Meet Your Producers: Dan and Leanne Mahalak Kaiwiki Food Forest

Upon entering Kaiwiki Food Forest and the GoFarm site just north of Hilo, we had the sense of being transported into a novel of a picture perfect farm with not even one blade of grass out of place. The carefully trimmed vetiver grasses frame perfect rows of veggies wonderfully cared for and nurtured, displaying a diversity of happily mingling veggies and cover crops.

Kaiwiki Food Forest is an agroforest wrapped around a market garden on the slopes of Mauna Kea. As recent GoFarm Hawai’i graduates, Dan and Leanne and their daughters Mica and Hazel, continue to learn as they use organic, regenerative farming practices on their GoFarm Incubator plot and continue to cultivate their agroforest and farm at Kaiwiki.

A big Mahalo to Dan and Leanne for inviting our team to harvest a variety of crops to take home: cabbages, lemon grass, beets, and more.

Next time you travel north towards Hamakua coast, take a look to the left, just as you pass the cemetery, and you get a glimpse of this diversly planted, inspirational farm.

Most of our members have received either Rainbow Lacinato Kale or beets with beet greens or both. These crops were grown under the care of Dan and Leanne of Kaiwiki Food Forest.

For more information about GoFarm and the training programs they provide, visit

https://gofarmhawaii.org/gofarm-training-program/