North Shore EVP

By Will Bailey, Honolulu Civil Beat (Jan. 14, 2026). Read the full article on Civil Beat.

Hawaiʻi says it wants to support small farmers and strengthen local food security, but Will Bailey argues that one of the most stubborn obstacles wasn’t land, water, or labor—it was paperwork. Food-safety certification, a routine cost of doing business for large farms, often functioned like a locked door for small producers because the process assumed they had spare time, staff support, and reliable language access. Without that certification, farmers could be shut out of schools, distributors, and other institutional buyers regardless of how good their produce was.

What changed in recent years, Bailey writes, wasn’t the standard—it was the structure around it. GroupGAP (Group Good Agricultural Practices) flips the old model by letting a central organization carry much of the compliance system—shared manuals, procedures, internal oversight—while individual farms still meet the same requirements and still undergo audits. In Hawaiʻi, the North Shore Economic Vitality Partnership built the state’s first USDA-recognized GroupGAP program for diversified fruits and vegetables in 2019, and it has since trained multiple cohorts and supported more than 50 farms across the islands—representing a sizable share of Hawaiʻi’s small farms certified under harmonized standards. The payoff is concrete: certification can finally unlock wholesale pathways, and even modest access can add meaningful annual revenue for a small farm—less “growth theater,” more survival.