It’s never been easy to calculate what’s going on with taro, Hawaii’s most widely cultivated vegetable.

For one thing, some growers provide it to friends and family instead of marketing it to buyers for production of poi, a traditional Hawaiian dish.

Even if the farmers are looking to sell, the market varies from small family operations to large companies.

These days industry conditions are even more confused, with observers reporting an oversupply of local taro even as some wholesalers choose to import it from other countries. Many in the taro-growing community are having to get creative, shifting away from Hawaii’s traditional taro supply chains and major customers and into a more diverse market.

Meanwhile, as prices fluctuate widely for kalo — as taro is often called in the islands — making ends meet is not easy.

Poi mills are the most traditional destination for locally grown kalo, with the processors buying more than half of what the state produced in 2021. They turn the vegetable into various products but mostly poi, an edible, lilac paste made by pounding kalo with water that was once a staple in the Native Hawaiian diet, eaten alone or alongside other dishes.

Those mills purchased 2.4 million pounds in 2021, worth $2.6 million, with farmers receiving an average of $1.24 per pound.

But as some newer poi pounding outfits show a willingness to pay up to $3 per pound, some farmers are questioning their compensation from previously struck deals.

Finding New Buyers 

Sierra-Lynn Stone, a sixth-generation kalo farmer on Kauai, recently shifted away from supplying the state’s two largest poi processors and has been reaping the benefits. 

She has been involved in the family kalo farm her entire life but started taking it more seriously in 2010, and took over the farm when her grandfather died in 2020.

Stone initially sold her kalo for about $1 per pound to Taro Brand and Hanalei Poi Co., with varying results. Demand was not always consistent and largely at the whim of companies whose set quotas were showing no signs of increasing, despite their contracted farmers becoming more productive, Stone said.

“A lot of us farmers had that hiccup, where we kind of lost a crop because we were so dependent upon these two primary vendors, (waiting) for a (quota) increase,” Stone said. “That’s when I started reaching out.”

The 33-year-old never knew about alternative markets while farming with her grandfather but found new customers on Oahu. She sells about 6,800 pounds of kalo every month, although the amount depends on the size of the harvest.

But the demand from her new customers – Kākoʻo ʻŌiwi and Waiahole Poi Factory – is consistent and high. And they are paying her about $2 per pound.

“I’ve never experienced a market like that, vendors like that, it’s incredible,” Stone said. 

Stone believes more potential buyers are out there. Farmers just need to be open-minded and proactive, she said.

Producing The Champagne Of Poi

Daniel Anthony is both a grower and a retail seller of kalo on Oahu.

He runs Mana Ai, a Kaneohe company specializing in traditional poi pounding. He is scrupulous about what kind of kalo he uses, discerning the qualities of kalo that make the best paiai — a product he sells online that can be diluted with water and turned into poi.

Some farmers keep their corms — the most-commonly eaten, starchy part of the plant — in the ground too long, Anthony says.

Harvesting them when they’re almost overripe means they’re bigger and easier to pick, but also higher in sugars. He said that’s a standard practice for growers supplying larger poi mills, but it’s not the product he wants.

Anthony curates his own kalo and the product he gets from other farmers to ensure what he considers the highest quality crops — namely younger, less-sugary corms. He batch-steams the corms skin-on, which retains their desired qualities related to starchiness and nutritional value.

He’ll pay his fellow farmers $3 per pound for good taro.

Each factor in poi production – variety, water, harvest, pounding method and preservation – is essentially an ingredient, he said. Milling poi with industrial methods rather than hand-pounding with a pohaku kui poi, a pounding stone, alters the product, he said.

Anthony was a key proponent of a 2011 campaign to protect traditional poi making. The effort resulted in hand-pounded poi preparation being exempted from certain Department of Health requirements so homemade poi could be sold.

What exists now is two different kinds of poi: Those that Anthony makes, through hand-pounding to make paiai to dilute with water to make poi, and “ready to eat” varieties developed by larger brands.

The latter is something Anthony considers akin to comparing parmesan cheese and sparkling wine to Parmigiano-Reggiano and champagne. Those differences are strictly regulated in the European Union to preserve and protect regionally produced foods, he said.

Then there’s the approximately 80 different kalo varieties native to Hawaii, and their properties.

That is something that Hawaii can and should be highlighting, especially the smaller operations, Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative founder and director Dana Shapiro said.

“I think farmers can absolutely differentiate themselves on their production practices, their variety and the finished product form,” Shapiro said. “I think there’s a direct correlation between volume and price.”

Local Dish, International Ingredients?

Though there has been emphasis on bringing poi consumption back up to par with other staples, such as rice, the industry is facing increasing amounts of imported taro products.

Waiahole Poi Factory, which buys kalo from Stone, sometimes imports kalo as well if the supply chain “is really stressed,” owner Liko Hoe said.

His well-known Kaneohe restaurant predominantly obtains its kalo from smaller local farms, which tend to have a more inconsistent supply, as opposed to larger growers who farm at scale and have contracts with the bigger outfits. Hoe said the supply chain is “always an issue” for his restaurant. 

“Especially from a farmer’s perspective, it’s hard. It’s a year to mature. It’s not months, it’s years,” Hoe said. “For us as buyers, as consumers of kalo, trying to get wholesale price kalo is also hard.”

Sometimes the restaurant has to buy kalo at retail prices too, which almost doubles his cost.

But Hoe, who has run the family business since 2009, is optimistic about the issues being faced by the kalo industry, as well as his own. 

“This is just part of the regrowing pains of kalo in Hawaii,” Hoe said. “We’re going to just keep on trying to figure it out.”

The state Department of Agriculture estimated imports comprise 16% of the market. Ten percent is reportedly sourced from Mexico, Costa Rica and Ecuador via the U.S. mainland, while the remainder comes from the Pacific.

Pacific imports accounted for 137,000 pounds of taro during the 2024 fiscal year that ended last June, an almost 63% increase from the year before, worth $232,099. The previous year just over 84,000 pounds of taro came in, according to the DOA.

Imported kalo is also more expensive this year, costing an average of $1.70 per pound compared to last year’s $1.47, DOA economist Matthew Loke said. 

Loke, who leads the state Agricultural Development Division, said 59% of the imports come from Fiji and 39% from Samoa. The remainder comes from the Philippines.

“I guess you could infer that if it’s fresh, frozen or chilled, it’s coming in by air; if it’s dried, it’s shipping,” Loke said, adding that the dried kalo would most likely come from the Philippines. 

More than 100,000 pounds of kalo were imported to Hawaii from January to June this year, which is an indication that import numbers are only going to rise, Loke said.

The frozen or fresh kalo could be used to make poi, though just how much might be making its way into local products is uncertain. Some say it’s being used to make taro chips.

Culture Or Commodity

The past 30 years of cultivation show little change in how much kalo is being produced in the state. 

Kalo is the most widely cultivated vegetable in Hawaii, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics. Almost 270 farms harvested 557 acres of its corm in 2022. That was a 25% increase over 2017 numbers, measured during the previous USDA census, but just seven acres more than in 1991. 

That reflects a longer-term decline in kalo farming, one fed by myriad factors that are reflected across the food system — land availability, expensive labor and access to sufficient water among them. But with that decline came an increase in demand, farmers said in 2021. 

At the time, Hawaii’s locally grown kalo corms were valued at about $3.8 million, having produced just shy of 2.9 million pounds at an average of $1.24 per pound. Include the lu‘au leaves – also used in cooking – and the crop’s value almost doubled to $6.3 million.

That is almost 1% of the USDA’s $673 million valuation of Hawaii’s entire agricultural sector, calculated in 2022.

Kalo was worth about $1.24 per pound that year, according to a state DOA market analysis. Food hub Malama Kauai conducted a survey of kalo farmers last year that found an average of $1.45 per pound. Then there are the likes of Stone and Anthony. 

Poi millers and processors purchased about $2.7 million of kalo in 2021, accounting for just over half the state’s supply. Wholesale and retail businesses, restaurants and on-farm sales took the lion’s share of the remaining $3 million in value.

“It’s not quite a commodity yet and it’s not a standardized industry because it’s a cultural industry,” Malama Kauai director Megan Fox said. “The industry that has commoditized it is the poi mills that have very set contracts.”

Hawaii’s large poi mills, such as Hanalei Poi Co. or Taro Brand, owned by HPC, run larger contracts with farmers who sell at lower prices but in higher quantities. Their representatives did not respond to requests for interviews.

The reality is that much of the kalo-growing ventures in Hawaii are not full-time pursuits. For many farmers it’s a part-time job or hobby, and labor can be difficult to come by.

Hawai‘i ‘Ulu Cooperative has experienced a swing in demand driven by large grant-funded feeding programs associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the founder and director. Summer program Kaukau For Keiki, which provides meals to children during vacation periods, was one example, Shapiro said.

From fiscal years 2022 to 2024, the coop’s kalo purchase grew from 75,000 to 130,000 pounds to meet demand. But last year, it purchased 90,000 pounds.

“When that grant-funding turned off it was a real trauma to the industry, which had scaled to meet that demand,” Shapiro said..

And that could be a big reason why some farmers have kalo rotting in the ground, she added.

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from the Stupski Foundation, Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.