KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
A young goat bites the hand that feeds it, but it's a friendly chew. The goat is a resident of Hawaii Island Goat Dairy, which produces goat cheese.
Today we offer a tour of three farms on the Big Island's Hamakua Coast, chosen to reflect the diversity of agricultural entrepreneurship going on a short plane ride from Honolulu.
All three are family-owned small businesses located in beautiful settings, at high elevation, on a strip of coastline between Waimea and Hilo. In the gourmet-foods vernacular, these are artisan farms, a term that conjures images of handcrafted products made on a limited scale for a niche market.
They are in various stages: a honey producer secure with a high-end clientele, a goat-cheese dairy that can't keep up with demand and is slowly expanding, and a mushroom farm that is just starting out but aiming for the largest market of all, Costco, with its exotic specialty product.
» A sweet bee partnership
» Mushroom farm sprouts from koa's sawdust
» Goat-cheese makers use hands-on approach
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KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
Richard Spiegel examines a section from a hive tended by his honeybees. As long as they aren't provoked, Spiegel says, the bees won't sting.
Big Isle farmers
grow diversity
Hippie principles guide
a sweet bee partnership
By Betty Shimabukuro
betty@starbulletin.comA bee by nature is a well-behaved creature, unlikely to sting unless threatened. No pre-emptive strikes in bee-dom.
Richard Spiegel related this as he reached into a humming hive and removed a frame crawling with bees. He was entirely un-armored. No net, no protective suit.
"You have to move really slowly," he said softly. "They don't like it if you move fast, so it forces me, as an A-type personality, to slow down."
As if to prove the point, Spiegel accidentally dropped the frame. The bees buzzed upward in an unfriendly cloud.
"Probably," he said casually to a visiting photographer, "it would be best to leave now."
Spiegel owns Volcano Island Honey Co., producer of a white honey that has found a national niche on such upscale shelves as those of Neiman Marcus.
Spiegel's interest in bees goes back more than 20 years. "I'm a retired hippie, and I dropped out of being a lawyer in the '70s," he said. "I've come back to see if it's possible to run a business with the principles of that hippie era."
These principles include building massages into his employees' four-day workweek and allowing ocean swimming as part of each workday.
KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
Volcano Island white honey is certified organic.
Spiegel employs seven to 10 people, depending on season, but his real workers are the bees. He maintains just more than 100 hives in the lava fields of Puako on the Kohala Coast, where the bees collect nectar from a grove of kiawe trees. Conditions are sunshiny and desertlike, but the trees are naturally irrigated by an underground source of brackish water.
Each colony consists of a queen, raised by a breeder in Kona, and 50,000 workers. They live in white boxes that Spiegel's crew fits with frames set with beeswax. The bees, in the natural course of things, fill the beeswax cells with honey. They also raise more bees in another part of the hive, which perpetuates the project.
Bee trivia, Part 1, how bees make honey: "They flap their wings in the hive," Spiegel said. This dehydrates the kiawe nectar so that only 15 percent water is left. This, plus an enzyme that the bee adds to the nectar, produces honey.
Each frame in each hive is checked weekly so that it is removed when the honey is just right. Too soon, it will ferment; too late, it will crystallize in the honeycomb.
Processing happens at the honey house on Spiegel's homestead, miles away in cool, green Ahualoa, near Honokaa. Here the honey is removed and jarred.
Bee trivia Part 2, cleanup: The bees do it. Compulsive workers that they are, they collect any honey left in the beeswax after processing and carry it to new hives to make new honey.
The company's Rare Hawaiian Organic White Honey (the kiawe blossoms produce a thick, naturally white product) comes plain or flavored with ginger or lilikoi. Spiegel also produces a winter honey made in the off-season (November to March) of wildflowers in the Ahualoa area.
Spiegel sees his operation as co-op of man and bee. "We always allow them to have enough honey for their own needs. We just go into their savings account, like Robin Hood."
Rare Hawaiian Organic White Honey sells for $11 to $12
for an 8-ounce jar through www.volcanoislandhoney.com.
It is also available at Neiman Marcus, R. Field Wine Co.,
Martin & MacArthur, Compleat Kitchen, Executive Chef,
Islands Best, Native Books & Beautiful Things, Diamond
Head Market and Pat's Island Delights.
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KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
Janice Stanga holds a cluster of oyster mushrooms, samples from California of the variety that her company, Hamakua Mushrooms, will soon be marketing locally.
One man's trash is another man's mushroom food, which accounts for the selection of a 35-acre site high above Laupahoehoe as home ground for Hamakua Heritage Farm. Gourmet mushroom
farm sprouts from
koa’s sawdustBy Betty Shimabukuro
betty@starbulletin.comIt's a beautiful spot with a sweeping view of the sea and an occasional whale, but what drew Robert and Janice Stanga here was the koa harvesting going on upslope.
Cutting down trees produces sawdust that, mixed with a bit of bran and water, is gourmet food for mushrooms. "We can use a lot of waste to make food," Robert Stanga said.
"After the mushrooms are grown, it's perfect bedding for local nurseries."
The Stangas' goal is to produce shiitake, hon-shimeji and oyster mushrooms, including the oversize king oyster, or eryngii. They say Hawaii imports 8,000 to 12,000 pounds of exotic mushrooms every week, so the market certainly exists.
Right now, their self-described "fungal jungle" consists of a 16,000-square-foot, $750,000 building and a first crop of mushrooms growing in bottles and bags.
The Stangas expect to be in full production -- 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per week -- next month. In the meantime, California-grown versions of the mushrooms have been test-marketed under their label, Hamakua Mushrooms, among Big Island chefs and at a few stores, notably Marukai.
The California connection is key to the project. The company that provides Hamakua Heritage with its mushroom spawn also can provide backup product should the farm ever have a problem filling orders.
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Bob Stanga checks on bags of mushrooms recently inoculated with spawn and ready to grow. The growing medium, a combination of koa sawdust, bran and water, is sterilized to protect the crop.
Once provided with sustenance, mushrooms grow fairly happily on their own. The farmer's job is to maintain certain strict growing conditions. These include making sure the substrata -- that koa sawdust -- is sterilized to kill any competitive molds or fungus. Jars or bags, depending on species of mushroom, are filled with the substrata, inoculated with mushroom spawn and set aside to grow in a sterile, temperature-controlled environment. Growing time runs from a few weeks for oysters to three months for shiitakes.
The Stangas are not farmers by trade. Bob was the owner of a helicopter company when he came up with the idea of doing business closer to the ground. "Several years ago I got a mushroom book. ... I thought it would be nice to get into a niche market."
He also considered snails, but "you don't have to chase mushrooms. You have to chase snails."
Hamakua Mushrooms should be available next
month at stores including Marukai and Costco.
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KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
Dick Threlfall feeds his baby goats, nine at a time, using a bucket and nipple contraption that gives them all an equal crack at lunch. Threlfall and his wife, Heather, make goat cheese out of milk produced by these babies' mamas.
Makers of popular
goat cheese use
hands-on approachBy Betty Shimabukuro
betty@starbulletin.comDick Threlfall was a teacher at one time, a blacksmith at another, but today he is mommy goat.
He uses a paint mixer to stir up a bucket of milk-replacer for a pen full of babies, all under a week in age. Then into their midst he wades, his bucket now outfitted with nine nipples. The tiny goats drain it in seconds.
"We bottle-raise all the babies," Threlfall says. Milk-replacer is economical and pathogen-free, and besides, the real goat milk is needed to make cheese.
Hawaii Island Goat Dairy produces a creamy, light goat cheese on a 10-acre retired macadamia nut farm in Honokaa, land the family has owned for 20 years. Threlfall calls the 2-year-old company "my wife's little dream."
Heather Threlfall is a medical technician who works as office manager at Kamuela Veterinary Hospital. It is Dick Threlfall who minds the goats by day and Heather who makes the cheese by night.
"She wanted to make cheese, so we got a cow," he said. "But it was too big and intimidating."
So the Threlfalls switched to goats. They keep 35, three of them males, the rest milk-producing mamas. The animals wander the farm, feeding themselves on bamboo, ti leaves, ginger and mac nut roughage, as well as pasture grass. In seven-month cycles the females breed, give birth and lactate. The result is cheese.
Twice each day, the goats are led up a ramp in groups of five to a milking platform fitted with hoses and suction devices. The milk is immediately cooled and transferred to the cheese-making room, where it is pasteurized, cultured and turned into cheese. This takes 14 hours in a cheese vat followed by 12 hours hanging from a rack in cheesecloth.
Threlfall said the dairy produces 200 to 250 pounds of cheese weekly under the name Mauna Kea Chevre and is almost always sold out, with restaurants being major customers.
If there's any milk left over, it's turned into another, more involved cheese, feta.
The Threlfalls have owned the Honokaa property for 20 years and have been making cheese for 10. Two years ago they obtained commercial certification for their dairy and began marketing their cheese. It comes au natural, as well as flavored with dill/garlic, macadamia nut/basil and rocoto pepper.
They're in the process of expanding their farm to its capacity of 50 goats, which will allow them to better meet demand. This means more mothering for Dick Threlfall, but he says, "I needed something to keep me out of mischief when I retired."
Mauna Kea Chevre is primarily sold to restaurants but can
be found at a few Big Island outlets: Kaneshiro Market,
Kamuela Liquor, Health Way and Island Naturals. It also
sells for $5 per 8-ounce container at the Hilo Farmer's Market.
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