Category Archives: History

Company News, History

Building History

I asked John Cross, an executive of C. Brewer & Co., the sugar cane folks we bought our land from: “How old is that green shack on our property, the one located next to the old airstrip?”

He told me that the shack predated airplanes. In fact, the building was used to support mules that cultivated sugar cane in the old days. So this building is at least 55 years old. And best guess is that it’s been there for longer than 65 years. It was called Duggan’s Shack in the old days. But that’s another story.

A few months ago, we started thinking about what we could do with this old building. Trees and grass were threatening to cover the building completely and the roof had holes.

We didn’t know exactly what we would do with it, but we knew we had do something or we would lose a part of this land’s history.

First we thought about putting up a farm stand. Kimo decided to repair the most obvious problems, like holes in the roof, etc. We really liked the idea of doing a farm stand, since it was located right on the farm, but we worried there might not be enough customers to support the business. While we were thinking about it, Kimo made the necessary repairs and cleared the brush around the building.

About that time, my grandson Kapono and I started to participate in the Kino‘ole Street Farmers Market. We’ve been there for maybe six weeks now, and from that experience we both realized we didn’t think we could get enough customers to come to Duggan’s Shack. It’s off the highway and the area’s population is not large enough. Lose money.

But then the Alan Wong cookout came up and we offered to dig an imu and make kalua pig. Kimo decided to take that the opportunity to kalua enough so each of our employees could take home a container.

And right then we figured out what we can do with Duggan’s Shack in this new age. We will use it for company parties—where we will do an annual kalua, have fun and send everybody home with food. Perfect!

Community, History

Talking Story

I got to chat with Robert “Steamy” Chow at the Farmers Market Saturday morning. When I was a kid, people called him “Steam Pork.” But since then it’s evolved to “Steamy.” He was an old friend of my father’s and although I had never met him before, Pop talked about him so often I feel like I know him.

Steamy was a master caliber pistol shooter, as was Pop. Pop was into pistol competitions. He built his own pistol range, made his own koa gun box that he took to competitions, and carved custom koa handgrips for his pistols when the store-bought custom grip did not work just right.

I can remember that Pop would “dry run practice” for hours at home. He put a piece of black tape on the living room wall and practiced focusing. Since a person cannot focus both near and far at the same time, he had a routine. He would focus on, and level, the front and rear sights, making sure the distances through the rear sights were equal from side to side.

Then he kept that relationship steady and refocused downrange, to balance the black bullseye on top of the front and rear sights, which were out of focus but already set.

To become as proficient as humanly possible he exercised to strengthen his shooting arm. The stronger the better. For hours he practiced holding his breath—thinking his heart rate down so that his arm would stay steady.

Pop was amazing. He was not satisfied merely to hit the bullseye. He was more interested in how many times he hit the “x,” which is the mark in the middle of the bullseye.

When live firing and “in the zone,” he could call the shots. He would say, “2 o’clock X.” This meant he thought his round had hit the bullseye on the right upper side of the “X.” More often than not, Pop was right.

He told us: “Like everything else, it’s a mental game.” This was his shorthand for figuring out where you need to be, breaking the problem down into its essential elements and then doing or inventing what you need to get there.

At the market Saturday morning, Steamy said he has followed our farming progress in the newspapers for many years. He told me, “You’re just like your dad.” This reinforced in me the belief that influencing a child early in life can have a positive impact. And because I had such respect for my Pop, it also made me feel good.

Pop always said, “Not, no can. CAN!” I learned this lesson well and I still absolutely believe it. I want to give kids the opportunity to feel like anything is possible.

It’s great to go to the Kino‘ole Farmers Market on Saturday mornings. Talking story with people makes it so interesting and gratifying.

 

History

The Old Days

Richard said something the other day about how people used to live—they knew their neighbors; they often planted ‘ulu trees so they always had delicious breadfruit; they shared their mangos with someone who, in return, shared some of their fish.

He wrote about plumbing a house so the wastewater runs into the vegetable garden, and that made me think about the Kona Coffee Living History Farm. From their website:

D. Uchida Farm – A 5.5 acre historic coffee farm first homesteaded in 1900

The Kona Coffee Living History Farm brings the coffee pioneer’s story to life by depicting the daily lives of early Japanese immigrants during the period of 1920-1945. Visitors are guided through the coffee and macadamia orchards, the many historic structures, and are greeted by costumed interpreters along the way.

It’s fascinating to walk through this family’s restored coffee farm—and especially, for me, its farmhouse, maintained as though it’s the early part of the 1900s, complete with costumed interpreters working in the house.

One thing I noticed when I toured the farmhouse was the “filter” (an old tobacco filter) at the kitchen sink. It let the water flow, but not food bits—and the water flowed out a pipe and right into the garden just outside the kitchen.

How smart is that? Our grandparents, and their grandparents, knew what they were doing. Yet many of us have gotten so far away from that these days.

Macario and I live on the Hamakua Coast land where my family has lived for several generations. It’s still rural here, but as opposed to when my great-grandmother lived here, Hilo-town is now just an easy 15 or 20-minute drive away.

Back in my great-grandmother’s day, even though she lived here in this very same place, town was far away. Once a month she would get dressed up and ride the train to Hilo, where she would get the family’s supplies for the entire month. Her daughters would beg to be allowed to go along, because it was a big exciting day to go to town.

I think about that when I occasionally find myself having to zip into town more than once in a single day, and I feel sheepish and wasteful. Our lifestyles are so different now.

I know a lot about what went on in this house in 1939. That’s when my great-grandmother left here bound for Columbia University in New York, where she earned a master’s degree. While she was gone that year, her 28-year-old daughter (my grandmother), who had a 7-year-old son at the time (my dad), sent her long, interesting letters about what was going on.

My great-grandmother apparently brought those letters back home with her, because I found them tucked away in this house one winter day 50-some years later, when my then-elderly grandmother—formerly the 28-year-old—was still around. It was wonderful to read them aloud together in front of the fireplace, a few each night. It took us several days to get through them all, because we’d stop as she remembered what she’d written about so long before and filled in details.

From those 1939 letters about life here at this place I learned that they used to have chickens and that my grandmother sold eggs in town at Kwong See Wo store. That my grandmother made mango chutney when she had a lot of mangoes (but I already knew that). And that my grandfather poked holes in a Crisco can to water the strawberries once when it was particularly dry.

They grew kalo (taro) then. They planted ‘ulu trees, which we still eat from, and ate ‘ulu as well as ho‘i‘o, tomatoes, oranges, tangerines, mangos, bananas and vegetables from their garden.

In one letter my grandmother wrote about friends coming over—they all rolled up their pants and went up the stream to catch ‘opae. Sometimes my grandparents would go stay with family and friends at the beach house for an extended, relaxing time of play. They would fish for their meals.

It was interesting to read how often good friends came by to visit. They’d show up with coolers full of fish and Chinese food and their backseat full of fruit from their trees. It was a long journey out here to the country, so they’d stay for four days or maybe a week. Everybody pitched in to cook, etc., while they were here and it was a party the entire time. Pictures show that they played music and some danced hula. Always in those photos there is good food everywhere and kids are playing together and everyone is smiling.

I think about those letters and that lifestyle. Though I realize that my grandmother was writing about the fun times, and not the day-to-day stuff, it still seems like life was a little bit simpler then, and pretty nice. They planted and grew food, and ate well. They had friends over a lot—dear friends that my grandmother remained close to for her entire life—and lots of times they made their own music. It’s a lifestyle I admire.

We grow some of our food these days, and we too have good friends, though we don’t get together as often as they did. We should.

One year we had family and friends here for Thanksgiving dinner, and later in the evening my brother said it reminded him of one of my grandmother’s parties back when we were kids. “Every room I walk into,” he said, “there are little groups of people talking and laughing.” He even pointed to two little boys who were playing a little rambunctiously and said, “That would have been [our cousin] David and me, getting into trouble.”

I liked that. I also like the occasional reminder that we need to have good food around us, some of it we grew outside, and have our friends over more often, and remember to live our lives well while we’re here.

Bananas, History

Old Bananas

From Hawaiian Annual, Hilo Fifty Years Ago, by J.M. Lydgate (published in 1923, this refers to events of 1873):

A bunch of the largest bananas ever produced in Hawaii, according to the report of the government experiment station, was taken to the mainland this past summer by Dr. W. E. Slater, grown by him at his home on Dole street, and destined for Minneapolis.

The individual bananas averaged eight inches in length and three inches in width, and the entire bunch weighed seventy-three pounds. There have been heavier bunches of more hands of the ordinary sized fruit, though this may be the record, as stated, for individual bananas. Unfortunately the kind or variety was not given.

 

History

A Peek Backwards and a Peck

There’s an interesting timeline of the history of agriculture in Hawai‘i on the Hawai‘i Department of Agriculture’s website. See it here.

Did you know:

• That the orange is thought to have first arrived in these islands in 1792?

• That coffee and pineapples were brought to Hawai‘i by the Spaniard Don Marin in 1813?

• How much money 15,000 pecks of pineapple brought in, when they were exported from Hawai‘i in 1897?

Do you even know what a “peck” is? As in, “a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?”

That’s beyond the scope of the History of Agriculture in Hawai‘i page. But here you go.

Big Island, History, Where We Live

Wailoa Pond Memories

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When I was a kid, Pop would deliver eggs from our poultry farm to the Hilo Egg Producers Co-op, which was located between the Wailoa Pond and the Hilo Civic Auditorium.

A couple days after the 1960 tsunami, we were delivering eggs when we found weke swimming in ponds on the gravel road. The waves had swept through Wailoa Pond and stranded the fish on land. This was an unbelievable sight. I was in the 10th grade then, and my brother Robert in the 7th grade.

Pop spent a lot of time mullet fishing on Wailoa Pond—sometimes from the shore and sometimes from his rowboat. Sometimes, when the mullet came close to shore, the fishermen would stand shoulder to shoulder, casting out to the middle of the school.

Mullet fishing protocol states that one must not cross over another fisherman’s line. To be in the middle of the group, closest to the fish, you had to be accurate. The less accurate you were, the further to the edge you found yourself forced.

I was not a real mullet fisherman, and after a few casts I would find myself out on the edge by myself. Pop and Robert always fit comfortably in the center of the group.

On the day I returned from Vietnam, I got home and Mom told me they were at the pond. I drove down there and they were all happy to see me.

There was what I estimate to be a 50+-pound ulua swimming along the edge of the bank that fronts the Lagoon Center, heading toward the Café 100 direction. We knew he had to come back and my brother Kenneth ran to get his spear gun.

Since I was just back from Vietnam and they were so happy to see me, they gave me the honors. The ulua swam back and passed right in front of me, only about 5 feet away. I used all my combat skills and let it fly.

Missed! I couldn’t believe it, and neither could they. That was the end of the welcome back party.

But hey, I was an Army lieutenant, a Vietnam veteran!

Big deal—I missed the ulua.

Hamakua Coast, History

The Story of Hamakua

Hamakua Springs is located in, well, Hamakua, and today I thought I’d tell you a little about the Hamakua Coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i.

Hamakua is one of the ancient districts of this island. It spreads just north of Hilo for about 50 miles up the coast to Waipi‘o Valley, which is a beautiful, deeply historical valley that was settled in the 13th century or earlier. Several powerful chiefs hailed from Waipi‘o.

The book Place Names of Hawai‘i, citing Nathaniel Bright Emerson’s Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, says “Hamakua” (poetic) means “kuhi loa.” “Long corner.” I’m assuming that refers to its physical location.

Here’s something to chew on: Almost no one pronounces “Hamakua” correctly. It’s properly pronounced HAA-MAA-KUA. There are kahakos—macrons, or stresses—on the first two As, meaning you hold them a little longer.

Few people even know that anymore. It’s as though we lived in Nevada and called it “Las Vee-gus” all the time.

Anyway. If you were to travel the Hamakua coast long ago, you would have walked along winding paths, up and down through gullies and streams. You’d have seen Hawaiian families living here and there, their grass homes tucked into the valleys and gulches, many of them growing kalo (taro).

In more recent years, the crop in Hamakua was sugar cane. The coast had sugar plantations and mills and the plantation villages that sprung up around them, and cane growing seemingly everywhere. And there was a railroad that ran where the main highway (19) is now, but which was destroyed in a 1946 tsunami and not rebuilt.

This island’s, and Hamakua’s, sugar chapter is over now, and now the story is about diversified agriculture. And that’s where Richard, and Hamakua Springs Country Farms, comes into the picture.

Rural Hamakua is a lovely, scenic place of much rainfall and therefore luxurious green rainforest. It is a coast of waterfalls, rivers, springs and streams, with prawns in them for the catching. Hamakua is also a place of swimming holes. Of sweet guavas that squish between your barefoot toes, or taste delicious if you get them before they fall. And waiawi, which are little strawberry guavas, both yellow ones and red ones. Right now the waiawi are abundant and fallen fruit is covering backroads like bright carpets.

On one side of the Hamakua coast are cliffs that reach down to the ocean, where you can watch whales pass by during their migrating season. Along the other side we see Mauna Kea, the volcano that stands magestically over us, and which is sometimes covered with an amazing cloak of snow in the winter.

There are probably other places as beautiful, but you’d have to do a lot of talking to convince me that there is a place MORE beautiful than Hamakua.

Biofuel, Current Affairs, History, Sustainability

Biofuel

Nancy Redfeather, a friend and sustainable farming advocate in Kona, sent me a link to this article in the Maui News.

When I was on Maui recently, I attended a biofuel meeting sponsored by Hawaii Electric Light Company. The article quoted me as being one of the few testifying in favor of the plan to replace fossil fuel diesel with bio diesel, made from palm oil.

I thought I’d share my response to Nancy, in order to give a little bit of context to my testimony:

Hi Nancy:

Thanks for sending me this.

I was on Maui visiting supermarkets and wholesalers when I attended that biodiesel meeting. That was the fourth bioenergy meeting I had attended.

I believe we need to figure out how the Big Island can become sustainable in energy, as well as in food production. We are in the process of building a hydroelectric plant at the farm. That will allow us to get off the grid.

HECO says it is committed to sourcing only palm oil that is certified sustainable. Some people seemed skeptical and even disappointed that NRDC was trying to do a third-party certification program for palm oil farming.

Since, in 1993, our farm—Kea’au Banana Plantation—was the first banana farm in the world to be certified ECO O.K. by the Rainforest Alliance, I related our experience with what happened as a result of the certification program.

During the early 1990s, the Central/South American banana industry was notorious for its poor sustainable/environmental/worker health record. As a result, the Rainforest Alliance, headquartered in New York City, decided to start a certification program. We read about it when a friend on the mainland, who knew our sustainable farming philosophy, sent me a copy of the World Watch magazine, in which the planned banana certification program was described.

We looked at the protocol and saw that we were not far from what they required. So I called the Rainforest Alliance and told them what we were doing. They sent two inspectors from their San Jose, Costa Rica office to inspect us. They were amazed that a banana farm in Hawai‘i, of all places, was pretty much in compliance. The inspectors told me they were getting stiff resistance from the large banana companies in Central America.

To make a long story short, their Board met and we passed. But I was told that there was consternation in Central America, and that it would not do to have a foreign company become the first banana company in the world to be certified ECO O.K. So a few weeks went by until they found a small grower in Costa Rica who could qualify. Then we were both allowed to say we were first in the world.

The result was that other farms started to transform themselves so they could be certified ECO O.K. In a short time it became clear that, because of marketing pressure, the large banana companies could no longer resist—and they started to clean up their acts.

On Maui, I related how our company was instrumental in changing the behavior of the world’s banana industry because of the Rainforest Alliance’s third party certification program. I told everyone that I felt that NRDC was trying to achieve the same thing—transform palm oil production behavior worldwide—and that I had actually seen it work.

But it seems clear to me that this is a complex issue on Maui.

Anyway, that is the story behind the story.

History, How It All Started, Our Story

Kapoho, Part Two: “That’s Why You’re Dangerous”

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Richard Ha writes:

When we were first getting started in bananas at Koa‘e back in the late 1970s, our farm was way out in the Wild West, where our close neighbors were the original “sustainable farmers.” Some people called them hippies. We just thought of them as fellow farmers making their own way.

Their houses were open, with mosquito netting to protect against flying insects. They had no electricity or running water.

They were on catchment water systems and we, and they, were concerned that our overspray did not hurt them. We were very conscious of their proximity and we took care to communicate closely with them. It made us very aware of how our operation could affect our neighbors, and helped us become the sustainable farmers we are today.

The neighbors occasionally had full moon parties and I went once. It was an experience walking around in the bright moonlight, in and out of the shadows of giant mango trees, running into people I’d never met before. I think the boys went to their parties frequently. I heard the people who lived closer to the ocean were clothing-optional, but I did not know that for sure. They were good neighbors and we got along very well.

The boys and I were very close. Jason and Bert danced and played music for Johnny Lum Ho, and they always won the Merrie Monarch competition. During the summers we all hung out around down the beach at Leleiwi, and when it got too cold we hung out at the Ponderosa; that was the name of my Uncle George and Aunty Agnes’s house on Chong Street in Kaumana.

Our farm grew to 55 acres in a short time and we all were very proud of what we were doing. Jerryl and I started to go to Hawai‘i Banana Industry Association annual meetings on O‘ahu, where people were very impressed we were coming up so quickly. We learned a lot by associating with the oldtimers and the University of Hawai‘i people.

On a farm tour of Kauai with some other Hawai‘i Banana Industry Association farmers once, we went to Waimea Canyon. We stood overlooking a cliff where there was a rope restraint you weren’t supposed to step beyond. One of the local guys, who was wearing brand new jogging shoes, stepped over it. We were considered large farmers and kind of leaders in the industry then, but he didn’t know us personally. I said, “I can have your shoes?” It meant: If you slip and fall, don’t waste your good, expensive shoes. Poho, give them to me before you go.

I wanted him to know we all came from the same place. You’d have to have come up the hard way to value shoes that were going over a cliff. It was so funny. His wife jerked, he jerked and then we all laughed knowingly. It was a good moment.

Jerryl’s truck could hold three people and my Opel station wagon could fit five. We had no problems with communication when everyone could fit in the two vehicles. But soon the farm and our number of employees grew too large for that, and after that we needed to make a special effort to keep everyone informed.

This was our first step into the world of big business. I realized then that it was not possible to be all things to all people. The best we could do was to be fair.

I lived in the condominiums above Hilo High School. I had a barbell set in an upstairs bedroom and that’s where I first started lifting weights. My next door neighbors and close friends were Ron and Penny Mau. Penny became a school principal and Ron is now a very, very well-known entomologist at the University of Hawai‘i College of Tropical Agriculture.

We were sending a steady amount of bananas to Oahu and our farm was growing. I had a degree in accounting, which I had studied to help me keep score. But I had no actual experience in the accounting field, and as much as I tried, I could not develop an effective bookkeeping system.

Finally I shoved all my records into a banana box and took them to an old veteran accountant. I told him I was looking to hire someone to keep the books.

I thought he might like to know that I had an accounting degree, expecting him to acknowledge that this was a good thing going forward. Instead, without looking up, he told me, “That’s why you’re dangerous.”

(To be continued….)

If you missed our story up to this point
Waiakea Uka: We first start growing bananas
Kapoho Days, Part One

Bananas, History, How It All Started, Our Story

How It All Started: The Kapoho Days (part one)

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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