Agriculture / Gary Maunakea-Forth says the acquisition of a new 11-acre parcel for Mao Farms is already making a big impact.

“It’s almost killing me,” he laughs over the phone from Waianae on the Saturday before this week’s dedication and blessing ceremony. “It’s seven days a week just trying to get everything into shape.”

The managing director of Mao Farms is not exactly kidding–the newly acquired former chicken farm, which adjoins the leased farm Mao has been operating since 2002, had been shuttered for two decades.

“The wooden sheds had all collapsed and most of the infrastructure had begun to rot,” Maunakea-Forth says. “We’ve taken probably $100,000 worth of stuff to the dump and recycled 150 tons of metal.”

The payoff, however, will be a fourfold increase in Mao’s capacity. As Oahu restaurateurs and consumers alike have embraced the farm’s organic produce and progressive social mission, Mao’s resources have been stretched to capacity–only about half of the farm’s existing five acres is actually arable and in production. Maunakea-Forth says that at roughly 15 commercial customers, the operation was tapped out.

“They’re screaming for more, and we’ve got 20 to 25 more [customers] lined up.”

Mao will convert one former chicken coop to a meeting and office space and another to a new packing facility. Once everything is up and running, Maunakea-Forth says, “We can quadruple what we’re doing now.”

The farm doubles as a social program working to keep agriculture alive on the Waianae Coast by giving college students from the area the experience of working all aspects of farm production.

“The youth are the backbone of the whole operation,” Maunakea-Forth says.

The 30 workers currently on site work three days per week, plus occasional Saturdays.

“The whole idea was to do a 180 on the industrial model of agriculture. As [students] get more experienced, they learn everything from seed to sales, to where they could run any part of the operation they’ve trained on.”

Maunakea-Forth says the farm is starting to see a “feedback loop” as students begin graduating from college and returning to the farm. Mao’s assistant farm manager came up through the system, and managers expect more of the same. He says the new land will also substantially increase the capacity for student training.

“Expanding our capacity correlates directly to the number of college kids we can accommodate,” Maunakea-Forth says.

The property was acquired through the Legacy Lands Conservation Fund, a state program funded by a 10 percent earmark on the conveyance tax applied to real estate transactions, with support from the Pierre & Pamela Omidyar Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation. The Trust for Public Land assisted in the transaction.

“TPL was involved in working with the conservation community to create the Legacy Lands fund in 2005,” says Lea Hong of the Trust for Public Land. “We’ve always been aware of Mao’s work–I knew they were looking for some land to buy, so when the Takahashis started selling the chicken farm, it seemed like a perfect fit.

“There were real estate issues, appraisal issues, documentation issues regarding the grant process,” Hong says. “So we helped them through the process, and they wrote us into their grant to help cover the cost.”

Mao isn’t wasting any time getting started. “We’ve already planted 225 trees, 75 mango and the rest citrus,” Maunakea-Forth says. “Corn is very land-intensive, so we couldn’t do much with it before. Now we’ve got that in. It gives us tons of options. It really is a nice piece of land.”

Organic farming in Hawaii raises more than great produce