When you take a drive around O'ahu, you see fallow fields of sugar and pine, but tucked away and thriving beyond are fields of papaya, banana, lettuce, watermelon, flowers, cows, chickens and seed corn.

In Waialua, Hale'iwa, Kahuku, Waimanalo, Waiahole and Kunia, farmers are planting and harvesting thousands of acres of vegetables, fruits, coffee and nonedible produce.

There are few in our community who would not be proud and grateful for the farmers who are feeding us and producing other useful products that support our economy, but many of us have not seen the thousands of productive acres on O'ahu. We haven't had the opportunity to be impressed.

It was my good fortune to be included in a daylong tour conducted by the city's volunteer Agricultural Development Task Force. In a day, we barely scratched the surface in visiting the farms, talking to the farmers and just seeing the possibilities of the land and the need for water.

And land and water are what the farmers need to run their businesses. Landowners are willing to sell or lease the lands and farmers want to acquire those lands. Farmers need that control in order to get business loans to carry out their plans.

City and state policies both strongly support agriculture. Yet, farmers are often unable to acquire leases or to purchase the land they are farming.

Large tracts of land cannot be sold or generally even leased in smaller parcels unless they are subdivided. The large parcels are often a thousand or more acres and a typical farmer would need about 200 acres to be profitable. City and county ordinances in trying to protect agriculture have limited subdivisions on large agricultural tracts.

There is a need for a meeting of the minds to support the needs of agriculture as it thrives today on smaller lots with access to water as opposed to the needs of larger plantations that thrive on large tracts of land with their own water sources. The challenge is to support the smaller agribusiness while ensuring these smaller lots do not turn into house lots with a few vegetables.

There are tools the city and state has in its arsenal to support and protect. These include agricultural clusters and agricultural subdivisions. There has also been talk about creating a new agricultural zoning designation to clearly identify characteristics and areas in which the smaller farm lots would be permitted. In this new agricultural district, subdivision standards of wide and paved streets, sidewalks and streetlights, now a roadblock for farmers, would not be required.

While on our agricultural informational tour, each of us was warned of its subliminal purpose: to make us advocates for farmers. It worked.

I know everyone in our community supports agriculture. Now we have to find ways to turn the support for agriculture into quick action for farmers to get control of their land before we lose what many of us don't even know we have.