Back to the Land
An initiative in land stewardship on former sugarcane land in Kīlauea is working to increase food security and foster community on Kaua‘i’s North Shore.
Text by Brittany Lyte and Lauren McNally
Images by Christian Cook and courtesy of Middle MGMT
The County of Kaua‘i was ready to throw in the towel on a proposal to build an agriculture park on 75 acres of abandoned sugarcane land in Kīlauea. Overgrown, with no access to a water source, the plot had become the site of homeless camps and a dumping ground for old mattresses and abandoned vehicles. The county, which had taken the project’s helm after more than two decades of attempts by the community and the Kīlauea Agricultural Association to develop the parcel, realized there wasn’t enough funding to fulfill a long-held vision for a $7.2 million organic food and farming hub.
Upon learning that the project wasn’t moving forward, Yoshi L’Hote assembled a group of volunteers and revitalized the nonprofit ‘Āina Ho‘okupu O Kīlauea (AHK)to help Kaua‘i County implement the master plan. With the financial support of the county, the state, and private donations, the team cleared the land of rubbish, cut back the overgrowth, and planted cover crops to enrich the soil. Then they recruited anyone willing to get their hands dirty as part of a newfound movement to boost local produce production, decrease reliance on food imports, and establish resiliency in the face of climate change—including an expected uptick in natural disasters that might one day test the neighborhood’s ability to sustain itself. “I’m the dummy who raised his hand and said, ‘Yes, I can do it,’” L’Hote says.
The Kīlauea Community Agricultural Center is the nonprofit’s flagship project, and the objective is as much about fostering kinship in the community as it is about providing Kaua‘i residents with a steady source of fresh food. Plots were made available to local farmers at low or no cost, and with help from a team of 20 to 30 weekly volunteers, some 45 fruit and vegetable crops are now growing on the property and filling community-supported agriculture boxes for residents of Kaua‘i’s North Shore.
The agricultural center welcomed an inaugural class of six interns in early 2018, a program designed to introduce prospective farmers to food cultivation, land preservation, and bookkeeping. After a year of paid training, interns earn a business name, insurance, and a two-year license agreement to farm on site. “We’re forming new farmers with good habits,” L’Hote says.
“You have to have a holistic approach and understand different crops because your security as a farmer is to be diversified.”
The challenges of being a small farmer in Hawai‘i were all too apparent when the pandemic hit the following year and the market for local produce disappeared practically overnight. Using nonprofit funds and donations from the community, ‘Āina Ho‘okupu O Kīlauea helped bridge the gap for several Kaua‘i farmers by aggregating farmers market boxes that were either sold or distributed for free to those in need. Thanks to a U.S. Department of Agriculture contract funded by the CARES Act, which allowed AHK to expand the initiative, the Kīlauea Community Agricultural Center was able to funnel $1.5 million into farms island wide and supply local families with more than 420,000 pounds of government-subsidized produce in 2020. The government funds also enabled the agricultural center to purchase new equipment, install new greenhouses, increase production on the farm by four acres, and add roughly 20 employees to its staff, the majority of whom are between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.
Several former interns were hired by the Kīlauea Community Agricultural Center as full-time employees, and now a third cohort of interns are helping the farm continue to increase production toward the goal of accessing a bigger market. Over the past year, that’s included raising poultry and working to build a more robust hog industry on island, starting with establishing a nursery and a network of offsite pig farmers who will ultimately have access to facilities to slaughter, process, and retail their products on site.
To that end, the agricultural center is in the process of developing a farmers market complex that features an existing set of 3,200-square-foot pavilions—designed to host not only farmers markets but also public events once Covid-19 restrictions are lifted—and will eventually include a small retail front and café, along with certified kitchen space for farmers to turn their yields into value-added products. “Our local farmers and fisherman need certified facilities to put out products that are ready for the shelf so we don’t have to depend on wholesalers, who tend to use the Hawai‘i name even when it’s not locally caught or sourced,” L’Hote says. “We want to make sure that whatever’s being done here is being represented appropriately so it can fetch the right price because it is a superior product—I truly believe that.”
