In Fire-Stricken Maui, Sustainable Land Management Is Key

Surveying the aftermath of the Kula Upcountry Fire—one of three devastating wildfires that raged across Maui last month—Brendan Balthazar noticed a striking pattern emerge across his cattle ranch. Peppered throughout some 500 acres of charred pastureland, he found sizable patches of grass left unscathed by the blaze.

“The fire burned right around them,” says the 73-year old rancher and owner of Diamond B Ranch, noting the intact areas—some as big as a quarter acre. “It’s all grazed pasture,” he says, spared “because the fuel load was low.”

But elsewhere, fields of fire-prone grasses had made conditions ripe for combustion, says Balthazar. Introduced to the islands decades ago as livestock forage, invasive vegetation such as Guinea grass and buffelgrass proliferate in the islands, largely on unmanaged agricultural land. And with the state in prolonged drought, the dense, often chest-high growth has turned vast swaths of land, he says, into “one tinder box.”

Once home to large-scale plantations and ranches that dominated the landscape for more than 160 years, the steep and steady decline of Hawaiian agriculture has left fields and pastures idle by thousands of acres, often in close proximity to residential development. Left unchecked, they’re fertile ground, experts say, for harboring fecund grasses and other non-native plants, trees and even deer.

Amid a warming planet and increasingly volatile climate patterns, many see the role of agriculture as essential in minimizing the threats facing the remote archipelago. Keeping fields productive is an essential land management strategy, experts say, while encouraging a diversity of agricultural uses builds resilience in both the land and Hawaii’s food system.

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