved in agriculture are rarely heard.

 

Many of the advocates of pesticide use we reached out to didn’t respond, but Hōʻā reached Miller, Jeff Scott and Boyd Ready through social media and met the trio at the Coffee Gallery in Haleiwa one afternoon.

 

“Some farmers that I know said that residents called the Department of Agriculture and complain if they even see a sprayer.  The residents sometimes fear that they are being poisoned when they are hundreds of yards away,” said Jeff Scott, a research scientist for Western Pacific Seeds, a small seed company based on the North Shore.

 

Like Miller, Scott supports genetically modified organisms and pesticide use.

 

“Speaking as a professional horticulturist, plant breeder and geneticist, and having started my career as an organic gardener, I’m completely dumbfounded that organic gardening has not embraced biotechnology and genetic engineering,” Scott said. “Because it solves problems without using toxins.”

 

Miller has been with the North Shore Chamber of Commerce, a non-profit organization, for 17 years. For many of those, she served as the Chamber’s Executive Director. DuPont, Pioneer and Monsanto have made donations to the Chamber of Commerce over the years.

 

She moved to Waialua as a child over fifty years ago. Back then, the town was home to the Waialua Sugar Company, which employed many residents.

 

“There was a Facebook posting where the individual was saying, ‘This isn’t the community that I grew up in,’" Miller said. “Basically lamenting the fact that we have these chemical companies in our community. I replied to that person saying, ‘You are absolutely right. This isn’t the same community.’” Miller said seed companies have been here since 1968.

 

“What has changed is there has been a persistent campaign against the seed companies,” Miller said. “Directly, I believe, from a movement that is funded by organic and I also heard, people who want to get [agricultural] lands for other uses. The other thing that has changed is that we have a lot of newcomers into our community, people who have had absolutely no connection with agriculture whatsoever.”

 

Miller thinks that most of the controversy was generated following an incident of pesticide exposure at Waimea Canyon Middle School on Kaua‘i in 2008. Students were evacuated from the school due to possible pesticide exposure, prompting the Department of Health to work with the University of Hawai‘i to conduct tests of the air around the school. In summary, the study read that pesticides and natural chemical levels were “well below health concern exposure limits or applicable screening levels.”

 

Scott said that farmers with children don’t want their children to be exposed to pesticides and that agriculture has to “find a way to adapt.”

 

As the agricultural committee chair, Miller’s role has been to integrate agricultural practices so that they remain a priority. That includes making sure that lands designated to agriculture are not developed for other uses, such as residential buildings.

 

“Until there is a political will to make agriculture a goal in Hawai‘i, it’s not gonna thrive,” Miller said. “And now we have the political will of folks who are advocating backyard farming and most of them are advocating organic. Now they are saying, well, you should only be doing this kind of agriculture and nothing else.

 

“Diversified agriculture is really hard as it is, right now we only doing agriculture on one third of sugar plantation’s lands,” she said. “There’s two thirds of lands where nothing is happening on it.”