From the get-go, we decided we wanted to do two basic things: Connect farmers with consumers as directly as possible and give consumers the best deal possible on the freshest food we could find. That's what we've been doing. Although we were advised by various people that we needed to have a 50-100% markup on our products, we decided that's just replicating the same system we've got. We were determined to try to do something a little bit different.

We have all of the resources we need to grow all the food we need, have all of the water we need, and manage all of our waste right here on island. Coming at it from a feeling of empowerment and a feeling of abundance, rather than that constant fear and feeling of scarcity that so many people apply to food systems.

Agriculture has every single trade available in it. We have plumbing, we have construction, we even have machine operation if we're doing large-scale farming. We have, of course, farming; we have labeling and marketing, packaging, processing. All of that is produced on farms. The more diversified of a system that we have, the more jobs will be needed for various different products. That's what I think we need to focus on politically.

It's about feeding our children. So there will be fish in the bay, the bay will be healthy, and corals will flourish. That's when the bay will be pono. It's because I grew up a fisherman, right? I didn't grow up snorkeling in the bay looking at these fish. I was throwing my net so I could catch the fish-totally opposite from a snorkeler.

“We've got to go back to the future and go back to remembering that there's nothing that can't be done here. Hawai’i supported this many people without even technology before. Now we're going to need to do it a little differently though. Let's use new technologies to get our farmers competitive so that they can make a solid family-wage farming, and then people will farm.”

“It's ironic because the consumers are paying higher prices, the ranchers are getting lower prices, and the middle guys, they're probably not doing so great either because they don't have the volume. It's really not a good system.”

“We cannot build food capacity in a week. So it was really only about 12% of those of the people who were wanting things that could really get things. The silver lining of it was that people's minds were opened and woken up to actually seeing us. Seeing agriculture, seeing food systems as something they need, not just something like having a pop-up event or the farm-to-table thing.”

“Getting things between islands has always been a barrier for local producers because it adds a certain dollar amount per pound-it's just inevitable. No other state really has to contend with that, so being an island state has highlighted that vulnerability…So, I'd say the highlight, the biggest vulnerabilities were transportation problems.”

“Hawai’i should be leading the world in sustainability because we're the most isolated islands. It's a shame that we're not. Our kūpuna were the best farmers. Well, they didn't use the word farmers. They were the best gardeners the world has ever seen, and that's not my language that's stories. So we know the math is there for sustainability. Because of the colonization by the United States and then the plantation era, we've kind of skewed pretty hard.”

“The people in our community are what we would call middle-class.… then suddenly they're laid off. They don't have any liquidity. They do not have any savings. That's the norm for our middle-class. So now they're being laid off from work, they're not being paid unemployment, the next thought is that they're not going to be able to provide for the basic needs of their family…That was a real wake-up call.”

“I had been looking at trying to gear myself towards a business scale-up and going to the next level with the catering. All of a sudden, boom! Every event I had on the books got canceled within two or three week’s time. My whole queue of work got canceled. Then, it was like, okay…now what?!”

“This is the most food we ever had, actually during this time, which is kind of cool. Also, our fishermen friends have been fishing more, but now that they're not selling it to the big companies they're just selling it up, and they’ve been having fish for cheap. And hunting pigs and goats have been coming in... actually deer from Maui have been coming. Our freezer has been stocked. That's been a good part, but how can we stay sustainable off of that after?”

“When you talk about the emotion of hunger and food scarcity, it really, it was really impactful to see these families that came to get food. A lot of them had never been in a food bank before- they had never stood in line to get food. And they found themselves in this really unusual situation where they're like, you know, it's either I go stand in the food line or I seriously cannot feed my family. Seeing that was very emotional.”

I’ve realized one of the biggest things is, kūpuna do not like being an inconvenience to their family. So they call for help. Their family can be living upstairs. They just don't want to be a burden. Or there are the ones that cannot cook for themselves. We still have plenty falling through the cracks.

We’ve all heard it said, if the barges stop coming, we only have a few days worth of food. I don't necessarily agree with that. We have a lot of food. Our shelves might go bare, but what COVID has shown us is that we have a lot of food, but our distribution infrastructure needs investment.

“So now we can see all the faults, we see all the things that could possibly go wrong that we could prepare for. If another major catastrophe does happen here, we would be prepared for it because this is our drill.“

We just want to take it one small step at a time, especially being an island community and understanding that our resources are finite. There aren’t too many more mistakes we can make.

“This is Kaua`i’s second major “disaster” in the last few years, so we are lucky to have an amazingly responsive community, a local government that engages and responds to the community, and lots of leaders across the island who work together quickly when things get sticky here.

“What I hope is that it's described as a story of heroism, born out of this crisis, that can change the world…I see a story of resilience and victory for communities that have been in desperate need of change.”

“The way I look at it, if people are fed and not hungry, then our community can continue to work towards a better future.”