Across the islands, the cultivation of taro is experiencing a resurgence that addresses far more than the material needs of those who plant or process the crop. You won’t find the numbers reflected in state agricultural statistics. Many of the participants in this resurgence are farmers so small their crops don’t register a blip on the state’s statistical radar. Others may be involved in taro cultivation for cultural rather than commercial purposes.
In preparing our series of articles on taro, we found dozens of taro farmers and small-scale poi processors whose collective efforts speak volumes about the environmental, cultural, and economic values growing numbers of Hawai`i residents are embracing Here are the stories of just a few of them. We hope you find them as encouraging as we did.
Waiahole, O`ahu
Brothers Charlie and Paul Reppun are too modest to take credit for the resurgence of interest in taro farming over the last decade. Yet nearly everyone else involved in the movement will happily acknowledge the significant role that these Waiahole farmers have played. Their technical expertise, gained often from years of trial-and-error, as well as their generosity in sharing all that they know have strengthened the bonds of a growing statewide network of taro farmers and have vastly increased individual farmers’ chances of turning their interest in taro cultivation into a means of support for their families.
That same modesty carries over into their daily lives. Charlie Reppun and his wife, Vivien Lee, live among their fields in a small frame house that boasts a composting toilet, solar panels, and propane-powered refrigerator. Nearby are the homes of Paul and a third brother, John, and their respective families.
For almost a quarter of a century, the Reppuns have farmed in Waiahole, where taro provides a little more than half their income. Sales of papayas and bananas make up the rest.
As much as their lives have revolved around the seasons of planting and harvesting taro, and as much as the cultivation of this plant has imbued their lives with an almost spiritual dimension, the two brothers spoke candidly about both the promise and potential pitfalls of the taro renaissance.
“What hinders any kind of a major taro renaissance,” says Charlie, “is that you don’t have to grow taro anymore. There’s plenty of food. You can eat rice or potatoes or anything else. When Hawaiians were around, you would grow taro – or die. But now it’s all voluntary.”
Although Paul adds that the renaissance “is limited by land and water,” Charlie insists the main obstacle is “imported food.”
While taro is unquestionably important as a food source, the Reppuns also discuss the community-building value of a crop that requires intense, shoulder-to-shoulder labor. For a few years, they were part of a group that regularly brought schoolchildren and anyone else interested in learning to grow taro to an area of unencumbered state land in Waiahole Valley where volunteers had opened up ancient taro lo`i and auwai in an area that came to be known as the mauka (upland) lo`i.
“The way this project started off, there were guys who came to us and said they wanted to learn to grow taro,” says Charlie. “But ours is a small farm, it’s our livelihood, and it doesn’t really work to have that happen.
“So we started this project, thinking it would be a place where guys would come and learn. We had no idea there would be so many people who don’t want to become commercial farmers but who want to participate, want to grow, want to be involved in it from that standpoint. So the way it’s evolved is – it’s such a great thing. The only rule we have is – and we went round and round about this: how many times should you come and work before you take home taro – and finally we decided that if you’re coming up for the first time, and you work, you can take home some taro. And that’s basically it. It’s not commercial, and it’s not exclusive.”
The use of the mauka lo`i for educational purposes – or any use at all, for that matter – is on hold for now, while the Hawai`i Community Housing and Development Corporation, the agency that oversees the leases of Waiahole lands owned by the state, considers questions regarding legal access to the parcel that have been raised by some valley residents.
The Reppuns, descended from Russian immigrants to the islands, have not a drop of Hawaiian blood in their veins. For them, taro cultivation has less to do with a resurgence in Hawaiian values than it does in a belief in the universal value of close ties to the land and to others who share in the work of making the land productive.
“Like any farmer, we’re strong believers in small farming,” says Paul Reppun. “And actually, the smaller the better. If you have a garden in your back yard, then you have a direct link between that garden and your table, and that link is more important than a farmer who grows a thousand acres.
“The more people that grow their own food, the better. And taro is ideal for that, because it’s so productive in such a small area. The problem is getting the land and the water. So if you can get a hui [group] together, and people can hui together and grow that taro collectively, then you’ve got the manpower to maintain your ditch, keep the river clean, build the dam in the river. You can share the taro, share the huli [the stalks used to make new growth], share the labor. Things like that. It’s like a community garden – only, unlike community gardens, there’s more collective labor needed in order to maintain things. This is where the future of taro is.”
The Reppuns were instrumental in organizing the statewide group known as Onipa`a na Hui Kalo (loose translation: the organization of steadfast taro growers). In that capacity, they’ve helped open up ancient taro lo`i on nearly every island and had a hand in developing guidelines for such activity.
“The aim is more the non-commercial side,” says Charlie Reppun, referring to organizations that do not intend to use commercial fertilizers, heavy equipment, and pesticides on the land they cultivate. While some commercial operations may still avoid these tools of modern agriculture, notes Paul, this is usually only possible when large numbers of workers are available. “You can still do things commercially and open [taro lo`i] up with traditional methods,” he adds, “but it’s kind of awkward to call a hundred people to come work on your personal taro patch – and then say, thank you very much and go sell your taro.”
As an example of the kind of community effort that reopening lo`i can exact – and the kind of community support that Hui Kalo can provide – the Reppuns retell the story of how an ancient lo`i on the North Shore of Kaua`i, near Ha`ena, was cleared.
“We had this huge group of people camping the night before” at Ha`ena, Paul says. Chipper Wichman of Limahuli Garden, part of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens and one of the organizers of the effort to clear the lo`i, told the Reppuns that he had a Bobcat available to help with the work and could bring it down the next day. “And we said, `don’t bring it, don’t bring it’.”
“And he said, but we got all these stumps.
“And I said, do you have a big rope?
“And he said, yeah, we got a big rope.
“And so I said we’ll see what we can do.
The next day, Paul Reppun continues, “we put 10 people on the rope and pulled out a guava stump. And if ten wasn’t enough, we would put a couple more on, and a couple more, couple more, until we had enough people
“And these two great Java plum trees were standing in the middle of this taro patch. Everybody kept looking at them. And we said, no, don’t cut them downÉ. We’re going to save those trees for dessert.
“Eventually those trees were all that was left to do. We ended up with stumps that were like this big around” – he stretches his arms out wide – “and we pulled them out of the ground. An awesome thing. A hundred something people pulling.”
— P.T.
Maunawili, O`ahu
“The Reppuns taught us, if you want something, go get it,” Mark Stride says of his early mentors from Waiahole. Stride, in his mid-30s, is soft-spoken, but can talk for hours about farming.
Stride and his wife, Noe, have two young boys – Lokahi and Ho`oikaika — with dark hair and big, round eyes. Farming is so much a part of their lives that Stride’s third child, a girl, was born not in a hospital, but at his taro farm in Maunawili. Stride, once with the archaeology firm Cultural Surveys, has been farming taro for about eight years, ever since he was taught by the Reppuns. He’s also farmed bananas with Lorrie Reppun’s father (Paul Reppun’s father-in-law), Dexter Dixon in Luluku. Stride’s ties with Dixon led him to the two and a half acres that he’s been farming for the last three years. Stride admits that in the first two years he wasn’t the model farmer, visiting his farm sporadically. But in the last year and a half, he’s been dedicated. While he had farmed off and on for many years, the death of his mother and pressure from other farmers to kick him off the land caused him change his lifestyle: He joined the Mormon Church and got serious about providing a stable future for his family.
One Saturday afternoon, I join Stride and a small group of helpers on a work trip to the patches. We say a prayer before he unlocks the lower gate that leads to a number of small farms. In the human circle, holding hands are two strapping Hawaiian brothers from Waiahole, their friend Kanoa, [the other guy], and Stride — all of them are connected through the Mormon Church.
We drive up the winding gravel road and pass old homes, one of them is the house where Queen Lili`uokalani wrote Aloha `Oe. Higher up, we pass a sod farm. Banana, ginger, and heleconia grow in profusion along the road.
We round a sharp turn after which the road overlooks a set of about five small, neatly kept lo`i, each brimming with big broad taro leaves. A stream, Pikoakea, flows from a spring up mauka, ducks under the road and fills the taro patches.
Stride says all of his fields are restored ancient Hawaiian lo`i, whose earthen berms once lay hidden under weeds and brush.
He started small, with the mauka lo`i, each of which he expects to yield about 400 pounds of taro per 18-month cycle. It’s protocol, he says, to first maintain the area, and he’s done that. He cleared the auwai, cut trees, cleared weeds, and revived the lo`i, mostly by himself.
Stride notes that while he sometimes brings a visitor or two to work in his lo`i, he’s never had so many helpers at once until today. Our mission is to prepare and plant the next open lo`i, which is nearly twice the size of all the others.
At the start of the afternoon, it looks like a big mud hole. First, we take our shovels and build the makai (downslope) and side walls higher so the water trickling in doesn’t overflow. The mud is heavy and clings to the shovels like glue, but with so many of us, the job is easy and quickly done. The boys and a kupuna who lives with Stride and Noe plunge long wooden poles and shovels in the mud at the head of the patch, working them back and forth to break up the compacted mud beneath. Then, like horses pulling a plow, the men push the loosened mud around with a wooden, rake-like tool so that it’s level throughout the lo`i.
While the young men struggle away at that task, Stride wanders off, returning with two heavy buckets of rock dust he bought from a nearby quarry. With this, we fertilize, taking handfuls and tossing them over every part of the lo`i until the buckets are empty. The rock dust is food for the microorganisms he’s added to the soil. They’ll process the dust and organic material into nutrients his plants need for healthy growth, he says.
In the early 1900s, burnt bone and lime were sometimes added to the soil before planting. Today, adding rock dust and microorganisms is one of the modern organic techniques Stride uses along with the old methods of taro farming. He also practices a French method of tilling the soil/mud. Using only a shovel, it’s very labor-intensive, he says, but well worth the effort.
You need to use modern methods, he says, estimating that his work is 50 percent traditional, 50 percent modern. Stride is rabid about experimenting with new, organic ways of tending his taro. He swears to the benefits of rock dusk, but says when asked the Reppuns to try it, they politely refused. That’s okay, he says, realizing the offer to his mentors was “like telling an artist how to paint.”
Stride walks us to where the largest lo`i will be. Meanwhile, the young men play in the mud, first smearing each other with dirty hands, then painting their faces, and eventually, bathing in it. Downstream, a rough horseshoe shape, where the auwai once ran, cuts through the dense vegetation. Up and running, this lo`i could yield 1,000 pounds of taro per cycle. Another one on the other side of the trees could be just as large. Eventually, Stride wants to build a poi factory. Stride has an old report prepared for Cultural Surveys that says a poi factory operated in Maunawili decades ago. Right now, his small lo`i produce taro and poi only for his family and “whoever else needs it,” he says.
Two spotted dogs serve as scarecrows for the pigs that live in the Maunawili mountains. The pigs come around, Stride says, but so far they haven’t gone into the patches. Still, he worries that one day they will develop a taste for his plants.
The land Stride farms is leased from the Department of Land and Natural Resources. He subleases it from the Sanchez family, a Luluku co-op member. Another co-op member who grows bananas has been eyeing his land. Nobody wanted it before when it was covered with weeds, trees. But now that Stride’s turned it into a blossoming taro farm, the farmer – a millionare, Stride says — is flexing his muscle. Whatever happens, Stride says he’s not leaving.
In addition to running his farm, he and his wife have formed a non-profit called Aloha `Aina health center. Stride has worked with troubled kids, some through the Department of Education. He’s still registered with the department as a tutor, but has stopped taking kids because he’s frustrated with the DOE’s “here, you take `em,” hands-off attitude.
Still, he says, the kids are enriched by the experience of being connected with the land, so much so that one of the mothers asked him, “What are you doing to my kid?”
The Reppuns, he says, have spurred many young people to embrace taro farming. So has Eric Enos of Wai`anae, who with his Cultural Learning Center at Ka`ala, pioneered efforts to reconnect alienated youth to the land. “I’ve never met the man, but he’s an inspiration,” Stride says.
After the tour, each of us takes turns gently placing huli in a row until the lo`i is dotted in fresh stalks from end to end. We leave, splattered in mud, but before we go, Stride cleans some ka`i taro corms for us to take home.
— T.D.
Waipa, Kaua`i
Thursdays are poi days for the folks of Waipa, a small community past Hanalei on the breathtakingly beautiful north shore of Kauai.
On a recent morning, in a shady lanai at the rear of a weathered plantation-style house, about three dozen souls took their places at the colorful plastic tubs of taro – hundreds of pounds of it — that had been cooked the previous day. The assembled congregation defied categorization: old and young, haole and Hawaiian, Native American and African-American, locals and visitors who, through friends or family, had learned of the custom and had come to participate in the old Hawaiian tradition of lau lima.
Pulling a chair up to a tub and arming myself with a table knife, I joined the improvised `ohana. We reached into the dark water and pulled out the soft, purple corms. Carefully, we removed the outer skin and the imperfections. They went back into the water to be screened out later in the day and eventually served up to some lucky hogs.
When the taro was cleaned, Stacy Sproat, mastermind of the Waipa operations, turned on the noisy, industrial-strength grinder. This day, the weekly routine was interrupted by technical burps: a second grinder refused to work, and the primary grinder seemed prone to shorting out.
Sproat was not worried. One of the workers had the shorted circuit quickly repaired, while a decision was made to circumvent the secondary grinder simply by pushing the poi twice through the primary one.
“The poi won’t be as smooth as usual, but it will be just as good,” Sproat said.
She should know. Sproat has been working with the Waipa Foundation for nearly a decade now, setting up the poi days and getting a farmer’s market up and running, among other achievements.
The community poi days had their origin when Sproat, one of several parties leasing Waipa Valley from Bishop Estate, saw an unmet need for affordable poi among the kupuna, or elders, in the area. The operation has grown to the point that each week, some 800 to 1,000 pounds of taro grown in and around Waipa is processed and distributed to not just the kupuna, but to dozens of families around the island who have standing orders for the poi.
But Sproat’s vision for Waipa goes well beyond the poi days. This summer, she was mother hen to a dozen young people who, under the auspices of the Alu Like program, participated in activities at Waipa that taught them many of the things one needs to know to carry on Hawaiian agricultural practices in today’s world.
The students learned how to beat bark and make kapa, how to prepare hala leaves and weave lauhala baskets, and how to plant and harvest taro, all things one might expect in a summer program.
Yet there was more: the coursework included sessions on how to identify and map archaeological sites. Instructing them was Bion Griffin, professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa.
Increasingly, archaeology is seen as both a hindrance and a help to those who want to restore ancient taro fields, or lo`i, to production. At Waipa, the back of the valley once was criss-crossed with lo`i and watercourses, or `auwai. Many of the lo`i in the lower part of the valley became rice paddies in the early 20th century, but for the last half-century, the area has been grazed by cattle.
Sproat and others associated with the Waipa Foundation are hoping someday to reopen the lo`i and return much of the valley to taro cultivation. In the meantime, the foundation tends to the community’s cultural and nutritional needs with the weekly poi days and, in recent months, an open-air farmer’s market.
— P.T.
Hanalei, Kaua`i
Suppose, for a moment, all the lo`i on Kaua`i’s North Shore are opened. Will markets be flooded, prices for the crop plummet, and the farmers who grow the crop suffer the loss of their so heavy investment of time, money, and labor?
If anyone should worry about that, it would be Bino Fitzgerald of Hanalei. He’s a third-generation taro farmer and his family is one of several with leases from the Fish and Wildlife Service to plant taro at the service’s scenic waterfowl refuge in the broad Hanalei River valley. Fitzgerald, 28, and partner Hobey Beck, 34, started up the Hanalei Poi Factory two years ago. Since then, their operation has been only growing – and Fitzgerald expects the trend to continue.
Fitzgerald attributes the success of the company to the quality of the product: fresh poi that is kept chilled from the factory to the ‘fridge. Traditionally, poi is packaged in plastic bags and kept at room temperature. Bacteria in the poi start it souring immediately. The sour taste is the by-product of the bacteria at work.
By contrast, the poi that Fitzgerald and Beck distribute is packaged in sealed containers, much like yogurt or cottage cheese, and is displayed at supermarkets statewide in refrigerated cases, usually near tofu products. With the chilled taro, the taste you get is that of the taro.
“As a kid, we ate poi,” Fitzgerald said in an interview at his Hanalei office, a neat, modest trailer behind the old telephone company building that now houses the poi factory. “We always made it at home, never bought it. We wanted to produce the same type of poi on a commercial level,” he says – hence, the sweet poi product.
Another benefit was the poi’s appeal to a younger generation of consumers. “When we started, we found the average age of poi consumers was between 45 and 47 years old,” Fitzgerald said. To keep producing taro and to build a strong market for poi, “we had to appeal to consumers other than the sour poi eaters.”
What’s more, the Hanalei factory offers farmers an alternative market to what was once a near-monopoly of the state’s major poi processor in Honolulu. “We always had it dictated to us, what price we’d get, how much we could sell,” Fitzgerald said. Now, with competition, “it just makes sense. By creating our business, we’ve solidified our lifestyle as farmers.”
Fitzgerald has a degree in business administration, but his heart remains in the lo`i. “I enjoy farming and the islands,” he said. While the Hanalei Poi Factory could be a model for a small, community-based business, it’s “more about lifestyle,” he said. He and his partners are producing a good product; testimonial letters from young mothers and satisfied customers fill their file drawers; their business helps more than two dozen local workers make a living.
Finally, he says, turning around to take in the view of Namolokama mountain, its summit embraced by clouds and rich green fields at its feet, “Tell me: where else could I have an office with a view like this?”
— P.T.
Honoka`a, Hawai`i
Jim Cain smiles when asked to explain how he came to call his brand of Waipi`o Valley poi “King Laulau.”
“A few years back, I entered a laulau contest,” he recalls, referring to the island delicacy of taro leaves wrapped around a core of vegetables, seasoning (usually salt) and protein (usually pork, chicken, turkey tails, or butterfish) and baked in ti leaves. For the contest, Cain went down to the mouth of Waipi`o, where the surf pounds against the black sand beach, and gathered for his unusual winning entry riches from the sea. “We put in roe from sea urchins, opihi, mahimahi — pretty much everything we gathered,” he says. “All the stuff came from the land and sea of Waipio. Oh, and fresh coconut cream as well.”
Since then, Cain’s friends have dubbed him the King of Laulau. When he started up his own poi company three and a half years ago, the nickname just seemed right, he says.
Cain, wife Gretchen, family members and assorted friends are all working this Thursday morning at the King Laulau poi factory in the Hamakua Coast town of Honoka`a. The facility, a certified kitchen, is in a part of the old Honoka`a Hospital. The cooked corms of api`i, a variety of white taro, mixed with a little lehua taro to give it color and a nuanced flavor, are washed and put in a central bin. On either side, workers clean the corms with implements ranging from a sharpened coconut shell to dull table knives. At the end of the line, Cain mixes the corms with pure water and pokes it into a food grinder. Kids – Cain’s plus about three others from the valley – help out. The children are home-schooled, and, says Cain, “part of that schooling is definitely the taro patch, learning the taro. It teaches a lot of responsibilities and takes place in a beautiful environment.”
After the taro is made into poi, the finished product is packaged in plastic bags, labeled, and sorted for delivery to retail stores up and down the eastern side of Hawai`i island. A few bags are set aside for a friend’s wedding the next day. Often Cain takes special orders for parties, baby luaus, and other celebrations.
Cain grows much of the taro he processes on a four-acre farm in Waipi`o Valley, where he has grown taro for about 12 years. He has lived in Hawai`i about 30 of his 40 years, he says, arriving here with his family at the age of 5. His family eventually moved back to the U.S mainland, but Cain returned and has made the islands his home ever since.
Why the transition from farming to processing? “We wanted to make a living farming,” Cain says. “But you have to farm a lot of taro to support a family. With the amount of land we had, we decided that by processing the taro, we’d get closer to our dream of being self-sufficient through farming.”
He is quick and eager to share credit with other farming families in Waipi`o who showed him the ropes of poi processing: “I’ve been lucky to have people willing to share their knowledge about poi making,” he says, going on to list some of the legendary names of Waipi`o and neighboring Waimanu Valley (the latter practically uninhabited for almost a century): “Morgan Toledo, Sam Mock Chew, Papa Joe Batalona, Uncle Jackie – Waimanu Jack – Kaholoa`a, Jason and Alberta Mock Chew.”
Cain sees his involvement as helping to “to keep taro going, keep it alive. Waipi`o poi is something very special, something treasured. It’s a big responsibility to keep that going. We treat it with a lot of respect.” That also explains in part his decision to grow a variety of taro, api`i, that used to be the mainstay of Waipi`o Valley. “Api`i used to be what people grew in Waipi`o,” he says. “Then people switched over, partly due to a flood in 1979 when people lost seed. They brought in huli [sprouting stems] from Kaua`i, mainly of the lehua variety. A lot of poi makers want this red color [of lehua], so not many farmers grow api`i anymore. But we have it in all our patches.”
The presence of an “incubator” certified community kitchen at the old Honoka`a Hospital allowed Cain to get a start in business. A short while later, with the business seeming to take off, he moved King Laulau to its own certified kitchen, where he and his family and friends grind taro, bag poi, and make kulolo, a kind of taro-coconut pudding.
Growing taro and making poi “is about more than economics,” says Cain. “Really, for us, it’s a way to connect to Waipi`o through taro. What we’ve gotten out of it is a strong connection to Waipi`o – to the land itself, to ancestors who have been there before, and to the people who are farming there now.
“To me, that’s been the biggest benefit – as well as making poi. To take it to the end and actually make poi – it’s a feeling you just cannot replace. Especially for my kids to be around that, be part of that, it’s an education that’s really special. They’re learning lot of respect, for the land, for their elders, for Hawaiian culture, and for working hard, working together. Those are the real benefits.”
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 12, Number 6 December 2001