Alumni News

“Can Urban Farming Solve Hawaii’s Food Crisis?,” which ran Monday in the online Honolulu Civil Beat, includes input from Ted Radovich and Kent Kobayashi of the Dept. of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences. CTAHR continues its long-standing commitment to providing students and stakeholders training on a wide range of agricultural technologies, Ted explains. We’ve identified ‘protected agriculture’ technologies (including greenhouses and screenhouses) as a priority area for expansion in the future.

He adds that already, hydroponics and aquaponics are a component of multiple TPSS classes. Also, there are always opportunities for directed study, and students have focused on indoor hydroponics and aquaponics. As an example, he cites a controlled-environment aquaponics system developed by MSc student Marissa Lee under advisor JP Bingham (see photo).

Read the full article.

For this year’s UHM Aloha United Way campaign, all faculty and staff in the CTAHR database get a free ticket for a chance to win! But wait, there’s more! Every time you donate to the UHM AUW, you get a second ticket. Donate again and you’ll get a third ticket!

What could you win? Why, an awesome box set of door prizes from the Office of Communication Services (OCS)!

• 1 CTAHR polo shirt (traditional or brand new design)
• 1 CTAHR baseball cap (sweeet!)
• 1 CTAHR groceries bag (high-quality canvas)
• 1 CTAHR baby onesie (not pictured but incoming)

At end of the UHM AUW campaign (Oct. 8), OCS will obtain a list from AUW of all CTAHR donors and donations, add these extra tickets to the CTAHR directory list, pull a random ticket, and announce the lucky winner of this fabulous door prize.

How to donate online:

1. Visit UHM AUW
2. Log on with your UH ID and Default Password “”
3. Create a personal AUW account
4. Donate online
5. Also visit Instructions and FAQs if any questions.

Operators are standing by! So visit the UHM AUW campaign now and boost your chances for winning cool CTAHR gear.

Chicken meat and chicken eggs are the most-consumed and widely-accepted animal protein worldwide. To meet the growing demand, advances in chicken genetics have been huge in recent decades. But the resulting improvements in poultry strains and production performance have come at a price. Today’s chickens are more susceptible to higher environmental temperatures due to a greater metabolic rate, besides the lack of sweat glands and presence of feathers.

Environmental heat stress, also a potential consequence of global warming, is a significant problem in the poultry industry. The adverse effect on poultry health and production has led to substantial economic losses in Hawaiʻi and beyond.

In a new study from the Dept. of Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences, researchers are investigating several antioxidants and polyphenols to mitigate heat stress in poultry. Their findings suggest that a dietary supplementation of dried plum (rich in polyphenols) and Alpha-lipoic acid (fat and water soluble antioxidant) may impart a number of benefits. Such supplements can ameliorate the broilers’ health and production by improving the feed utilization and feed conversion ratio, antioxidants and immune-related genes, and gut microbiomes.

“It is not economical to use an air-cooling system inside a poultry house,” lead investigator Birendra Mishra points out. “Thus, with the rising issue of global warming, it is important to develop cost-effective and adoptable strategies for sustainable poultry production.”

For his related published research, graduate student Sanjeev Wasti received the 2019 Best Poster Presentation award from the Poultry Science Association and 2020 Hatchery Students of the Year award.

Read the full study, Dietary supplementation of alpha-lipoic acid mitigates the negative effects of heat stress in broilers, which appears in a recent PLOS ONE [16(7): e0254936].

After much anticipation, it’s finally here! Our CTAHR Strategic Positioning officially kicked off on September 15, 2021.

Through the guidance of our consultant, Dr. Mitch Owen, of Mitchen Inc., we will be creating a faculty-driven strategic plan to help position us to be successful in the next iteration of CTAHR.

Who are we? What should we be known for in the next 5 years? In the next 10 years? Well, Dr. Owen is going to help us figure that out with the input of faculty, staff, students, our peers, and the public we serve.

Who is this Owen guy and why should we listen to him you say??? Well, Dr. Owen, who goes by Mitch, is a management consultant and executive coach who specializes in strategic planning and comes to us with an extensive resume of working with Land Grant Colleges like ourselves. You can find his list of clients here:  https://mitchen.net/client-list/

The MALAMA aquaponics program is a decade-long effort to improve the health of Waimanalo, Oʻahu, community members through a culturally grounded, multi-generational, family-based, backyard aquaponics program. MALAMA, which stands for “Mini Ahupuaʻa for Lifestyle and Mea'ai through Aquaponics” is also the focus of the latest Voice of the Sea video series. CTAHR education specialist and community coordinator Ilima Ho-Lastimosa was featured, along with UH faculty Jane Chung-Do (Public Health), Clyde Tamaru (CTAHR, retired) and Ted Radovich (CTAHR).

MALAMA involves a multidisciplinary community-academic partnership with researchers and community leaders from CTAHR, Office of Public Health Studies, and Ke Kula Nui O Waimānalo. MALAMA was first initiated in Waimānalo by Ilima in 2009 and teaches families to grow their own food using backyard aquaponics technology through Hawaiian cultural practices and values. 

The 6-month program includes a series of hands-on, family-oriented workshops to guide families to build and maintain a backyard aquaponics home system and make healthy meals and lāʻau (Hawaiian healing remedies using herbs) using the plants and fish grown in aquaponics systems.

Aquaponics has been found to resonate with Native Hawaiian communities because it utilizes a symbiotic relationship between fish and plants by effectively combining hydroponics (raising plants in water) and aquaculture (raising fish in tanks) to create a contained, sustainable food-production system that mimics the traditional Native Hawaiian ahupua‘a system of land stewardship and food sustainability.

The hands-on workshops have been held at the Waimānalo Learning Center inside the Waimānalo Research Station, where there is a community aquaponics demonstration system. As one participant in the video describes her system, “I get the food that comes out of it and it feeds my soul as well.“