#Growing thyme in hawaii plus#

Small Kine Farm has shown a farmer can make it growing mushrooms in Hawaii. Jason Brand, a former investment banker who now runs a large lettuce farm on Oahu, agrees Hawaii can move the needle on how much of its food to grow here. She sees numerous tools to address challenges farmers face, including access to land and financing. Kleissner is co-founder and board chair of Hawaii Investment Ready, a business incubator for entrepreneurial projects that address social and environmental challenges. Lisa Kleissner, a Hawaii philanthropist who has been overseeing an extensive study of the state’s food systems, thinks so. But is it really possible for Hawaii, which now imports about 85% of its food, to grow more of what it eats? If Hawaii is going to grow more of the food it eats, including mushrooms, the state will need a lot more farms like Small Kine, or bigger versions of Small Kine, or both. “But we offer a living wage.” Small Kine Farm’s Fung Yang stands near the compost that he grows his portabello mushrooms on in Waimanalo.

#Growing thyme in hawaii plus#

But it’s big enough to support six employees, plus Yang, his wife, Yumi, and their 2-month-old daughter. Yang is doing his small part to change that by producing thousands of pounds of mushrooms a week to sell in stores like Down To Earth, Kokua Market and Foodland.Īs Small Kine Farm’s name indicates, it’s hardly a megafarm. And that’s just a small part of the flow of food into a state where almost all of what’s eaten here is shipped in. Hawaii imported about 2 million pounds of mushrooms in 2004, Yang says, the last year that figures are available. Yang grows organic mushrooms, and the earthy smell comes from piles of wood-chipped trees that Yang composts into what amounts to soil – the scientific word is substrate – for the portobellos he cultivates. “What you’re smelling is the smell of money to us,” says Yang, owner of Small Kine Farm in Waimanalo. To many people, it might smell like a pile of rotting leaves, but not to Fung Yang.