The Kuahiwi Market Slam with Chef Alan Wong and his dedicated crew brought in a record crowd to KCC Farmers Market on May 29th. Michelle and her father Al sold over 500 pounds of “frozen beef” and 300 hamburgers and loco mocos in just a few hours.
The line began to form before the market started. Word had got out thanks to a wonderful article by Erika Engle in the Start-Bulletin and an awesome post to his Baker’s Hour site by Hawaii culinary blogger Ed Morita.
Chef Alan volunteered his own Saturday morning to help the Galimbas, and when the rest of his staff found out, they decided to join in too. Pineapple Room Chef Lance Kosaka arrived with his truck full of equipment and supplies, as many faces from Alan Wong Restaurant and Pineapple Room appeared to join the cooking. Chef Ed Kenney, a market regular came by smiling and commenting that the Alan Wong crew never does anything “small.” And it’s true, they brought the Kuahiwi Ranch Oahu Farmers Market debut to another level altogether.
A line long with both locals and visitors stretched past the booth, lasting till the last packet of ground beef was sold and the last burger was topped with onions and handed off.
One thing was clear at the moment the end of market horn blew: There is without a doubt, a huge demand for Kuahiwi beef on Oahu.
This is Filipino soul food. My grandfather made a stupendous la’uya, and my father also. It is very simple and very tasty, especially if you’ve spent a cold, wet day in the mountains.
This premiere issue of She grows food focuses on The Farming Women of Ka’u. We’ll take you to this farming community on Hawai’i island that’s not only rising from the ashes of the post-sugar era recession, but is aspiring to reclaim farming and food growing for the art it truly is. Five-star finished pasture-raised beef. World-class coffee. Magazine ready veggies.
Michelle Galimba, Lorie Obra and Sokha Hester. They, like the rest of the women of Ka’u and women all over the world, are the backbones of their communities. We are stronger than we know. She grows food is here to remind us of this.
Why start at Ka’u? It’s the district on the southern tip of Hawai’i Island, the state’s youngest island. In fact, it is still forming. All that new birthing is happening in Ka’u alongside a fiercely growing community commitment to growth that is agriculturally based. No hotels, more farms. No chains, more local stores selling local produce. They are developing a new strategy for growth: growing things at the highest standards possible. In a world awash in the tide of cheap food, they have decided to grow not only real food, but really great food.
They are taking farming back to it’s original state. Much more than a science. It’s a craft. Even an art.
And not just a business either. Rather, a community effort. A responsibility. Women are leading the way of this revolution. In the next weeks and months, we’ll be introducing you to more women who will be giving you reasons to think Hawaii is on the forefront of this movement that may have began on our plates but is ultimately reconnecting us deeply to the issues of land, water, community, and food.
Please join us. Let’s build the future of our food together. From the ground up.
With a cattle ranch to run, raising an eight-year-old daughter on her own, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Lit, there’s a lot on Michelle Galimba’s mind.
Coming back to Hawaii after an era of travel and study that took her from the cafes of Paris to the corridors of academia, Michelle has only sharpened her ability to see the beauty and meaning, the art and politics, in the landscape of agriculture and community she now finds herself.
She grew up on Oahu and graduated from Punahou, but raising animals is strong in her blood. Her father, Al Galimba, played a huge role the North Shore Meadow Gold dairy operations at the height of its success. When Meadow Gold closed its dairy operations on Oahu, C. Brewer on Hawaii Island began leasing land holdings acquired for their defunct sugar operation, it was then the Galimbas decided to pursue Al’s long held dream: to move back to his hometown of Na’alehu in the Ka’u district and raise cattle. They started with nothing but knowledge, desire and their connection to the land and its history.
Hawaii Island is where the relationship of Hawaii and cattle began, over 200 years ago, when the first four cows arrived as gifts to King Kamehameha. It is on this island that the king’s love of the cows caused him to declare a protective proclamation that allowed them to flourish without boundary – wild. Ranching in Hawaii began as a way to minimize the rogue population of this huge animal.
And that’s how Kuahiwi Ranch started too. With one cow. With Michelle and her brothers, riding deep into the valleys and roping wild cattle. Then caring for them, raising them, cultivating their herd over a decade and a half.
But ranching is not just about cows. It is also about the land, pasture, water, and working with others to keep a rural community alive. The expanse of land, and the many factors involved, might also require those who ranch to develop a philosophy of stewardship. This is certainly the case with the Galimbas and in other ranchers we’ve spoken with.
On an early visit to Kuahiwi, I sat with Michelle on her porch. We were high in the valley and as she gazed deep into the valley. She spent the last few nights shuttling one of her dogs to the vet, he was old and not doing good. Between thoughts, my eyes would drift over the expanse of shimmering waves of green and gold pasture to the smooth and endlessly blue ocean. Then sky. She had just come back from Honolulu where she met with a meat distributor in a small air-conditioned office. The goal is to get their beef into markets on Oahu. She is also working with coffee growers in Ka’u to get their coffee into larger markets too. It’s not all just about markets, it’s about farming. It’s about doing what it takes to make Ka’u a community where farms could have a future and people could continue to have livelihoods and independent businesses, where the next generation does not have to move away.
That moment in the freezing air-conditioned office in Honolulu – it was a walk through fire. A necessary step, she said, if her daughter and nephews are to have even an inkling of a chance at running this ranch.
Months later, Michelle is on Oahu again. Events have been organized to showcase Kuahiwi beef in a tasting against supermarket imported beef. Chefs from top Oahu restaurants show their overwhelming support of Kuahiwi.
I hear from a friend of mine, also a friend of Michelle’s, that Michelle’s father Al has said if they do not get into Oahu markets by summer, they will need to close their operation. I meet Michelle and her daughter, Ua, for dinner. They are in town to do a sampling presentation at Foodland for a beef co-op they are a part of. Ua is along for a short shopping trip that involved a pair of silver shoes for the Miss Peaberry contest.
Michelle is a mover of things and ideas. And things are moving quickly for Michelle. And on a recent Saturday night, she fired the equivalent of a bursting flare high into darkness, illuminating the disappearing landscape of agriculture in not only Hawaii, but the rest of country, and perhaps the world.
It came as a 8:43 p.m. posting to her blog Ehulepo, named aptly for the wind of Ka’u that beats the dust.
In it she mentions an article, “Push To Eat Local is Hampered By Shortage” by Katie Zezima for the New York Times that reveals that local independent livestock farmers across the nation are finding that a lack of support by communities and governments for needed infrastructure has become the largest obstacle in this push for reestablishing local food systems.
“This is a problem that I deal with everyday,” writes Michelle. “It’s a part of what I mean by saying that it’s not enough to buy local. Is it the farmer’s and rancher’s responsibility to create the infrastructure necessary to get the food all the way onto the plate? Do farmers have the millions of dollars and more importantly, the time and stamina to get through the regulatory hurdles of putting this infrastructure into place? We are trying to get it done, but the obstacles are daunting. We could really use some help, and not just in the eating part. “
In a few days she will be appointed to the Hawaii Board of Agriculture. But it will not instantly solve the problem for her ranch, for Ka’u, or for food growers in Hawaii.
She Grows Food invites you to be a part of a project to support Kuahiwi, in not just establishing themselves in the Oahu markets, but to address Michelle’s concern about the lack of infrastructure.
Did you know that freshly picked, unroasted coffee berries have a soft white flesh?
I was savoring the rarity of this chance to taste one and its surprisingly pleasant sweetness, as Lorie Obra informed me that because there was only one white bean that came out of the berry that was in my mouth, it was a peaberry. Very special. Rare.
We were standing in Cloudrest, an elevated area in Ka’u, where many of the coffee growing families’s farms are. I’m told that this place lives up to its name. A friend was here a few months ago and came early enough to be treated to some dramatic mist lingering just above the seven hundred trees on Lorie’s farm. But this afternoon, it was the happiest and bluest sky you ever saw.
How it must have felt for Ka’u.
Remote. Nearly 922 square miles that was home to an active volcanic crater, moonscape lava fields, ranches, a string of townships, not quite 6,680 people, and recently cultivated coffee farms. When the international coffee spotlight fell on Ka’u, lingered on Lorie Obra.
This was no strike of luck. This was the result of a concerted effort of thirty newly established, family-run independent coffee farms that, against the prevailing cannibalistic business models, decided to help each other. Through trials and tribulations, they organized and committed their hearts to proving that in Ka’u, an exceptional coffee could be cultivated. The awards started coming in.
In 2007, two of the Ka’u family farms captured 6th and 9th place in the Roaster’s Guild Cupping Pavilion Competition. Also, seven Ka’u farms ranked in the SCAA’s top 10 Hawaii/Asia/Indonesia regional competition. In the following year, another farm came in 11th in the Roaster’s Guild Coffee of the Year competition. In 2009, yet another Ka‘u farm placed 7th in the Roaster’s Guild Coffee of the Year competition.
Most of these farmers were the last of multiple generations to work at the sugar plantation which long ran the Ka’u economy before closing operations in 1997. Old plantation land became available at reasonable price and these families decided to make a go of it and planted coffee trees. What Ka’u decided to do however, was not simply grow coffee. They were aiming for exceptional coffee.
When the sun gets too strong, Lorie and I walk towards a small red cabin raised on stilts. There’s a picnic bench under an eave that extends from the little. It’s cool and quiet. The grove slopes up toward the mountains, the trees are planted in orderly rows. Lorie tells me that I just missed the blossoming of the coffee flowers, by a week! Darn. She jokes that it looked like it was snowing up here.
I follow her gaze, the little red cabin behind me, it too has a story. Rusty’s brother-in-law called it The Love Shack, she mused, joking about it’s isolated, romantic look. It was a place that they and their help could to run to for shelter when the rain came.
Lorie was moving her hand through hundreds of brilliantly red coffee berries nestled in her picking basket when I noticed the small elegant script eternally drawn into her left hand. Rusty.
It was 1999 when, after several trips home visiting his family in Ka’u, that Lorie and her husband, Rusty, decided pack up their life in New Jersey, move to Hawaii and grow coffee. The two of them did not having any coffee growing experience, but what they did have were meticulous natures and an understanding of the workings of chemistry, which is of course, is all about the nature of nature. Rusty was a chemist and Lorie was a medical technician. As their website says, this contributed to the spirit of culinary experimentation and open-air laboratory that still exists at the farm.
After six years of building their farm together, she lost Rusty in 2006. She tells me that when he got very ill, he made her promise to sell their farm. He didn’t want her to be burdened with running the farm alone.
It was a huge undertaking, but Lorie kept the farm. She decided to continue her and Rusty’s dream.
She’s been running the farm alone. Her berries are hand-picked and she is constantly experimenting with all kinds of processing techniques, working closely with good friend and roastmaster R. Miguel Meza, extending her knowledge of all things coffee. She is also currently president of the Ka’u Coffee Co-op, still 30 families strong, an organization started by Rusty. The co-op could be thought of as backbone that brought the Ka’u growers deep into serious international coffee competition.
When I ask her to tell me what she can’t live without, the farming scientist tells me “water.” Then as we walk through a row of trees, she shows me the delayed, unripened berries, an effect of the heavy recent vog. I ask her what she dreams of, not skipping a beat, Lorie lets me know. What she wants is not just for her business, but for all of Ka’u coffee to be recognized as perhaps the best the world has ever known. She wants that for Ka’u. And for Rusty.
There’s always that moment. That bright second when the world aligns itself into an open path.
For Sokha Hester, the path has been both treacherous and remarkable.
But the moment she started on the path of a professional grower of food happened when she gave a teller at her bank a few of her homegrown eggplant. The next week, the same teller begged Sokha to sell some of her harvest at the Na’alehu Farmers Market. You can see why. Anyone who catches a glimpse of anything grown on the Hesters’ farm, blinks twice. Not just beautiful. Stunning.
Years later, Sokha and her husband Ellis, have innovated their 30 acre growing space a mile above Pahala, into a farm that offers such a diversity – nothing seems impossible. They continue to creatively work their way through a variety of not the best growing conditions: uneven land, rocky soil, weather conditions – to bring to their markets the most flavorful and eye-popping vegetables.
As we sat on the beautiful deck of the home she shares with her husband Ellis and their cats, Sokha confides that it hasn’t been easy lately. Ellis had just come through some health issues. She was worried about how long they could keep up such a difficult way of life: waking up early for the farmers markets, the very physicalness of farming, the necessity of their constant brainstorming of solutions for their crops, the long summer twelve hour days.
But then, that bright moment circles back. “But people depend on us, for their vegetables. Whenever we talk about quitting, they all say please don’t stop, if you stop, where will I get my vegetables.” After another pause, “Also, we really like being able to employ people, we like it that we can give people jobs here.”
And they are not only providing employment. They are providing an opportunity for learning how to grow and all of the skill set needed to run a farm. The young local people on their farm that day looked involved and engaged, there was a sense of pride to. How can you not feel very good about growing things of beauty. I’m getting repetitious, I know. But, look at this.
That she came back to growing food is another circle altogether. The beginning of that one took place in a small village in Cambodia decades ago, during the communist regime, where she and her family had been relocated. They, like every family, had been given a 100 square foot space. They, like all the other families during that era in Cambodia, went into the forest to cut trees and grass to build a shelter to sleep in. This is where and how they lived for years, Sokha, her parents, her ex-husband and their four children. She traded seeds with her neighbors and learned how to grow. They are Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese. Her family ran businesses, not farms. This was her first experience with growing, in the small spaces around their house. She grew pumpkins, squash, whatever she could. They never got to eat what they grew. Khmer Rouge guards would keep track and come to harvest all produce for the main kitchens. She didn’t mind, as long as it was providing food for people. She kept growing.
After her mother died in the camp, they decided that it was too dangerous to stay where they were. It took five attempts, but they all made it out. The path out was through jungle and fields laden with mines. But they made it. They made it to the US where Sokha eventually started working for a technology company that developed high-speed telecommunications equipment for hospitals. Sokha, starting as a technician, worked her way through the gates and ended up as a patent-holding engineer. It was hands on all the way. They would give her the projects that engineers with degrees could not handle.
Her love of finding solutions is something she has in common with her husband Ellis, the perennial farmer. They stay up nights devising solutions for their farm. Two inventors burning the midnight oil about water, weather, tractor pumps.
After she met Ellis, he was managing a huge organic farm in Willamette Valley. She began spending more and more time in the country, on the farm. He taught her how to drive a tractor. They began coming to Hawaii Island on vacations. They loved being here. And slowly, a way opened for them to move to Ka’u.
At first it was natural to tend a vegetable garden. They had no idea it would turn it into a business. But here they are. Thirty acres later.
As we walked through the tractor pathway between the greenhouses, a hawk circled overhead and landed on a tree right on the farm. It stayed and watched. Sokha told us that the hawk had been there from the day they moved in. “This is his home. He comes and watches us everyday, picking green beans, everything. Sometimes I can get very close to him. Yes, this is his home.”
Here she was now. On an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Growing food for people and creating livelihoods too.
Before we left, I asked her what it was, that one thing she could not live without, without a pause she said it. “Work.” She smiled and put on her hat. “We have to keep moving. It’s what us human beings do.”
Market Slam: May 29, 2010: KCC Farmers Market: Michelle Galimba of Kuahiwi Ranch makes her debut at KCC with frozen cuts of beef. Supporter Chef Alan Wong will be cooking and serving up Kuahiwi Ranch hamburgers and loco moco! Please spread the word! Come show your support!
KCC Farmers Market, Saturday, 7:30 to 11:00 a.m Map
The key for Kuahiwi Ranch’s survival is to break into the Oahu supermarkets and restaurants.
As our systems of food distribution came to depend on larger commercial food growers outside of our state who could provide lower priced imports, our local independent farms and ranches found it more and more difficult to find their way into our supermarkets and restaurants. Because of this, we have lost countless farms. In 2009 alone, we lost 16 farms on Oahu.
She Grows Food specializes in reversing these trends, one farm at time.
We started this process with Kuahiwi by introducing them to leaders in the Hawaii culinary movement, who immediately recognized the high quality and standard of Kuahiwi’s beef and worked hard on their end to get it into their restaurants. We assisted in generating publicity for the ranch and the crisis situation of the beef industry in Hawaii.
This has helped Kuahiwi but it’s not enough. For Kuahiwi to survive, we need to get louder and wake up the giant that is the Oahu market. They need to be in the supermarkets.
We need your help. We are putting out the call to all local food vigilantes!
Over the past year, She Grows Food has been researching, strategizing and laying the ground work for a public action campaign that could creatively and powerfully put local ranches and farmers back in our markets.
What we found is that in order for farmers and ranchers to survive and to grow, they need get a fair price, no more having to take the hit from competition with cheap imported food. The key is to use our numbers to help them leverage a fair price at the market. This is where you come in.
The concept of Local Food Vigilantes is visibility for all of us who see our purchases of locally grown food as a purposeful reinvestment in our local food growing system.
Here’s the plan:
Organizing. Become a Local Food Vigilante by subscribing and getting guerrilla with us. We’ll send you updates and action alerts. As individuals we care deeply about rescuing our local food systems. As a group, we are a force to be reckoned with.
Eating as a Political Act. In the coming months, we will be working hard to stage supermarket and restaurant slams and publicizing them. What’s a slam? We put out an action alert, vigilantes show up and shock with sheer numbers.
Together, we can make the message clear:
– We have the power to directly assist our local farmers in leveraging a fair price at our markets.
– Our markets need to know that we will support fair prices for our local farmers. No more cheap imports that do nothing to build our local community.
Yes, it’s time to break old habits and compost vicious cycles.
Our first slam will be KCC Farmers Market, Saturday, May 29th, 7:30-11:00 a.m. This is Kuahiwi Ranch’s debut at the Hawaii’s largest farmers market. Michelle Galimba will be there representing her family and selling frozen cuts of their ranch’s beef. Chef Alan Wong found out that Michelle was coming to the market and volunteered to cook in her booth for her as a show of support and to help her raise money. He’s phoned to say he’ll be cooking and serving a special Kuahiwi dish.
Vigilantes: show up in force and show your support for Kuahiwi too!
Goal for this event: Document the demand for Kuahiwi beef on Oahu, so that we can show supermarkets that powerful support exists.
