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Thank You For Visiting! Don't Forget to Refrigerate, Wash before use, and Best to eat all produce within a week!
Healthy Produce Grown by Our Family for Yours - Right Here in East Hawaii!
Celebrating our first cabbage harvest for local markets! Thank you to Joseph Stanberry for being there for Kope Hale Farm, looking forwards to many more harvests together and excited to work with the Better Together Natural Farms LLC Network in many ways.
Rainiest Catch HD.mp4Rainy harvests aren't easy, but someone has to do it!
Learn more about us: Kope Hale Farm, using organic natural farming practices in East Hawaii, inspired by Square Foot Gardening, now using KNF and JADAM!
Follow Our Microgreen Farming!
Farmer Irene Bencito, has been growing microgreens for her own family and others to help increase the immune system of the people she cares about since the start of the pandemic. Creating a positive change, out of a difficult situation, the entire growth of Kope Hale Farm has been about not only surviving change and challenge, but finding a way to harness the power of change and thrive using ingenuity, refusing to give up creating new solutions and seeking knowledge from nature and others willing to share, happy and grateful to accept help and volunteers!
Farmer Irene Bencito, has been growing microgreens for her own family and others to help increase the immune system of the people she cares about since the start of the pandemic. Creating a positive change, out of a difficult situation, the entire growth of Kope Hale Farm has been about not only surviving change and challenge, but finding a way to harness the power of change and thrive using ingenuity, refusing to give up creating new solutions and seeking knowledge from nature and others willing to share, happy and grateful to accept help and volunteers!
Our Farm - Our Mission - Our Practices
To grow the best produce to be healthier and help others be healthier too! Growing without poisons and by producing as much as possible to build the soil with what we already have from nature, like Bokashi collected from mom's around the island and Indigenous Microorganisms Nature would use to grow more instead of chemicals nature never uses. Now following KNF. As well as JADAM, low cost organic natural farming practices meant to revolutionize organic farming by putting pest control and fertilizers in the hands of farmers instead of corporations.
To grow the best produce to be healthier and help others be healthier too! Growing without poisons and by producing as much as possible to build the soil with what we already have from nature, like Bokashi collected from mom's around the island and Indigenous Microorganisms Nature would use to grow more instead of chemicals nature never uses. Now following KNF. As well as JADAM, low cost organic natural farming practices meant to revolutionize organic farming by putting pest control and fertilizers in the hands of farmers instead of corporations.
Current Crops in Production
Cabbage is an antioxidant, known in TCM as an-anti cancer food. Sometimes the simple things in life are still the best! Start with something simple to help your digestive system thrive so you can be your best self!
We are also happy to grow and preserve Kalo, as well as māmaki, which we drink daily as a preventative anti-oxidant stronger than green tea at reducing inflammation and preventing stomach cancer, reducing insomnia and arthritis and preventing dementia by way of anti-oxidants called catechins.
Cabbage is an antioxidant, known in TCM as an-anti cancer food. Sometimes the simple things in life are still the best! Start with something simple to help your digestive system thrive so you can be your best self!
We are also happy to grow and preserve Kalo, as well as māmaki, which we drink daily as a preventative anti-oxidant stronger than green tea at reducing inflammation and preventing stomach cancer, reducing insomnia and arthritis and preventing dementia by way of anti-oxidants called catechins.
East Hawaii Farmers Unite!
We are building our wholesale business, exploring our original coffee production, but also developing a partnership with a larger farm/orchard Better Together Natural Farms LLC. Please check out their website www.bettertogetherfarm.net if you want to learn more about volunteer opportunities or Farmer's Day at the Orchidland Farmer's Market on Monday Nights!
We are building our wholesale business, exploring our original coffee production, but also developing a partnership with a larger farm/orchard Better Together Natural Farms LLC. Please check out their website www.bettertogetherfarm.net if you want to learn more about volunteer opportunities or Farmer's Day at the Orchidland Farmer's Market on Monday Nights!
Our Farm Training
Thank you to cohort 8 and instructors Daniel Randerson and Avery Bryce of Go Farm Hawaii (Extension Program of the University of Hawaii) for the wonderful opportunity to learn how to run a farm business with food safety and legal records, plan a crop on a calendar to be able to match the needs of the community/stores and what we can produce here in Hawaii to help change the food system to 90% grown instead of 90% imported as soon as we can preventing economic and environmental strain.
Thank you to cohort 8 and instructors Daniel Randerson and Avery Bryce of Go Farm Hawaii (Extension Program of the University of Hawaii) for the wonderful opportunity to learn how to run a farm business with food safety and legal records, plan a crop on a calendar to be able to match the needs of the community/stores and what we can produce here in Hawaii to help change the food system to 90% grown instead of 90% imported as soon as we can preventing economic and environmental strain.
Future CSA Under Construction
Thank you so much to our FALL/WINTER CSA Customers! We now have enough space and enough workers to consider the next CSA season. We are meeting with the NRCS department of the USDA to help upgrade the farm before we can really begin the next round of CSAs but please let us know your interest for flower CSA and or veggie CSA options and price points you prefer by emailing kopehalefarmhouse@gmail.com
Thank you so much to our FALL/WINTER CSA Customers! We now have enough space and enough workers to consider the next CSA season. We are meeting with the NRCS department of the USDA to help upgrade the farm before we can really begin the next round of CSAs but please let us know your interest for flower CSA and or veggie CSA options and price points you prefer by emailing kopehalefarmhouse@gmail.com
If you have questions about growing/farming Irene usually has answers:
My Journey as a Grower, and Quest for Farming Knowledge!
My Journey as a Grower, and Quest for Farming Knowledge!
Inspired by Square Foot Gardening
Inspired by Square Foot Gardening
When you don't know where to start with growing food for your own family, Mel Bartholomew's book "The Square Foot Garden" is still a good place to start because he breaks down the huge and complex world of botany/agriculture/agronomy to just one square foot at a time with one mission: grow the food you love to eat for yourself!
Step 1 - Plan what you want to grow and the space you will grow it in.
Step 2 - Build 4'x4' beds, or other combinations of raised soil with grids.
Step 3 - Start slow by seeding in food you eat, then water with love as you learn by doing!
The concept expanded as Mel Bartholomew, no longer with us, worked his whole life to bring the concept of starting small at growing your own food to children in schools, people across the US and abroad as the Square Meter Garden. There is now a Square Foot Garden Foundation to help new growers get started, as well as an online forum to answer all kinds of questions. Though vermiculite is getting harder to get, at least information has gotten easier to get!
Microgreens to Order
Microgreens to Order
Thanks to a microfood security grant, I restarted my microgreens grow to order business to help my local community be well! We had some fruit fly issues, but overcame them with some creative solutions (moving the production area). We're offering Broccoli, Radish and Kale microgreens are grow to order and there will be a 10-day waiting time for production and delivery.
Popular Tray Varieties Available for Pickup in Ainaloa, East Hawaii:
Broccoli microgreens, a hit with the kids surprisingly! Everything is more tender as a baby.
Radish microgreens, spicy with an intense and fun flavor.
Kale microgreens, It is well-known as the fitness food for women that contains carotenoid lutein and linalool, which offer several benefits for women’s health.
Seasonal Surprise Blend, new mixes of flavors each season to ensure greater nutritional variety and culinary flexibility to pair with soups that fit each season.
Email: kopehalefarm@gmail.com subject Microgreens Order, to begin your order!
Community Supported Market Gardening
Community Supported Market Gardening
For those of you who don't know Community Supported Agriculture is when members of the community support their farming friends by purchasing a share of the harvest before the season begins. By paying upfront small and new farmers can afford the cost of seeds. Unfortunately though Hawaii has wonderful sun and abundant water, seed and soil is scarce and expensive, even more so for non-conventional farmers who want to provide the safest and best quality food for their families and loved ones. So by supporting your local farmers CSA options it helps a ton for the farmers who are already working so hard against pests, supply shortages in Hawaii and our harsh economy.
What to expect with a CSA?
Pay up front for the season, talk to your farmer about having a shorter season or smaller share if the cost is too much, but realize minimum seed orders are often $200 and they rely on you the people they serve to pay that cost because that's the relationship and purpose of a CSA, for them to support you with safe and high quality food, you help ease the burden of getting the season started.
Get to know your farmer, ask about anything you want, pesticides, soil types, problems, solutions, food safety, how to cook with certain new foods, what foods may be coming up soon, knowing your farmer is a really cool perk about joining a CSA. Meet us at the Farmer's Market or email us with questions we will be happy to respond to during a slower week on the farm. It's lovely for us to meet you and it's great for you to know person to person who grows your food.
Get ready to have fun cooking and enjoying some of the freshest and best quality produce you have ever had. Don't worry if you don't cook everything, Better Together Compost Solutions is happy to help you find a pick up or drop off for your green waste.
Our current farm upgrades are underway and we look forward to our next CSA being started after that, possibly a mini CSA with basil, cucumber, tomato and other cooking herbs that will make it easy on mom's to cook something fresh and delicious!
Thank you so much to our past CSA customers the support you gave us help us grow so much as a farm!
KNF and Natural Farming Practices
KNF and Natural Farming Practices
While at the University of Hawaii's Go Farm Hawaii program, our class was so fortunate to have a volunteer from Akala Berry Farms teach us how to make some hands on Korean Natural Farming, Fermented Plant Juices (FPJ), from comfrey and also banana flowers. It was a wonderful experience that open our minds to lots of different organic practice, natural farming methods outside the box of conventual US farming methods. Korean Natural Farming is known that way because of the founder being from and based in Korea, but it also incorporates a lot of traditional Japanese Farming methods and has now become tired and true in Hawaii, the Philippines and Globally as well. The main idea is to follow nature's ability to balance living microorganisms to unlock more plant available nutrients instead of showering farm beds with chemical nutrients that can't be used by the plants and are largely washed away into rivers and oceans, harming life there, while wasting money for the farmers who already have a rough profit margin.
Some KNF Basics
Vigorous plants contain rhizobia symbionts to plants mostly bacteria that can be harvested by smashing the new shoots of the leaves of many weeds or strong growing plants.
Collecting the juice from those plants that has the symbiotic bacteria (sometimes fungi as well) gives you a collection of Indigenous Microorganisms (IMOs) who more than likely have the tolerance for your grow zone since they were growing in it.
Fermenting the collection of IMOs in sugar or fermented fruit or milk or molasses will allow them to multiply greatly, then the soil or plants can be sprayed with them and they will join the ecology of a farm to help the plants protect against harmful soil disease such as blight or wilt, help the plants use nitrogen from the break down of bacterial cell walls in the soil and all sorts of other natural parts of the rhizophagy cycle. The rhizophagy cycle is the process where microbes alternate between an endophytic phase and a free-living soil phase by "infecting" or inoculation of cells at the root tip meristem, it's fascinating research that proves why ancient native American techniques of inoculating corn with reed grass endophytes worked.
JADAM; the Small Organic Farmer's Revolution
JADAM; the Small Organic Farmer's Revolution
One thing that affects small farmers significantly, especially in East Hawaii, is the difficult phase of starting a new farm buisness with little income and high costs. Though consumers care about farmers more and more, they are also financially limited so that sometimes what we can affect more than asking people to pay what they can't afford for food, is making costs of running a farm as low as possible. The founder of JADAM, son of the founder of KNF, dedicates his life to the idea of doing whatever he can to bring farming knowledge to the masses for free on YouTube. He spent his life crafting and sharing recipes to get rid of any and all pests with the least harsh chemicals needed, things like simple home made soap are made of chemicals sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, but they are only used as needed and with the least toxic chemicals instead of secret and heavily toxic ingredients such as DDT, round up ext. His methods and recipes have been studied and practiced consistently since about 2000 so it's our farm's opinion that they are not only safe, but a high ethical example we are happy to follow, to make our own sustainable fertilizers and pest control solutions when we need them using cheap and homemade recipes. Not only to save costs, but to find methods that really work that are appliable by the average small farmer. It's a shared ethic and goal to find solutions that respect nature at the same time as making farming feasible in the real world.
JADAM Learning Resources:
The main recipe book is available via Amazon and other stores to support the author.
The founder Youngsang Cho puts free videos on YouTube for everyone to share.
Garden Like a Viking and other YouTube Gardener's also demo the DIY procedures.
Experience Kope Hale B&B!
Come to Visit and Enjoy Your Stay,
On Our Casual, Organic Practices, Family Run Coffee Farm
In beautiful Ainaloa, Hawaii!
Want to Experience our Farm's B&B Coffee Farm Experience?
We Currently Offer 2 Sizes of Vacation Suites:
Kope Hale 1 Studio - Kope Hale 2 Farm House
With optional coffee harvest/roasting experience available during select seasons.
Email Kopehalefarm@gmail.com Subject Hawaiian Coffee Experience for details.
We Currently Offer 2 Sizes of Vacation Suites:
Kope Hale 1 Studio - Kope Hale 2 Farm House
With optional coffee harvest/roasting experience available during select seasons.
Email Kopehalefarm@gmail.com Subject Hawaiian Coffee Experience for details.
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