If the egg is so "incredible and edible" — and all but vegans would agree that it is — why is Hawai'i's egg industry in crisis?

If we use literally millions of eggs a year in just this state alone, why would there be just five farms left, with one having announced imminent closure and another hanging on just out of loyalty to the industry?

If eggs star in everything from entrees to desserts, and if the food word of the day is "locavore" (meaning to eat food produced within 100 miles of where you live), why are we in danger of losing all our egg farmers just as we have lost all our broiler producers?

These are a series of questions with very complex, and in some cases, almost impossible answers. But Hawai'i egg farmers, the Islands' remaining chick hatchery, the state Agriculture Department, local chefs and restaurateurs, and others are determined to find answers if they can do so in time to prevent, so to speak, an eggless state.

But, they say, local people have to care enough to get a little education on the subject, and then to spend the few extra cents it may take to buy local eggs (an even tougher thing to ask in these recessionary times).

Of course, Mainland eggs are widely available and safe to eat. But Phyllis Shimabukuro-Geiser of Mikilua Poultry, the largest egg producer in the state (selling under the familiar Ka Lei, Hawaiian Maid, Maile and Times brands), says consumers should realize that a Mainland egg is a minimum of 10 to 15 days old before it arrives in the Islands — perhaps even older before it gets to the front of the stack on the supermarket shelf. Island eggs get to the market in a couple of days. Try this test: Break a Mainland egg on a plate. Break an Island egg. The one that's got a bright yellow yolk and is standing up like an ROTC recruit at attention? That's the fresh egg.

And increasingly, we are being told that we must come to value more about food than price and easy availability.

We must care, says Sharon Peterson Cheape of Peterson's Upland Farm in Wahiawa, about the family-farm way of life, the green and open spaces that farms create, the freshness of food and its nutritional and gastronomic quality, the web of business and personal relationships created by the presence of farmers in the mix, and the balance and safety net that comes of a community that doesn't rely on a place thousands of miles away for its very daily bread (or fried egg).

Next shipping strike, it won't just be toilet paper and rice that disappear if the loss of local farms continues, says chef Alan Wong, who grew up in Wahiawa. "I remember going to Peterson Farm in the family station wagon every Saturday to pick up eggs for an entire week," he said. The family would buy unwashed eggs, because these were cheaper, and his job would be to wash them. He's still buying Peterson eggs for his award-winning restaurants.

Another thing, says Lisa Asagi of Asagi Hatchery in Kalihi, the only chick supplier left in Hawai'i: We lose knowledge. As always seems to be the case, Hawai'i is different. Materials on chicken-rearing and egg production from other locations aren't helpful to farmers here, she said. If we had to rebuild a chicken industry from scratch, it would be a tough go.

"Many people have come up to me and told me that their family had a chicken farm in Niu Valley or 'Ewa Beach or Hawai'i Kai, that they remember how they loved it or hated it, and what strikes me is that we might never know what the family knew, the kind of growers' wisdom accumulated in that family, that family's story," she said.

Asagi literally grew up over the Kalihi hatchery, working there alongside her siblings and then escaping with relief in her 20s. She spent 11 years in the nonprofit media arts business in San Francisco. But she returned to the Islands because a number of factors threatened the family business, which her grandfather had founded as a chicken and egg farm in the old Damon Tract (where the airport is now).

Her parents began speaking of closing the hatchery after business took a precipitous drop when 'Ewa Brand, the last broiler operation in Hawai'i, closed in 2004. She realized then that she cared more than she realized. So she moved home.

SO WHAT'S WRONG?

Why can't these farms just keep doing business as they have done, many of them, for three or four generations?

So many factors contribute: