The first time I called Farm Manager Kimo Pa, in order to try and interview him, he was standing in a river fixing a water pump. When I tried him again later, he was driving a load of bananas and tomatoes to the airport.
“My job is to make sure the operations are running smoothly,” he told me. “Anything and everything that comes up, I jump in there and make sure I accomplish whatever it is that needs to be accomplished.”
It’s why, he told me, they wear t-shirts to work instead of aloha shirts. “We’d just get them dirty,” he said. “You never know what will come up on the farm. There are a lot of moving parts to this operation.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Kimo first worked for the company, then called Kea‘au Banana, back in 1988 when he married Richard and June’s daughter Tracy. Then he went into the construction industry for awhile. When construction slowed down in the early 90s, he came back to do construction work with Richard.
“I was building things at the farm on the weekends,” he said, “and then it was full time. Then he had some plans to do new packing houses and I did all those, and then I got back involved with the farm.”
Kimo said he always wanted to get into business. “I thought I was going to become a building contractor. But then I ended up doing this, and I enjoy it. There’s never a dull moment. It’s always a challenge to figure out an answer; not the way everybody else is doing it, but trying to do it better and different in methods of growing, processing. We’re always trying to improve the wheel.”
With Kimo as farm manager and Tracy working in the farm’s office, the couple is “the next generation” and will take over when this generation retires.
“Kimo will take over after me,” said Richard, “and I’m fortunate to have such a strong transition plan in place. It has nothing to do with the fact that Kimo is my son-in-law. He’s been the farm manager for several years now and has done an excellent job.”
“And more important to me was knowing how he would treat the employees,” he said. “I’ve watched him in action for many years and he treats all the employees fairly.
“Beyond that,” said Richard, “he embraces change. He’s always looking at least five years in the future and he believes, like I do, that if you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards.”
I asked Kimo about working with his father-in-law and he talked about how much he’s learned from Richard over the years. “He’s really an inspiration in guiding us in the right direction,” he said. “I really enjoy working with him and the challenges he comes up with. He’s not the type to sit back and relax and watch the world go by, and I’m not either. I want to be proactive, accomplish things, improve things. We get along perfectly. We kind of think alike.”
Kimo told me he is at the farm seven days a week. “Whatever time I don’t spend on the farm, I spend with my family,” he said. “I guess you could say that family time is my hobby.”
He has three children, ages 23, 17 and 14, and even two grandchildren, who are 3 years old and 9 months.
“I like working the way we have the farm set up, with family (working there),” he said. “It’s good because I’m a family type of person. It gives you more drive to work even harder.”
And then I just had one last question: Does he eat a lot of vegetables?
He does now, he said. “Until we started growing tomatoes, I never ate them because I never knew what a good tomato tasted like. I’d eat a tomato in a hamburger or salad, but just because it was there; because when I was growing up my parents told me, Don’t waste food.
“Now when I eat one of our tomatoes, or our cucumbers or whatever, I really appreciate it because I know what went into it to produce the food. But also because it has a distinct, good flavor I never had before.” —posted by Leslie Lang
