A Maui environmental organization would like the owner of Hawaii’s last sugar cane plantation to engage in a community-driven plan for transitioning its Hawaiian Commercial &Sugar Co. farm to other agricultural uses following an impending shutdown at year’s end.

The nonprofit Maui Tomorrow Foundation Inc. recently produced a study that suggests the 36,000-acre HC&S plantation can be converted to an organic, regenerative farm where sugar cane remains in much of the ground as fodder for livestock and complemented by trees producing fruits, nuts, medicine, timber and biofuels.

The 52-page report, titled “Malama Aina: A Conversation about Maui’s Farming Future,” was commissioned from Oregon-based Permaculture Design International LLC and aims to start a community discussion for reusing HC&S land.

“Beloved Maui is at a crossroads,” the report said. “For 150 years Maui agriculture has been large-scale, mono-crop, chemical dependent, and export oriented. Can a new farming model bring both economic and biological benefits? The community has an opportunity to come together and help usher in a new era of farming on Maui.”

Maui Tomorrow said the plan announced in January to close HC&S flung open the door to shaping the future of farming on Maui, and that it hopes the report will kick-start the discussion that perhaps would involve Maui residents buying the HC&S fields and farming them as a community cooperative.

However, the owner of HC&S, Honolulu-based Alexander &Baldwin Inc., is formulating its own plan.

Rick Volner, HC&S general manager, said in a statement that the company appreciates the community’s input on the future use of the plantation land.

“We have received and reviewed many proposals and recommendations over the past few months,” he said. “The company is exploring a variety of agricultural operating models across the plantation and a range of ownership structures, including A&B-led activities, joint ventures, partnerships, leases to third parties and sales to other farmers.”

Maui Tomorrow suggests that the regenerative farm vision in its report can yield far more profit than sugar cane farming for export while also employing more people than HC&S.

But the report does not provide any detailed financial analysis or feasibility assessments. It notes that ideas will need further research and require a large investment to carry out.

A&B, the fourth-largest private landowner in the state, has grown sugar cane in Hawaii for 146 years and has spent millions of dollars researching alternative crops in past decades.

In January, the company said it would close HC&S at the end of the year after it lost $33 million last year with little prospect of recovery in the face of low sugar prices, unfavorable weather patterns, high operating costs and the loss of a lucrative arrangement selling electricity to Maui’s utility company.

This year A&B expects HC&S will drag down its net income by $58 million to $76 million due to severance payments, other closing costs and a $5 million to $15 million operating loss from sugar production.

The impending shutdown will cost 645 employees their jobs in waves of layoffs that began last month and will peak in December.

A&B envisions a long-term plan to keep HC&S land in productive agriculture. Pieces of that plan shared so far include some things that Maui Tomorrow mentioned in its report — producing biodiesel from crops, cattle grazing, orchards and agroforestry. A&B also has proposed establishing an ag park with plots for lease to local farmers interested in growing food crops, with a preference going to HC&S workers.

Volner added that transitioning to diversified agriculture will take a number of years. “Our long-term objective is that we can support Maui and the state of Hawaii in achieving greater food and energy self-sufficiency and preserving agricultural lands,” he said.

The main concept advocated by Maui Tomorrow is organic, regenerative farming. This entails using on-site natural resources like compost to improve soil quality and plant nutrition to grow perennial crops that last for several years or more, compared with annual or semiannual crops often dependent on preparing the land with external inputs like chemical fertilizers.

Maui Tomorrow’s report envisions keeping sugar cane as a perennial for cattle fodder as well as some value-added products such as organic raw sugar, fiber and juice — and calls the crop “the fuel to feed the transition to regenerative agriculture.”

Fruit, nut and other orchard trees also are envisioned along with vegetable farming and raising pigs and chickens. The orchards and other crops could reduce sugar cane by 30 percent to 50 percent, the report said.

The report said regenerative agriculture would require less water, and that several HC&S reservoirs, which range from 1 million gallons to 80 million gallons, could be used to raise fresh-water fish. Agritourism is another aspect of a new plan promoted by Maui Tomorrow.

The nonprofit said in its report that profits for diversified agriculture are conservatively 100 times more than a sugar cane monocrop for export, or $5,000 to $7,500 per acre annually compared with $50 to $75 per acre annually. For 30,000 acres, that would amount to $150 million to $225 million compared with $1.5 million to $2.25 million.

Yet serious doubt has been expressed about profitable large-scale farming supplanting HC&S. Local economist Paul Brewbaker said recently that if significant money could be made on the thousands of acres of fallow former sugar cane land that already exist on Maui and other islands, then it would surely have already been done.

One challenge the report points out is that Maui lacks skilled farmers and infrastructure for diversified farming on more than 30,000 acres.

The report suggests that Maui County, A&B and nonprofits will have to invest in jump-starting new farming, including providing incentives and assistance to local farmers and recruiting successful farmers from off-island given that the model envisioned by Maui Tomorrow would produce more than the 1,260 jobs it projects would be lost by HC&S and supportive industries.

Another challenge could be A&B’s willingness or lack thereof to have others shape or control the future of HC&S land.

If A&B would sell the plantation at market value, Maui Tomorrow’s report said a community farm cooperative could be formed with all Maui residents represented as either worker-members or consumer-members with voting rights and profit shares.

A&B has suggested that it will keep control of at least the bulk of its HC&S land, in which case Maui Tomorrow still hopes to influence what happens after HC&S closes.

“The research and potential outcomes outlined in this report are the beginnings of a community discussion and vision,” the report said. “The key is to come together as a community, with our largest landowner, and chart this course together.”