Let's Talk Story - Down to Earth Blog

Getting directions to visit local farmer Ryan Earehart’s Oko’a Farm in Kula, Maui doesn’t include any street names or address numbers but is instead a list of agricultural references: “Drive until you see a tractor on your right. Keep going until you see a monkeypod tree and take a right, you’ll pass a herd of goats on the left soon. Keep going until you see a pineapple field on the left and you see sugarcane on the right.” If you couldn’t tell by his directions, Ryan is pretty preoccupied with farming and a quick glance around his 4-acre property shows you that his focus is paying off.

We are pleased to announce an exciting new series of paid cooking classes that will be taught by local chefs in our beautiful Kapolei Community Kitchen. Each month we will invite a guest chef to share delicious plant-based recipes. This month, we are delighted to welcome chef Fortuna Arai to our Kapolei Community Kitchen on June 30th from 6:30pm-8pm.

A few weeks ago, I had the amazing opportunity to visit MA‘O Organic Farms, which is a 25-acre organic certified farm in Lualualei Valley on the western coast of O‘ahu, near the town of Wai‘anae.  The trip was just one of the many events I had planned as part of a three-day meeting that Down to Earth hosted for members of the Independent Natural Food Retailers Association, who were visiting Hawaii from the mainland. 

Although Earth Day is officially April 22nd, Down to Earth will be celebrating it on Sunday April 27th with a special day of fun and music. Proceeds from tickets sold will go towards supporting an awesome new sustainability charter school in Kaimuki, the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability (SEEQS). Here's a great opportunity to support a worthwhile cause and have fun doing it! Learn more about Down to Earth's Earth Day Celebration

Tucked into the beautiful Lualualei Valley on the leeward coast of Oahu, are dozens of family farms growing a range of produce for the island. One of the newest in the valley is Ili’ili Farms, a certified organic aquaponics farm which we recently had the pleasure of visiting. Aquaponic farmers typically grow vegetables in water, instead of soil, where they place fish to nurture the plants.

I'm very excited to introduce Life Foods, Inc., one of our favorite new brands in the store. Life Foods is a Maui-based company that makes wonderfully delicious superfood products including veggie burgers, condiments, hot sauces, salad dressings and vegetable ferments. Life Foods was founded on Maui in 2013 and continues to expand throughout the islands (and soon mainland distribution!).

For our second Talk Story with the Love Life! Team newsletter feature, we are thrilled to share the story of Ko Farms, a local grower that has been providing organic produce for Down to Earth for almost 30 years.

The need to produce more food in some regions of Asia during the past fifty years was—for a time—achieved by increasing the yields of grain crops by as much as 2.5 percent per year using industrial farming methods.  These methods relied on high-yielding hybrid seeds and more recently seeds of genetically modified (GM) crops, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and intense irrigation.  But by 2004 annual growth rates of crop yields began declining, e.g. the annual growth in yield for rice crops dropped to as low as .5 percent.