WAIALUA — He’s been a farmer for 10 years now, but Al Santoro sometimes still sounds like a naval intelligence analyst.

“Nobody’s cracked the code yet,” he told about 30 members of a tour on a recent Saturday morning, discussing the challenges facing small farms like his Poamoho Organic Produce as Hawaii transitions from a plantation mentality into diversified agriculture.

Santoro is among those who have voiced opposition to two proposals currently before the Honolulu City Council. Bill 23, if approved, would limit ag parcels to one dwelling with no more than 1,500 square feet of floor space. Bill 24 seeks to clean up various sections of the county’s land use ordinance and generally tighten regulations on farm land. Both bills are pending action by the Council’s Planning Committee.

The bills essentially equate the size of a home with the productivity of the land on which it’s built. However, they offer no evidence that the two are related. Standing on Santoro’s land, you can see one neighbor “agricultural” parcel with a big home and two horses, with no crops. Another parcel has no home, two horses and no crops. Santoro’s acreage, a true farm, has a home bigger than the proposed limit. It’s difficult to see the link.

A fiery Italian-American with wild eyebrows and a welcoming smile, Santoro said the transition from tomatoes and basil in the backyard to an organic orchard started in 1999, when he and his wife, Joan, a computer engineer, purchased an agricultural subdivision on Oahu’s sun-drenched North Shore. Near Kaukonahua Road outside of Waialua, they built a 2,700-square-foot home, nearly twice the size of the county’s proposed maximum.

The bills were introduced March 31 in the aftermath of Resolution 09-90, passed last year, which says valuable agricultural lands are threatened by “gentlemen’s farms” — estate lots in subdivisions that do little or no actual farming. In addition to providing written testimony against both bills, Santoro authored a recent op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in which he said they amounted to “the biggest local government-sponsored land grab since the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.”

“Farmers want to and need to live on their land,” Santoro said in his barn. He supports reform — his neighbors’ pet horses shouldn’t quality their owners for agricultural property tax breaks, he said. But he worries defining a farm by the size of a farmer’s house is a poor way to measure agricultural production. Simply, the definition will punish those who can afford a larger home.

“Some people equate gentleman farmer to the size of the house, when really gentleman farmer is equated to the farm activity,” he said.

At Santoro’s farm, the lychees are meaty, a little tart and finger-licking good. Six different varieties of mango trees abound; some of their fruit are almost as purple as eggplant and nearly as big, but the one this reporter-host ate was not much bigger than a tennis ball and had a piney smell. The papaya is so soft that it melts in your mouth.

With more than 800 trees of nearly 30 different crops in the ground and a distribution network that carries fruit to Whole Foods in faraway Kahala, a number of North Shore restaurants and about 80 individual customers, Santoro says his is the largest certified organic operation on Oahu. He bristles at the suggestion that because his family operation only covers seven acres — a pittance compared to the thousand-acre sugar and pineapple plantations of yesteryear and 50,000-acre soybean or wheat operations on the mainland — he is a “gentleman farmer.”

Asked if people view him as a gentleman farmer, he said, “I know that my councilman does.” He was speaking of District 2 Councilman Donavan Dela Cruz, who represents the expansive North Shore region stretching from Mililani to Heeia. “I work every day. My birthday, I work. On Christmas and New Year’s, I work. I work every day. There is nothing gentlemanly about what I do.”

Repeated attempts to reach Dela Cruz for comment were unsuccessful.

Describing himself as a “pissed-off farmer,” Santoro said that the three biggest local players in agriculture — the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, the Hawaii Farm Bureau Federation and the University of Hawaii College of Tropical Agriculture — aren’t clued in to the business — and more importantly, lifestyle — of small-scale farming, having worked closely with large farms for many decades.

Two of those organizations have expressed what at most are mild misgivings about the proposed county ordinances, softly echoing Santoro’s concerns.

In written testimony offered April 20, one day before the council unanimously moved both bills forward to the Planning Committee, Board of Agriculture Chairperson Sandra Lee Kunimoto said the Agriculture Department supports the intent of Bill 23 and said it “would result in fewer and perhaps, more modest dwellings on agricultural lots.”

But she also said the legislation should go further to “establish a connection between agricultural activity and farm dwellings” by requiring evidence such as annual agricultural income or farm-related expenditures before permits are issued.

Similarly, the East Oahu County Farm Bureau objected to Resolution 09-90 last year, saying 1,500-square-foot homes are too small to accommodate multi-generational families and asking that the limit be raised to 2,500 square feet. The organization’s testimony said the law might discourage gentlemen’s farms but would do little to “encourage the development of agricultural enterprises on these lands.”

The intent of Bill 23 is to “ensure that agriculture-zoned lands are used for their intended agricultural purposes rather than being lost through the development of so-called ‘gentlemen’s farms’ which are often luxury residential developments where little or no agricultural activity takes place.”

However, the result would be that an owner of agricultural land would be limited to building a house one-third smaller than the national and Western U.S. median in 2008 and 40 percent smaller than the average size house both nationally and in the West.

The bills never explain how their authors arrived at an appropriate size for a home. Nor did the Farm Bureau explain how it arrived at its proposal for 2,500 square feet as an appropriate limit, although it did argue that it was unreasonable given Oahu’s housing prices to expect farmers with big families to live somewhere else.

The resolution that is the basis for the bills, however, makes clear that the goal is to prevent the subdividing of agricultural parcels into “estate parcels” where luxury homes can be built.

In the end, under the bills, farmers will be encouraged to make money from their work. But they won’t be able to invest their agricultural profits in a home, unless they can keep it under 1,500 square feet or buy a condo or home somewhere else. Say, Waikiki.