{"id":152851,"date":"2015-05-20T16:28:44","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T16:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=152851"},"modified":"2015-05-20T16:28:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-20T16:28:44","slug":"silencing-hector-valenzuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/silencing-hector-valenzuela\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silencing of Hector Valenzuela"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><span class=\"wf_caption\" style=\"margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 5px; float: right; display: inherit; max-width: 347px;\"><br \/>\n<span style=\"max-width: 344px; text-align: left; margin-top: 3px; margin-left: 5px; display: block;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The islands of Hawai\u2018i are like a magnet attracting insects from all over the world. Bugs catch a ride on every ship headed to the islands, and state authorities often find bug species they\u2019d never seen before. And the bugs\u00a0stay.<\/p>\n<p>As Hawai\u2018i has no winter frost to beat back pests, over time this accumulation of bugs started to become a problem, especially for farmers. Their response: apply a heavy dose of chemicals<\/p>\n<p>A Hawai\u2018i Department of Agriculture report from 1969 said Hawaiian farmers were using pesticides at a rate 10 times higher than the national average (in terms of pounds per\u00a0acre).<\/p>\n<p>In 1993, Dr. Hector Valenzuela, then a non-tenured professor of tropical plant and soil science at the University of Hawai\u2018i-Manoa, began a long-term research project to determine whether it\u2019s possible to grow crops in the state without synthetic pesticides. Valenzuela, who in 1990 received his Ph.D. in vegetable crops from the University of Florida, established the first long-term organic farming research project in Hawai\u2018i and the Pacific region.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.truth-out.org\/news\/item\/30883-the-silencing-of-hector-valenzuela\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The islands of Hawai\u2018i are like a magnet attracting insects from all over the world. Bugs catch a ride on every ship headed to the islands, and state authorities often find bug species they\u2019d never seen before. And the bugs\u00a0stay. As Hawai\u2018i has no winter frost to beat back pests, over time this accumulation of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,955,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-152851","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-health","9":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}