Hawaii's Share Your Table

They show us the farm in worn T-shirts and thick rubber boots, van der Stroom stepping away from repairs on processing equipment, and St. Martin from churning butter. Throughout our farm tour, their cell phones ring non-stop--a call about a broken water pump, about a grant, details for van der Stroom’s trip to bring back processing equipment from California. The dairy business in Hawai‘i is no place for divas. An endangered industry, once large enough to supply all the islands' demands, has now dwindled down to three dairies: two on the Big Island and Naked Cow Dairy in Wai‘anae.
 
Currently, Naked Cow Dairy has a relatively small herd, so they won't be replacing Meadow Gold's mainland imported milk anytime soon. Rather, they're targeting the market that doesn't want to buy mainland milk that's been sitting for seven days on a barge and ultra-pasteurized. And they're going with a different model. Van der Stroom, manager of Pacific Dairy for 12 years, says that after all the dairies on Oahu closed down, that she would go on her own. But she would do it differently. Instead of shipping milk to Meadow Gold for processing and marketing, which dairies had done previously, Naked Cow Dairy would do their own processing so that they could command their own price for their cream top, non-homogenized fresh milk.
 
They're also offering value-added products like cheese and fresh-churned butter. This is St. Martin's realm. “I was a chef for most of my life,” says St. Martin. “I was cooking in New Orleans when I lost everything in the hurricane, so I came here. I couldn't think of a better place to come.” She spends her time experimenting with cultured butter (churned with cream that’s been fermented, resulting in a flavorful butter reminiscent of parmesan cheese), flavored butters like mac nut honey, toasted coconut, and cheeses like feta and gouda.  
 
While the Naked Cow Dairy promotes sustainability through such details as re-usable glass bottles, van der Stroom also has broader goals that include eventually moving the dairy to pasture lands. Currently, with the number of cows she has, she can get a lot of feed locally. But as she grows, she’ll have to start shipping in feed. The rising cost of feed and shipping are some of the reasons that island dairies have folded, and van der Stroom hopes that by raising the cows on pasture, essentially growing her own feed, she won’t have to rely so heavily on imports.  
 
Van der Stroom hopes she can move her farm to pasture in two years, but so far, everything on the dairy has been slow going. Naked Cow Dairy was slated to start selling milk by last June, but the sisters have been bogged down in the details. “The industry is different in Hawaii,” says van der Stroom. “It’s a lot harder. We have to ship everything in. And we don’t have all the businesses that support dairies, like you have in the mainland. Over there, you might have a thousand dairies in one area. On every corner, there’s a repair store for dairy barns. They’re like the 7-11 of dairy barns [open] 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And over here we have to wait a week for parts. You have to teach yourself how to fix things because you can’t wait for a repairman to come down from the mainland.”

But for all the time van der Stroom spends on the farm, taking care of the cows, fixing equipment, painting the barn, installing a commercial kitchen, she spends as much time downtown at the State Capitol, a role she finds as important to the success of her dairy as taking care of her cows. As a lone dairy farmer, she’s trying to make sure dairy has its voice in policies relating to Hawai‘i agriculture. It’s important, but she finds the role bizarre. “We’re not designed to go to the capitol and testify in front of people,” she says, as if she were describing a Holstein cow, bred for milk production. “For the individual farmers to get off the farm and get out of the corral and take his boots off and go downtown to the Capitol, that is so weird. That is so strange. What’s that about?”


In the meantime, while the sisters wait for grants and loans to come in to set up processing and pasteurizing equipment so they can start distributing their much-anticipated milk, they can be found at almost every farmers' market on O‘ahu, selling their rich, fresh butter and offering samples of cool, tangy cream cheese. If at times they sound weary from building a dairy on O‘ahu, one only need bring the conversation back to their butters, to the creaminess of fresh milk, to future experiments like ice cream, gouda and cheddar. Hearing their evident pleasure in all things dairy, you get an inkling of why they started this whole business in the first place, given all the obstacles. It's a pleasure that's easy to understand in just one taste at their farmers' market stand.