Hula Girl Farm Tour - (808) 259-5617

OPENING SOON!! One of Hawaii's last remaining sugar processing businesses. We are in the business of manufacturing 100% organic sugar cane products,

The great sugar plantations are a fading memory now in most of Hawai`i except Waimanalo and on Maui where cane is still commercially cultivated. But those who’ve been in the Islands long enough can remember when the fields of light green cane stalks seemed to stretch forever across the island’s
landscape.

Now picture a different image, one that no one alive has seen but that lingers in the imaginations of a few. It’s the windward side of Oahu, four hundred or so years ago. Stretching up the mountainside of Ko`olau is a sight even more impressive than those future seas of cane: a vast patchwork of fields edged by ridges of hand-piled rock, or kuaiwi. The fields contain a multitude of crops: kalo (taro) and sweet
potatoes, breadfruit and bananas.

Planted along the kuaiwi that edge them is kō, sugar cane. But this cane is not the uniform light green of twentieth-century field cane. Instead, kō offers a rainbow of colors, from a violet so dark it’s nearly black to
red-purple, maroon, scarlet, pink, green, yellow and white.

Today the image of that field system lives at Hula Girl Foods. The planting was done in the traditional drylands style, with kuaiwi on one side of the kō and rows of kalo on the other. For the past 40 years, with the help of family and friends, Hula Girl and various botanical gardens have been collecting native cane varieties. It started with Manulele, the legendary love cane.

Tags: Tourist Attraction