Lease agreement reached for bulk plant Like a housewife with a newly installed white living room carpet, the Gay & Robinson sugar mill at Kaumakani hates mud. In fact, mud from rain in the fields surrounding the mill brings sugar
Lease agreement reached for bulk plant
Like a housewife with a newly installed white living room carpet, the Gay & Robinson sugar mill at Kaumakani hates mud.
In fact, mud from rain in the fields surrounding the mill brings sugar grinding to a grinding halt, idling most of the company’s nearly 300 workers.
Hopefully, that wasn’t an ominous sign for the delayed start of the island’s lone remaining sugar company’s annual harvesting season.
According to the weekly Hawai’i Crop Weather bulletin of the state Department of Agriculture, the harvesting was delayed three weeks by rare westside showers.
But the delay was caused nearly as much by ongoing negotiations between G&R and Amfac Sugar Kaua’i or its parental entities, according to Alan Kennett, G&R president and general manager.
After reaching an agreement with Amfac to lease Amfac’s Nawiliwili bulk sugar terminal on April 9, harvesting at G&R was supposed to begin April 16, but was delayed a day by muddy conditions, he said.
Kennett has been traveling to Honolulu frequently since then, as negotiations continue between Amfac and G&R over various other matters designed, where G&R is concerned, to allow the island’s remaining sugar plantation to stay in business and expand its cultivation operations onto the fertile Kekaha acreage formerly farmed by Kekaha Sugar Co., an Amfac entity.
The Kekaha land – 26,000 acres owned by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources and Department of Hawaiian Home Lands – had been leased by Amfac.
Amfac Sugar Kaua’i announced last September the end of its farming life on Kaua’i by mid-November last year.
An agreement was reached between Amfac and G&R regarding leasing the Nawiliwili bulk sugar terminal, which is owned by Amfac and is the only way harvested sugar can be loaded onto ships bound for the California & Hawaii (C&H) refinery in California.
The agreement gives G&R the option to purchase the Nawiliwili facility, with a time limit attached to that option, Kennett explained.
“It’s clearly in our long-term interest to do that,” he said of buying the facility.
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
