Kauai is a meditation. It is hitting pause. It is turning your cellphone off and being OK with it. It is sweating through macnut harvesting clothes and showering outdoors. It is red dirt caked on your feet, under your nails, ruining every article of clothing. It is falling asleep to symphonies of crickets and waking at all hours to those damn wild roosters who are oblivious to dawn. It is centipede bites and fresh papayas to soothe the sting, backbreaking harvests, and meals made from the fruits of your labor. It is youth and history, childhood stomping ground and illegal conquest. It is to know that the land wasn't meant for you, even if you were meant for the land.
I grew up on a macadamia nut farm on the north shore of Kauai. One day I will be the steward of this land. These are the farmers who are showing me how.
After finishing a cooking apprenticeship, Sonja Geiger left Germany at age eighteen. She traveled to India and beyond, met her husband in Thailand, and moved to Kauai fourteen years ago. “We wanted to study how to farm. So we bought this little piece of jungle. We started in the center and cleared little by little, my husband with the chainsaw, and created everything you see here. We lived in the bus with two little babies and one bed. No hot water, no shower. I would work and they would sit there and play with the worms.” Sonja tries to reuse and recycle everything. Here, hemp milk packages become sprout planters. “It’s all about the soil, the microflora, and the fungi. The soil is the beginning.” —Sonja Geiger
A vegetarian, no-waste, anti-GMO activist, Sonja plans to set up a healing center on her farm so people from all over the world can come and take classes on growing food. “I’m inspired by life. It has a ripple effect.” “The goal is to eventually have this island be a self-sufficient, GMO-free, healthy, organic island. It’s a vision and I’m just one of a lot of people who have that vision. With the internet, there is no more denying. Everybody knows pesticides and herbicides are bad for the land and destroy the microorganisms in the soil. We keep the hope that we can reverse the damage that these companies are doing.” —Sonja Geiger
Our land partner David Breen owns an organic farm and nursery. When he and my parents bought land together in 1980, it was abandoned sugar cane fields filled with giant irrigation ditches and piles of boulders. He describes himself as a barefoot farmer. “I’ve been barefoot for forty years. There are situations where shoes or steel-toed boots or rubber reef walkers are appropriate. But for me, intuitively, it’s part of taking care of my health to work barefoot.” —David Breen
Sonja has spent twelve years cultivating a farm centered around diversity, exotic fruits, flowers, and healing diets. “We import ninety percent of all the food on this island and we don’t need to import anything. We can grow everything.” —Sonja Geiger
David on farming: “Are you gonna make a ton of money? No. But the rewards are there, they’re just not monetary. We take care of the plants and they take care of us. It’s a very symbiotic thing.”
David’s nursery is filled with trees, plants, flowers, and rare and native palms. “These are the oldest plants on the planet going back to the fossil age. There are microclimates all over the nursery because where some plants would thrive, others would die. It’s all about finding what each plant likes and creating that environment.” —David Breen
“Generations of my family were plant people. When my grandmother died, in her bible we found this musty old piece of paper with a handwritten family history and it turnedout that the person in our family who originally came from France to Canada was a gardener. I got chills—or what we call in Hawaii chicken skin.” —David Breen
