Richard Ha writes:
After starting a banana farm at Waiakea Uka under the corporate name Ha Bros., Inc., I decided to start another farm as a separate entity, and I started looking for parcels. But land was scarce then. It was around 1978, and the sugar industry had most of the good land.
There was one 60-acre parcel available, which was owned by Elvin and Kay Kamoku together with Bill Kaina. Elvin was my Pop’s old diving buddy and at the time he was the Big Island fire chief. Bill Kaina was the pastor of Kaumakapili Church and later of Kawaihao Church. I leased the land from them.
The parcel was located at Koa’e, which is a 40-minute drive from Hilo. The Pahoa bypass hadn’t been built yet so we drove through the middle of Pahoa on the way to work. You went towards Kapoho, past Lava Tree State Park, past old Kapoho town, which was covered by lava, to the four stop sign corner and then back toward Hilo on Beach Road. You passed the Lyman cinder cones, and then the pavement ended and the road went under tall mango trees. The farm was about a hundred yards on the left.
The land had been planted in papayas and there was no soil at all. But a foot or more of cinder, from the 1960 eruption that destroyed Kapoho town, covered the entire parcel. The lava fountain had been more than 1000 feet high in 1960, and the prevailing wind blew the cinder onto the land.
We were kind of new to farming and we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be able to grow bananas where there was no soil.
Fortunately, the papaya farmer before us had had a D9 bulldozer rip deep rows through the pahoehoe lava, and that’s where he planted his papayas. We didn’t have any money so we planted 45 acres of bananas in those papaya rows. Luckily for us, the ripped pahoehoe allowed the banana plant roots to go down far enough to reach moisture.
Mom, Pop and I planted the first bananas. Later we hired people to help us to plant and take care of the growing farm. Our original banana crew consisted of Miles Kotaki, Jerryl Mauhili, Jason, Jolan and Jocky Keahilihau, Puggy Nathaniel, Jolson Nakamura and Bert Naihe. Most of them came from Keaukaha and Panaewa. Jerryl was the farm manager.
We planted the bananas as deep down amidst the ripped slabs of pahoehoe as we could, then we covered them up with a mound of cinder. This was all done by hand using picks, shovels and o’o bars because we could not afford a tractor. We filled buckets and walked down the rows throwing fertilizer by hand.
As the bananas started bearing fruit, the guys would harvest the bunches, bring them to the closest road and lean them up against a banana plant. When the bunches were all harvested they would come by, cut the hands off and put them in two papaya bins we had on a flat bed trailer.
We were operating hand to mouth, and one day the two papaya bins were repossessed, so we had nothing to put the bananas in. Jerryl decided to just haul them on the trailer without any bins. So they put a bed of banana leaves down on the trailer and lined up banana hands, one inside the other, from one end to the other. They put a layer of banana leaves on top of the bananas and then a second level of banana hands, then a third and a fourth and on up until there were seven layers.
The first time they passed through Pahoa town like that, heads swiveled: “What was that?!”
We would drop off the trailer at the Waiakea Uka packing house after work, around 5 in the evening, and Mom would cut the bananas up and have them packed before 6:30 the following morning. It went on like that for several months—maybe a whole year. I don’t know how we would have done it without Mom’s help.
My brother-in-law Dennis Vierra is a guy who can do anything related to construction, and he helped us build a packing house. Until then we had no shelter, no toilet—just a lot of determination.
Dennis built a structure where we could hang the bunches and roll them on a rail to a place where we could cut off the hands and place them in a tank full of water. The hands were floated across the tank, where they were cut into clusters and packed into banana boxes. We thought we were in the big time.
It turned out that nobody really wanted our bananas on O‘ahu. We had more guts than brains at that time, so we sent several hundred boxes to someone we called Uncle Chow, though we were never sure that was his real name. He took them around Honolulu and sold them off his flatbed truck for ten cents a pound. He never sent us the money, and we wrote it off as marketing and promotion.
His efforts got the attention, though, of Stanley Unten, owner of Hawaiian Banana Company, who was the main banana distributor on O‘ahu. He called and we started shipping to him.
Next we bought a large cargo van. Mechanization was coming fast and furious for us. We bought a roller conveyor to aid in loading the cargo van, which we drove to the docks. We also used the roller conveyor to unload our banana boxes into a Young Brothers refrigerated container.
Then we really hit the big time—we bought a secondhand forklift for $100. The guys called it “Fred Flintstone.” It had hard rubber tires and would go “clunk” every time the part missing from the wheel hit the concrete. But it could move pallets of bananas, meaning each one didn’t have to be carried by hand. All the guys appreciated it very much.
To be continued
