Every Day on a Pig Farm Is an Adventure!

There's certain things that I'm glad I'm farming because now I know more. And there's certain things, because I know more, it's scary. It's just interesting all the time, you know. Everything happens, you never know what's going down. And you just have to learn it as you go. And then part of like learning how to make things work is like knowing the history of Hawaii agriculture. Imagine if you had the most regenerative population in the world and then you change it to a monocrop society. It's exactly what we did here. Pineapples and sugarcane. This is a big piece of all Hawaii culture. There's like hope that everybody finds value in doing things like this. To us it's really important that we came here to Hawaii because we have been to other main pork producing states before and we've talked to pork producers there. But we also wanted to show what kind of variety there is and that there are some places where pork production is quite exotic. It's not a cookie cutter type of product. It's a very diverse product. It's a product that can be produced under very different conditions and can be made into very different products that consumers can enjoy. I'm from the Big Island of Hawaii. My dad is from Big Island. My mom is from Molokai. After you realize how beautiful it is you really want to cherish it. And I think you know being the oldest of three boys and having a dad that's really into the forest and you know a mom that's a nurse that cares for the community and you know the strong foundation of humans that I grew up around that really created who I am now I think. Yeah we have a responsibility being from Hawaii to be a certain type of person. Really aloha, really welcoming, really open to everything and happy I think. I do everything with my best friend and brother-in-law. We've been best friends since eighth grade. We married sisters and we do all these projects together. You know we got an opportunity at Napua restaurant which is like on the beach. It's the most beautiful place ever and the whole time we just felt like we don't belong. We're not at that level so we've been pushing ourselves to get to that level. We can't even like take it for granted even for one second because it'll slip through our fingers and that's how it's always felt and it still feels like that now. We have a functioning farm to a functioning restaurant. It's our farm to our restaurant so it's great to have our pork and then whatever we have from the farm. So like you know the all those things that we can use in the restaurants both sides. You know I think it's a huge plus for us and if the whole island as a collective would just learn and continuously grow like say man that that pork from the big island man they got it like you do it a different style. So I think sooner or later we just end up raising the pork quality and stuff like that. We always thought that what if the hotels participated in Hawaiian agriculture? What if tourism really was a part of our whole community? What if they didn't look at it as just a destination but to be a part of it? We decided we were gonna start a farm. And I was telling my dad like I'm thinking about being a pig farmer and he's just like you don't even feed the dog well. Maybe two weeks after that my dad was like hey he slid me over this application and it was a Kamehameha Schools application for the Mahi'ai matchup. It was an agricultural business plan contest and then whoever had the best agricultural idea for the land got the land for free and some seed money. We got second. I've never been more pissed off in my whole life being second place but we still they loved our idea so they gave us the land and the 20 grand went to shipping six girl Berkshire pigs from This is our first shack. It housed all the feed that we needed for the farm. It did everything and then a lovely lady anonymously gave us 80,000 dollars. I still don't know who it is and then that's when we built the building, fixed our tractor. I think there's that kind of support all over. The benefit of the A-frames right? Okay everything's on sleds and when the pig rolls over and bodies there's an empty void here where the piglets can get out of the way. In creating farms and looking at generations like no you're just going to do it the right way. You're going to start off with Berkshire pigs. It's a black pig that does well on foraging, good muscle structure, the marbling in the meats and will do great out in the wild. Alongside coffee, macadamia nuts is one of the biggest agricultural industries here so we have an excess of mac nuts here. When we would hunt pigs as kids, pigs you catch under the mac nut trees are always the most delicious. It wasn't about what it was going to cost but what could we feed them that would make them very Hawai'i. What could we feed these pigs that would make them taste better than any other pig right? That's the best supplement. So for me they're eating pasture, a very balanced feed diet and macadamia nuts and then they rotate around the pasture non-stop. So this was actually the first pasture so you got to remember when we first started it was trees and grass this tall you know. It wasn't this is an old abandoned sugarcane area. So you can kind of see how the rotation works. They were here eight weeks ago and then we move them there and then next week they'll move to the next and it just depends on weather on how long it takes them. If it's very wet the ground's soft the pigs will root up the whole place in two weeks then we got to move them. And then what you do is you start to shrink their paddocks because they're going to start to burn up the whole pasture. That's part of why I breed for a short nose is to have like less digging power. After they move we drag it with the tractor smooth it out the grass comes right back. The reason why these animals are rotated from one paddock to the next is so that the grassland can actually recover after a relatively short period of time that the pigs are on there. And so when you do that then you really match the capacity of the land with the pressures exerted by the pigs and that's what makes it sustainable. Like now we're doing sustainability and regeneration and all these buzzwords now because it's the right thing to do. But when it was the only way to do it and it was that if you weren't being sustainable it was at the detriment of all the people. I mean every little corner we cut nowadays is at the detriment of everybody. Sustainability is just a goal it's like a lifetime goal and sustainability is like perfection. It's something you know that we all chase but I don't think we'll ever get to where it's like 100 sustainable or perfection. So we took this pig to the slaughterhouse last week Wednesday the pig was about 190 pounds and we just picked it up 150 pounds all dressed and finished and packaged and then we just took a pack of pork chops and give them a taste make sure they're as clean and as good you know that we think they are every time. Thai flavor, Filipino, there's everything in like all the all the asias are represented in this thing. Try it. Really soak it buddy. Get some of that garlic on there. Yeah of course. That bite just changes life. Oh my god I'm lost. It's awesome. That's how Hawai'i works it's all of the flavors it's all of the cultures and accepting and being willing to try all the things that's exactly what we're trying to do on the plate. Just create the little mini Hawai'i as accurately as possible creating Hawai'i so that people can experience even if you're from here. You know in the restaurant world man we we watch guys miss it I mean we sacrificed all of it. Gives you a chance to look at your kids like oh they're watching us struggle and succeed so struggle is okay. So I think they push themselves too because they see us and then it's our wives supporting so they know it's the right thing to do so I think it all works because of that. I think we're doing a good job so I get to do it with my best friend Imagine if you got to do with your best friend like we do it together like when we were kids like if you're in the eighth grade you have a best friend. Imagine doing all the things that we've done in the last 30 years together you know like from sneaking him out of church to go surfing to now he's on a James Beard semi-finalist like it's so crazy. You know what we've put ourselves in and the fact that we got to do it together it's like right now if I think about it too much I'll get I'll get I'll get feelings so how fun