The history of farming in Waimea resides in the stories of our farmers and this year Ms. Robertson’s eighth grade honors English class added to that history with their oral history project: Farmers and Farming in Waimea, making a connection between classroom curriculum and the real world. The project was kicked off with a visit from Dr. Warren Nishimoto from the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Dr. Nishimoto compressed a semester long course into an all-day version of how to do oral history, captivating students with some of the stories he’s accumulated from hundreds of oral histories. The resulting interviews, conducted in the Mala’ai Culinary Garden, provide a glimpse into the lives of nine individuals whose stories are what makes Waimea the unique place it is. Although some of the interviewees come from far flung places such as Guatemala and Japan and others trace their ancestry in the islands, they are connected by their love and gratitude for the land.
The Great Mahele of 1848, which allowed private ownership of land began a huge shift in island agriculture. With private ownership of land came sugar cane plantations. The plantations’ need for extensive labor led to the influx of Asian farm workers, with the first Chinese contract laborers arriving in 1852. This insatiable need for labor also brought the first Japanese workers to Hawaii in 1868. The first group was comprised mostly of farmers from Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto and Fukuoka prefectures, where the drop in the price of rice made for difficult conditions. Rural farmers in Japan were suffering by the time Mineo Honda was born in 1942. In 1956 he came to Honoka’a from Kumamoto Prefecture and remembers, “The government controlled the farmers. All the rice goes to the soldiers. That’s the reason we didn’t have anything like food. Those days when I born was very poor. Country was in war. So was poor, poor and some don't have kaukau, you know food.”
The Great Mahele of 1848, which allowed private ownership of land began a huge shift in island agriculture. With private ownership of land came sugar cane plantations. The plantations’ need for extensive labor led to the influx of Asian farm workers, with the first Chinese contract laborers arriving in 1852. This insatiable need for labor also brought the first Japanese workers to Hawaii in 1868. The first group was comprised mostly of farmers from Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Kumamoto and Fukuoka prefectures, where the drop in the price of rice made for difficult conditions. Rural farmers in Japan were suffering by the time Mineo Honda was born in 1942. In 1956 he came to Honoka’a from Kumamoto Prefecture and remembers, “The government controlled the farmers. All the rice goes to the soldiers. That’s the reason we didn’t have anything like food. Those days when I born was very poor. Country was in war. So was poor, poor and some don't have kaukau, you know food.”
While contract laborers came planning to earn enough money to return to their home country, only a minority actually did so. On the Big Island, after serving out their contracts, many Japanese and other contract workers became farmers on the Hamakua coast and in Waimea. Aunty Dorothy Nishie, whose husband grew up on the Laupahoehoe Sugar plantation remembers, “My husband’s family had property in Laupahoehoe and they did farming. Weekends we’d go home and help them with the farm. They were planting chop suey potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans and things like that. And then he would carry on his shoulders and walk the community and a lot of them did that for survival.”
Ranching was the dominate livelihood in Waimea, but ranch employees and their families raised food to eat and trade. Aunty Dorothy Nishie, who grew up on Parker Ranch’s Waiki’i station where her father worked, recalls the gardens there, “My mother and all the ladies, they planted their gardens. They planted vegetables and they planted flowers. And my mom and several of my cousins were lei makers. So that’s how we got extra money.” There was also a regular connection with Waipio Valley agriculture, “It was a big bag of poi that was done in Waipio and brought up by the mules on the saddle through the mountains…”
Ranching was the dominate livelihood in Waimea, but ranch employees and their families raised food to eat and trade. Aunty Dorothy Nishie, who grew up on Parker Ranch’s Waiki’i station where her father worked, recalls the gardens there, “My mother and all the ladies, they planted their gardens. They planted vegetables and they planted flowers. And my mom and several of my cousins were lei makers. So that’s how we got extra money.” There was also a regular connection with Waipio Valley agriculture, “It was a big bag of poi that was done in Waipio and brought up by the mules on the saddle through the mountains…”
Before World War II farming was a way to survive. Tsukasa Yamamoto remembered, “Our business, farming business was hard, you know. You don’t want to buy cabbage when you raise your own. So the same thing with everything. It’s just for survival. We raised our vegetable, you know. Potatoes, cabbage, lettuce. We can sell some, but it’s mostly for survival.” But with the onset of World War II, military troops doubled the population of the sleepy little town of Waimea and placed demands on the farmers. “Small farmers they go to work and they get the time, spare time, they raise their vegetables. And they raise celery and all kind of vegetable for the marines. So the marines used to buy plenty…They want five thousand pounds of celery, five thousand pounds of cabbage, five thousand pounds of lettuce, five thousand pounds of all those things, you know.” (Tsukasa Yamamoto)
In the early 1950’s the opening of Hawaiian Homelands in Kuhio Village and Pu’ukapu Homestead enlarged the Waimea farming community. The Berdon ‘Ohana, taro farmers in Waipio, moved to Pu’ukapu Homestead to farm. Aunty Tootsie recalls, “Back in the day my dad farmed ninety acres along with the Nakamotos. The Nakamotos taught my dad, because Reiso (Nakamoto) was much older than my dad. He mentored my father in farming, you know. And then together we had a co-op. And we would ship out a lot of veggies.” When the Lalamilo Farm Lots opened up in the sixties, Bobby Nakamoto’s father was able to buy a farm lot. Bobby remembers those early days, “It was just raw land and there was a lot of rocks there so you had to clean up and put in a whole infrastructure.”
Mineo Honda found his way back to the land through a circuitous route. He was attending B.Y.U. in the late sixties when he met and married Nancy Kaauwai and immediately became eligible for the draft. “Came back from Vietnam. Soldier right? Went to the New York School of Technology (in Honolulu) and worked almost seven years as a designer dress man and to me, something lacking.” Eventually his uncle in Honoka’a found him farmland in Waimea. He and Nancy moved to Waimea and Mineo spent a training year working for Kawamoto Farm before starting his own farm. “And that’s how it happened, became a farmer. Like a dream.”
Alton Hooper, now a resident of Waimea, was born and raised in Honalo where he and his family raised coffee. He roamed his forest neighborhood and has never lost his close connection with the land. While not strictly a farmer, all his occupations have contributed to land stewardship island wide, but he has a special love for Waimea. “Waimea was God’s country. You know it was. And Waimea always with the uhiwai that rolled in in the afternoons. Grass was up to your chest. That’s what it was known for.”
For Bill and Marie McDonald and their daughter Roen, farming was about art. Bill and Marie moved from Oʽahu in 1973 and began growing flowers, later to be joined by daughter Roen and her husband, Ken Hufford, who now grow organic vegetables. But farming is more than food for Roen who combines her love of art and plants. “I don't need to go to the store and buy paint or paper or canvas or clay, you know, that's mined in some other country, to make something that's beautiful. Or useful. I can simply grow it and make something. So that's where the kapa comes in or the lei making comes in or the flower arranging comes in because all those things I grow.” Aunty Cynthia Spencer, current president of the Homestead Farmer's Market, also moved from Oʽahu and began farming in 1987. “After we moved here and my sister-in-law had a big yard, we just kind of cut out a portion and started farming. There was fourteen of us in the house and to help defer the cost of the grocery bill, we started farming”, and that was just the beginning of many years of farming.
Flavio Miche, the most recent arrival to the farming community, began farming in Waimea with the loan of an acre of land from a Guatemalan compatriot. He came from a Mayan farming family and grew up during the civil war in Guatemala but has never lost his deep connection with the land. “I always worked on the farm since I was five years old. My grandmother had a big field and we used to grow carrots, beans, corn, cabbage and also peaches. Every single day you have to wake up and go to the farm and kneel on the ground to pray and say thank-you for this day, for everything.”
In the last twenty years, marketing has returned to the local community with the creation of the Waimea Homesteaders’ Farmer’s Market in 1992, followed by the Parker Farmer’s Market and the midweek Pukalani Stables market. Roen Hufford, whose vegetable booth was an early mainstay of the Waimea Homesteaders’ Farmer’s market remembers, “They had an extension agent assigned to the Hawaiian Homelands farmers and he kept hearing the same thing, ‘We don’t have anywhere to sell our stuff.’ So that’s how the idea of the farmer’s market got started.” In 1992 five families began the Waimea Homesteaders’ Farmer’s Market, “And out of those five families, three of them grew flowers and those flowers were proteas.” Realizing that they had to diversify, the market slowly grew in size and now covers the whole Kuhio Hale field and includes just about anything you might want to buy, including breakfast at Nakamoto’s. Our community of farmers are like blossoms on a timeless lei, unique, yet unified in their love for the land, they feed our Waimea community and nourish our spirits. Hard working folks who offer the fruits of their labors because as Alton Hooper puts it, “You see I come from the land. I am of the land. We are all of the land.”
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