The Life of a Taroist

Photos by Chris Kobayashi

These days, it seems that everybody’s thinking “green,” whether it’s by encouraging corporate environmental sustainability, eating organically, or by toting around bags that proudly claim they’re not made from plastic.

But for Chris Kobayashi, a third generation taro root farmer in Hawaii, having a connection to the earth is more than a trend—it’s a tradition deeply rooted in her blood.

Kobayashi’s farm lies in the picturesque Hanalei valley on the island of Kaua’i, a fertile region where most taro production in Hawaii takes place. The 10-acre property—which has been producing crops for more than 60 years—sits near the Wai’oli River, and a nearby mountain range provides the water for its open-ditch irrigation system. Kobayashi grew up watching her father and grandparents tend the fields, but after graduating from the University of Hawaii, she didn’t exactly expect to take the reins. “I would help out with the farming, but I wasn’t totally interested in it,” Kobayashi says. “What really [changed] it for me was that my dad was sick—he had emphysema. One day, we were looking out the window, and he just said that he didn’t know what was going to happen to our farm, the taro, our land. And right there and then, it just hit me right in my heart. I knew that instant that I would be taking it over, that I would have to continue this legacy of his.”

Kobayashi often refers to the fields as her father’s sweat, blood, and tears; she marvels at the sacrifices of her parents, who ran a successful farm while raising five children. “Not a lot of people like to do what we do,” she says matter-of-factly, and in some respects, it’s easy to see why. Taro farming is a year-round job, with grueling manual labor in mud and water—the farm uses a traditional wetland style, or lo’i, which means that fields must be tilled, then flooded, before planting seeds. Every day, Kobayashi checks the fields’ water level (too much water kills plants, while a dry field sprouts weeds), keeps an eye out for pests like the golden apple snail, and maintains the crops’ bank space by weeding and fertilizing. She tends the farm’s two dry-land gardens, which yield everything from Japanese cucumbers to kale to beets, then drops by a local farmer’s market to sell produce directly to the consumer. She sells the bulk of the taro crop to local millers, who use it to produce poi, a traditional food staple made from mashed taro. 

And that doesn’t count the act of actually harvesting the taro (“We do that every year, all the time, constantly,” Kobayashi says), replacing newly harvested fields with cover crops, and later re-planting taro seeds. It’s a process that rotates among fields, and remarkably, Kobayashi accomplishes every step by hand—and with just a three-person team. “That’s part of why our production in the state is down,” Kobayashi says. “We don’t have new farmers, new people wanting to take on doing this kind of work. It’s very manual.”

Hawaiian mythology reveres the taro plant as the firstborn of the gods (named Haloa); as an ancestor of the Hawaiian people, taro helped to sustain and grow the culture for hundreds of years

Since inheriting the farm, Kobayashi has transitioned the property from using chemical fertilizers to organic methods, inspired largely by the success of the dry-land garden. The farm (named for the nearby Wai’oli river) has been operating organically for more than a decade, and the familial spirit continues today: When I call, Kobayashi is in the middle of showing her 10-year-old nephew how to cut off the taro’s huli [the propagative piece of the plant] for the first time.  It’s a frightening thought, then, that in a lab somewhere at the Hawaii Agricultural Research Center—presumably—lives a genetic sample that could threaten Kobayashi’s farm and her family’s way of life. Despite the sci-fi connotations, chances are that the average consumer has eaten a genetically modified organism (GMO): a plant created by inserting the genetic material of one organism into another, most often to make crops more resistant to disease, pests, and climate changes. In 2006, 252 million acres of GMO crops were planted around the world; 53 percent of those in the United States.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, by 2008, 92 percent of all stateside soybean crops were genetically modified. More than half of all corn has modified genes.  To Kobayashi and many other local farmers, the thought of genetically modified taro plants is an aberration, as their connection to the crop extends beyond family legacy or economic dependence. Hawaiian mythology reveres the taro plant as the firstborn of the gods (named Haloa); as an ancestor of the Hawaiian people, taro helped to sustain and grow the culture for hundreds of years. “[Our farm] still grows traditional taro that is hundreds of years old, maybe thousands of years old. And that’s the part that I’d like to see keep going,” Kobayashi says. “Because vegetatively, every time we plant a huli, we are personally contributing to the continuation and perpetuation of this life that began thousands of years ago.” Though she’s not Hawaiian, Kobayashi says she believes in the mythology and sees a strong connection between a culture’s relationship to food, the environment and quality of life. “This is actually an honor to continue this tradition. It is a responsibility for us to continue and protect it.” When the University of Hawaii began testing to see if they could genetically modify the taro plant, Kobayashi and other local farmers signed petitions, held rallies, and lobbied officials to keep taro pure. “You can look at the plant, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if one was modified and one was not,” Kobayashi says. “And for some of us, and a lot of Hawaiians, we are so wanting to keep our traditional varieties. If these get mixed up, we won’t be able tell which is which.”

In March 2008, Kobayashi entered her state’s spotlight when she testified in front of Hawaii lawmakers in support of a 10-year moratorium on genetic testing. After an eight-hour hearing in April, the lawmakers compromised by enacting a five-year ban on certain varieties. Kobayashi, who is loosely affiliated with the activist organization GMO Free Hawaii, is still not satisfied. “There’s just too much at stake for that to happen. And the other thing is [that] with GMOs, there’s so much that’s not known about it, [namely] how it will effect the environment.” Kobayashi and a dwindling group of farmers will return later this year to ask for an outright ban. “No matter what [they decide], all of us that are fighting are still going to be here. We’re still going to do what we do, we still believe what we believe in passionately.”

At the Waipa Farmers Market

Ironically, after World War II, a “Green Revolution” led to the mass development of chemical fertilizers and a complete restructuring of agriculture as an industry. For the first time, technological advances in agriculture (like synthetic fertilizers and lab-bred “high yielding varieties” of plants) became common even outside industrialized countries; and more significantly, farmers around the world heavily relied on the use of pesticides. As Kobayashi found years later, her family fields were nearly destroyed by that era’s support of chemical fertilizers. In the name of a new, sustainable green movement, she now fights to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen one generation later.

“As we keep growing, we find that plants are just like people,” she says. “They are living things too, and they respond to nature and the elements just as much as we do. So we need to treat them with way, way more respect. Especially taro.”