Managing pasture lands in Hawaiʻi could play a key role in defending against wildfires.
Local leaders and agencies are encouraging the active use of pasture lands to manage dry and flammable grasses that fuel and spread fires.
Most recently, the Maui County Council passed a property tax bill to incentivize owners of agricultural land to farm.
It’s one of a variety of ideas being proposed to fight or reduce the chances of devastating fires, following those that swept through parts of Maui in August.
Hawaiʻi's shrinking agricultural footprint has resulted in large swaths of fallow and abandoned land, and that coincides with increasing fires and land burned in the state.
Properly managing that land could help reduce the risk of large and fast-moving fires.
Clay Trauernicht, an extension agent with the University of Hawaiʻi's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, made that point again at a recent Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council.
He said the risk of fires is high on abandoned sugarcane land, for example.
“There's really not a lot being done on those landscapes. So, when you pull agriculture off the land, it fills in with these non-native grasses," he said. "There's a big difference between the fuels and these working landscapes and the fuels and these unmanaged, abandoned sugarcane (land)."
He said that, between 1999 and 2020, about 160,000 of the 220,000 acres of land burned in Hawaiʻi were grasslands and shrublands.
Trauernicht believes grazing animals, plant propagation, ecosystem restoration and traditional agriculture will play big roles in the large-scale effort to reduce the risk of fires in Hawaiʻi.
