Community Supported Agriculture Grows Up on Hawai‘i Island
By Cynthia Sweeney
Each Thursday, Lark and Steve Willey pack up their specially outfitted van with boxes of freshly picked spinach, beets, leeks, mushrooms, and other seasonal fruits and vegetables from their farm in Waimea, and deliver them door-to-door. In just three years, their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm has grown to about 75 members.
“This is an encouraging time. What used to be a small fringe movement has now entered into the mainstream, with access to organic and locally grown food increasing in popularity,” Lark says.
CSAs are a win-win situation for people who want to buy local produce and farmers who sell their products directly to them. With community membership, CSA farmers are able to build a reliable, steady customer base, receive payment early in the season, which helps with the farm’s cash flow, and have an opportunity to get to know the people who eat the food they grow.
Lark and Steve successfully made the transition from commercial farmers to CSA farmers eight years ago, when they moved to Hawai‘i Island from their organic farm on Maui. Steve is originally from Kula, and has always been an upcountry boy. He found a partner in Lark, and now, with their two daughters, it is a family affair. On Maui, they farmed organically for 22 years. This included harvesting a monocrop lettuce once a week for Down To Earth health food stores, an experience Steve describes as “intense.”
After moving to Waimea, their break from farming didn’t last long. Their passion got the better of them and they began growing what would mature into a seasonal variety of fruits and vegetables at their farm in Waimea, Ka ‘Ohi Nani (beautiful harvest).
“I can’t stop—it’s in my blood,” Lark explains. “I missed it so much. We started from scratch again. That’s what happens when you find your bliss,” she says.
While not all farmers are comfortable dealing directly with the public (Steve smiles and raises his hand) Lark is in her element designing the weekly boxes.
“You have to be very social,” Lark says. “The whole idea is to get out into the community, and the community gets to see the farm. It has helped us to bond with the farming community. This is very different than being a commercial grower. To be a CSA grower, you have to be service-oriented. I’m having a heck of a lot more fun. I get to do newsletters, recipes; my creative side is fulfilled.”
The contents of the boxes vary from week to week and according to the season. A typical box will include an array of vegetables handpicked that morning, like lettuce, artichokes, beans, and tomatoes. Subscribers will also often find fresh flowers and eggs, a newsletter and recipes that coincide with the boxed vegetables like tomato and red pepper omelets. All this delivered to your door for $20 a week.
Lisa Shattuck has been a Ka ‘Ohi Nani member for more than a year. “I love the surprise of getting different vegetables each week. I never heard of yakon before. This encourages me to eat what I might not ordinarily buy. I know the vegetables are freshly harvested that morning, not sprayed, and not sitting on somebody’s shelf.”
There are about 4,000 CSAs across the United States, with variations in the way they operate. On Hawai‘i Island there are currently about four CSAs in operation. While Ka ‘Ohi Nani grows and supplies all of its own produce, Adaptations Inc. in Kona operates more like a wholesale broker, distributing produce from 40–50 local farms to various pick-up locations around town.
Owners Maureen and Tane Datta have their own seven-acre certified organic farm in Hōnaunau that supplies about 30 percent of Adaptation’s produce.
“We are in a unique position by not having to rely on our own farm,” Maureen acknowledges.
Adaptations has about 65 regular members who pick up their weekly bags of fresh, local produce at various locations around Kona and at Tropical Dreams in Waimea. They also deliver and ship to 65 restaurants and 15 health food stores across the islands.
Adaptations offers two choices for their members: The Basic Feast is $22 a week, and includes seasonal fruits and vegetables. The Gourmet Feast, at $35, includes the basic box plus three or four “upscale” items.
From their warehouse in Kealakekua, Maureen and Tane have developed an infrastructure to keep all of this organized. Saturdays, Maureen emails members as to what choices will be available for Tuesday’s delivery. Members can also customize their weekly orders via the website and have access to Adaptation’s web store where they can purchase extra items for their bag. Maureen also posts recipes on the site.
While Tane has been farming since the 1970s, the Datta’s started their CSA in 1998, “Mostly to get our friends off our back,” Maureen laughs. “Friends were stopping by for a bunch of carrots here, a few heads of lettuce there, which was disruptive and just did not work,” she said.
The Datta’s earnest movement to “supply real food to real people who live here” goes back to 1990, a time when almost all of the island’s produce was shipped in and found in a can on a store shelf. Chef Peter Merriman, founder of Merriman’s restaurants and widely credited with the farm-to-table movement here in Hawai‘i, attended a potluck at the Datta’s farm one day and was impressed with the fresh produce he saw. So impressed, he invited Maureen and Tane to sit in on a forum with ten other chefs including Sam Choy, Amy Ferguson, and Alice Waters, on how to remove the barriers and bring local produce to the table.
“We were working together to see how we could do it better,” Maureen said.
In addition to Adaptations, the Datta’s also find time to host sustainable agriculture students from around the world, who receive college credit for studying and working on current farming projects.
“We love learning from the students. They have so much energy and enthusiasm,” Maureen says.
The Datta’s also farm Kona coffee and Ceylon cinnamon, which they sell for culinary and medicinal purposes. These are available under their Oceanfire label.
In Hilo, Big Island Farm Fresh Foods operates as part CSA distributor, part personal shopper. In addition to the fruits and vegetables delivered weekly in the basic $20 box, members can choose from a wide variety of items on their “webstand,” like Puna goat cheese, Hawai‘i Island grass-fed beef, local wild-caught ahi, and other island products that can be added on as “hook-ups” to their weekly box.
Big Island Farm Fresh Foods is a CSA that also offers their members the flexibility of ordering when they want or don’t want a delivery to their home or office. Brittany Anderson, who runs the operation with her husband Bodhi, describes the service as more like a co-op for people who don’t have time to go to the market.
“The biggest feature that sets us apart [from other CSAs] is that people can order from week to week,” Brittany says. “We have no overhead so we’re almost like a personal shopper.”
While a few CSAs around the island have found their niche, the challenges of CSA farming are numerous. Big farmers plant one large crop, like corn, and sell it to a distributor like Suisan who then markets and delivers it. For a small three-acre farm like Ka ‘Ohi Nani, scheduling crops throughout the year to get enough volume is complicated. And farming organically is a challenge on top of that.
Recently, the farm’s spinach suffered an aphid attack. To deal with the problem, Lark handpicked the infected leaves and watered each plant by hand.
“Not being a monocrop helps. That way the whole crop isn’t wiped out,” Lark explains. “We’ve had consistent numbers for so long, we’ve figured it out.
Although Ka ‘Ohi Nani is not certified organic, the Willeys adhere to strict organic practices. “We’ve been doing this for so long, I’m very confident with our standards. Organic certification on Maui was really strict, and I like that,” Lark said, referring to laxer organic standards required for certification by the International Certification Services, Inc (ICS), since the Hawai‘i Organic Farmer’s Association ceased certification of organic producers.
Everything is done by hand—tilling, harvesting; no machinery is used whatsoever. Weeding is a daily task, Steve noted, and neighbors have been known to scold them—in a friendly way—for weeding on Sunday’s and holidays. Fertilizer and plant food is all-organic and everything possible is composted.
“Nothing ever goes to waste around here,” Lark says, including pesky garden snails that are fed to the chickens and ducks.
Although the 2,500 ft. elevation in Waimea is higher and colder than the Willey’s farm in Makawao, their three-acre farm is typical of smaller organic farms around the island. Several other small farms including Ginger Ridge Farm in Mountain View and Dragon’s Eye in Kapoho have performed as CSAs in the past and are looking to do so again in the future. They cite various challenges including, in the case of Island Goods in Pāpa‘ikou, wild pigs uprooting entire corn crops.
Lark and Steve acknowledge their hard work and perseverance while encouraging others.
“I feel really blessed we survived the [bad] economy. We were always innovative enough to find work. We believe you can create work for yourself. CSA is a marketing tool, but you can market yourself. People often don’t realize their potential. We’re not going to get rich but we have food on the table and are working in a time when a lot of people are not. All my life I believed if you do what makes you happy, you will be successful.” ❖
Ka ‘Ohi Nani Farms, Waimea
Home delivery and pick-up locations in the Waimea area. Contact Lark, 808.333.0126
Adaptations Inc. Kona
Pick-up locations in Kealakekua, Kailua-Kona, Kaloko, and Waimea. 808.324.6600 AdaptationsAloha.com
Big Island Farm Fresh Foods
Serving Hilo, Kea‘au, Pāhoa, Ka‘ū. bigislandfarmfreshfoods@gmail.com, BigIslandFarmFreshFoods.com
Dragon’s Eye Center, Kapoho
Currently accepting names for waiting list. Contact Kaika, 808.965.9371. info@dragonseyecenter.org, DragonsEyeCenter.org
Ginger Ridge Farm
18389 Volcano Hwy, Mountain View. Currently accepting names for waiting list. Contact Howard James, 808.968.7622, organicfaming2005@yahoo.com
Sage Farms, Hawi
Membership is currently full.
Keep up to date on CSAs and farmers markets around the island at HawaiiHomeGrown.net and on page 74.
Photographs by Anna Pacheco: AnnaPachecoPhotography.com
Contact writer Cynthia Sweeney: sweeneywrites@yahoo.com
