She Grows Food

Dan and I drove out one Sunday to Ho Farms, a 40-acre farm in the Kahuku-area of Oahu’s North Shore. At only 28, Shin is well-known in the Hawaii food and ag community for being part of the next generation of farming in Hawaii – innovative, market-savvy – trading a career on the mainland for a chance to help her family’s farm.

Shin and her mother Le Xieng, took time out of their Sunday harvesting and packing schedule to talk with us. We walked along the rows of greenhouses that allows them to achieve a consistency they crave and to keep spraying down to an absolute minimum. Food Safety certified and Seal of Quality-approved, Ho Farms supplied the state of Hawaii with nearly 100,000 pounds of produce in 2009. They specialize in 6 varieties of tomatoes, cucumbers, long beans, eggplant and squash.

They are a tight family of four – father Wei Chong, mother Le Xieng, Shin and her brother Neal – and they run the farm together. Le Xieng laughs about how it is four minds running the business with four different visions. Now they have employees to help with the day to day operations, but it started out with just them: a young family who made the treacherous journey from Laos to Hawaii, unafraid of hard work but learning the hard way that the only way to really make a fair and good living was to work for yourself.

After a series of jobs from truck driving to taxicabbing, Mr. Ho made a go at farming. Le Xieng, watching him come home so late every night, left her seamstress work and set aside fashion design classes at HCC to help him. After a few years of shuttling back and forth from their home in Palolo to the farm in Kahuku, and seeing so little of their children because of their farming and commuting hours, the Ho’s decided to pack up their family and move to Kahuku.

As we walked along the rows of cucumber plants, hundreds of them, broad leaf and emerald green, Le Xieng talks about those years and you can feel how they must have been a blur – full of work and growth – when she mentions how her children must have felt. How her husband’s brother was the one to take them to the zoo, to the movies. How she and her husband would buy them trips to Disneyland but would be unable to go, unable to leave the farm untended. How there was nothing for her kids to do in Kahuku, no where to go. Later, Shin talks about growing up in Kahuku, how she wouldn’t trade it for anything. And you can see that mother daughter thing in these things, the worrying and the caring. The guilt and the love. But when it comes to the farm, they both say it: it’s about constantly finding a better way to do things. And respecting each other. That’s a big one.

Shin tells me that they respect each other’s ability to work hard. I also suspect that they respect each other’s opinion because they trust that each has the best interest of the farm in mind. A common goal.

And I wonder how it must have felt for the Ho’s when Shin and Neal after living on the mainland and earning college degrees, took up the challenge of coming back to the farm with the intent of taking it to the next level. It took a lot of trust and belief in their children for the elder Ho’s to accept and implement what Shin and Neal, with the help of Shin’s boyfriend at the time, had in mind – which was a completely new branding and market strategy. In a matter of months, they applied to get into Costco, got in, developed a logo, a branding and marketing strategy. This was the start of a whole different kind of farming. One that allowed Ho Farm to start commanding the respect and prices that comes with a branded farm. Branding, getting Food Safety Certified and Seal of Quality approved, only helped their farm to be recognized for the good work they were already doing.

Marketing is not the only kind of innovation going on at the farm. The Ho’s are always researching and experimenting with sustainable farming methods, so far the greenhouses have proven to be worth their weight in gold.

They are also social innovators. Shin mentions that their main top goals for their farm is to be able to supply the community with enough food, to have their farm be one of the greatest and most rewarding places for people to work, and to be able to help other small family farms in the community take their produce to the next level too. And it can and will happen. The Ho’s are part of the Laotian community in Hawaii, a community that is small but increasingly keeping much agricultural land in production on Oahu alive and productive through small leased plots run by families. These families are part of the legacy of farming world-wide and they are part of the future of farming in Hawaii. Lisa Asagi- She grows food correspondent

Check out Part Two of Ho Farm’s mother and daughter team – we talk about the future of their farm, farming in Hawaii and the role of community.

Recipe: Long beans with red curry paste

When 2010 rolled around, the Peterson family knew that they would have to do something special and they are still figuring out just what. Their family farm in Wahiawa had reached its 100th year of existence. That it would come at a time that is so bittersweet and hopeful has put so much into perspective for them and for all of us. The Petersons have been through and continue to make their way through more than their share of trials. The road has been a long one. A hundred years old to be exact, which is equal to a miracle for a farm these days. So how are they celebrating? In the most meaningful way you could ever imagine. They are slowly rebuilding. They are slowly regrouping. And with the help of all of us, they will even grow into their dreams of being able to supply our community at full capacity again like they did for decades. Fresh eggs for us and a promising livelihood for their entire family again.

We visited with Sharon at her family’s farm and got her thoughts on the efforts that brought all of us together – the nearly disastrous crisis of the Hawaii egg farms, feed subsidy help and the marketing plans in 2007 that saved them. It was during these months of working on the marketing strategy for the egg farmers that Dan and I started working together. In some ways it was our first She grows food project. Here’s a link to the website islandfresheggs.com. Visiting again with Sharon opened our eyes even more to her and her family’s incredible story. As humble as they are, we can still see how much more we can learn from them about the history and the future of farming in Hawaii. So please stay tuned for more about Sharon, her family and Petersons Upland Farm as we venture into the month of August.

Why August? Why, it’s been declared Hawaii Egg Month! When Petersons Upland Farm fan and Wahiawa-raised Chef Alan Wong realized that 2010 marked Peterson’s 100 year anniversary he decided to commemorate it with an Egg Recipe Contest! alanwongs.com and an egg-citing menu for the entire month of August. Well, word got around and we jumped on the band wagon to refocus on the August issue and soon to be announced collaboration with our friends at Share Your Table!

We think a 100 years of farming is definite cause for celebration. If anything, to honor all of the love that Sharon and her family have for what they do and what that love fosters in its hometown, Wahiawa, and beyond.

When Estrellita was just a girl with a name full of starlight, she would explore the wilderness surrounding their family’s anthurium farm in Mountain View on Hawaii Island and come back with baby fish that she would raise in tubs and buckets in the backyard. She cared for them so well that they would end up on the dinner table months later. That was just the beginning.

Now Lita Weidenbach, with her husband Ron, runs the largest Tilapia aquaculture farm in the state of Hawaii.

The second thing Lita tells me is that it was love at first sight: college days, Ron was standing in the kitchen at a friend’s party, cooking. Fish soup. This led to dates of driving around the North Shore looking for land to dream about raising fish on, deep decades longs research and experimentation that has led to the cultivation of a unique branch of Hawaii’s food growing past and potential: land-based aquaculture.

Over the nearly 20 years of building their farm, Lita and Ron have also built a new reputation for tilapia in Hawaii and it hasn’t been easy. Tilapia here picked up a reputation for being prolific and cheap, whose quality was determined by it’s environment: historically ditches and canals. The quality of any fish is determined by where it lives and what it eats. Tilapia is no different.

We’re standing a few feet away from the edge of a cliff that drops down into the shimmering green expanse. She calls it a pond but it’s eight acres large and 100 plus feet deep. What makes it so rare and keeps it alive is the fact it’s being fed by cool natural springs. Tilapia can grow anywhere, but there could not be a more perfect place for raising a new kind of tilapia: the tastiest kind. Lita and Ron have been working together for thirty years, painstakingly breeding and carefully cultivating toward a fish fit for white tablecloth and the finest of palates. Especially one belonging to a very stylish and knowledgeable First Lady, who has in fact dined on a tilapia raised right here on this farm and has declared that tilapia is her favorite fish.

Tasty is right. It takes one to two years depending on the desired finish weight. The result is big, meaty with a delicate and light flavor.

Lita’s domain at the farm is the hatchery and nursery, the raising of the baby fry as well as the algae the baby fish feed on. Keen attention to detail, and nuanced reading of behavior key Lita into the well-being of the young fish. It is fascinating to me, how Lita’s girlhood fascination with growing fish had blossomed into a very specialized livelihood.  I want to learn more about how far back and how deeply this connection to fish is to her life and she sends me this illuminating email: “You know, I think when you are a child it is so easy to be captivated by the wonder of animals, plants, and other creatures of this world — a child can be acutely aware of and appreciate such minute details as the translucent tint of a fish scale or the particular flowing curve of a fin.  I remember knowing each of my tilapia as specific individuals — I had a name for each of them!  I was so totally charmed by these underwater inhabitants that I spent long hours just observing them and learning their habits.  So yes, I believe that on some level, the care of my fishes came naturally to me, although my mother assisted in helping me to provide their basic care (an old bathtub and leftover rice from dinner!).”

Is it possible to have a sense of fish?  We think so.  So many people who have dedicated their lives to working with nature have developed a certain sense. It could even be looked at as a kind of communication between humans and animals, perhaps honed by tens of thousands of hours of living together and of caring for.   There is also another kind of sense that Lita hinted to in our interview as we talked about how more women are needed in aquaculture.  Why women?  In aquaculture the kind of attention to detail and acute observational skills that women have had to develop as care givers would be of great benefit in raising fragile young creatures that can only exist in very specific living conditions.  In Lita’s case maternal instincts must have been doing double duty with raising her small fry alongside her three human children on the farm.

With their involvement in the growth of the aquaculture industry in Hawaii and the nation, Ron was sometimes away on conferences and this often left Lita in charge of running the farm and caring for her young children. We’re standing at the rocky shore as Lita introduces me to a farm-built skiff that she and the kids would steer out onto the water to feed the fish. It’s about the size of a surfboard. It must not have been easy at all, as isolated as the farm is, but I can tell by her laugh and the glimmer in her eyes that they took it as an adventure.

Lita mentions often that it was a dream of theirs, to raise their children on a farm and the dream has come true.

Her children were outstanding students at Waialua High School.  Joe is now 25 and an environmental engineer.  Mariah is 22 and has a degree in sociology.  The youngest, Mikia, is 18 and attending Princeton and is focusing on issues of sustainability and renewable energy. They still come back to help on the farm and have a hand in planning for its future– the second generation of Weidenbachs. It will be exciting to see what they can do all together now.

We hope nothing gets in the way of their plans.

A few days ago, Dan and I got word that the Weidenbach’s farm is in danger. Please lend your help by emailing a brief testimony of support for the renewal of their lease so that they may continue to operate their farm. They not only strengthen our local food system by being our largest land-based aquaculture operation, but they are also leaders in this community. Here’s a link to the Acting Up Call to Action.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone else will ever be able to use that particular patch of land in the optimal and sustainable way that Lita and Ron are. They have been selectively breeding fish, maintaining a pristine eight acre pond, and cultivating an industry that already feeds us and may even save us one day: sustainable land-based aquaculture. This means the ability to raise seafood in safe, controlled and healthy environments, not the ocean.

With all that’s been happening to our oceans, how relevant is this particular endeavor at this moment in time?

Recipe: Grandma Fely’s Tilapia Soup