Hāna Fresh

Hāna is a really beautiful district in the state, and it’s one of the most isolated districts in Hawaiʻi. Having taken the road more than once, it’s quite remote. It’s just spectacular. There’s no getting around that. It’s also very small and isolated. A result of that is there are huge limitations in terms of what is available and accessible for the people who live here.

This farm, Hāna Fresh, has really become a special, a very special project, and it’s gaining recognition across the state and even across the country. This is a very unusual model of care, and we see a lot of people. We get around 600,000 visitors a year, and everybody’s amazed at what we’re doing from the standpoint of including farm products and the whole farming genre in with health care. And they get it, and they want to know why their communities don’t have the same thing.

Farm tour footage audio: Whatʻs this plant? Take a guess.

From our perspective, a person’s health in a community is more than just having access to a clinic. It’s really addressing the social determinants that affect how healthy an individual is and a community is.

Farm tour footage audio: Normally, the ones we send to the market is smaller.

We couldn’t really buy fresh produce in town. Well, how do you affect health unless you’re dealing with nutrition and people are eating right? And if you’re only going to eat canned goods and frozen foods, you’re going to have issues.

We knew we had 12 acres of property and really thought about starting a small farm only to support our kūpuna nutrition program and begin to grow the produce that we’re using to feed our seniors in Hāna. And from there, it really grew and has become a real cornerstone of our preventative services.

We were kind of laughed at when we started because the land that we’re growing on right now is rated as a very poor agricultural land even though it’s zoned AG and it’s difficult to farm here. We have about a hundred varieties of produce that we grow from vegetables and herbs to Hawaiian medicinals to fruit and we’re really seeing changes in how people eat and how they’re learning to eat. We help people understand how they can use the produce in the kinds of things that they cook every day.

So lots of greens, lettuces, bok choys, Asian greens, arugula. People know what arugula is now. Tomatoes, a wide variety of cherry tomatoes, greenhouse tomatoes, greenhouse cucumbers. We’re experimenting with bell peppers right now and we’re getting some good results with that.

Banana, papaya, coconut, guava, the list goes on. People are at least getting their greens and they’re getting their vegetables. So this has been a really important project for us.

We did have to stop for about three months. People were just beside themselves and, When are you going to open? When are you going to open? And the community was so disappointed. I was amazed. I was getting phone calls from people, Why is it closed? Why did you close the market? People have come to really depend on this and to not have to drive two hours  to get fresh produce, but to come to the farmer’s market, you can’t get any fresher than that.

It’s helping people to stay well and stay healthy so that they don’t need to see a doctor. I think this is a model for the future really, a model going forward if we continue in that direction. We’re going to make some serious changes and hopefully people will be healthier going forward.