Lavaloha’s History
How Lavaloha started out as a reclamation project and wound up as a chocolate farm!
The Reclamation Part
Lavaloha’s main lot was bought from the sugar cane company in 2003. Sugar cane operations had ended about a decade earlier, and the land was then leased to sweet potato farmers and cattle ranchers. The farmers used poison gas to kill the nematodes that damaged the sweet potatoes, after first covering the field with plastic sheeting. After the gassing, the pushed the plastic aside and replanted the field. This made a mess, that had to be cleaned up..
Drainage needed to be added to keep water off Amauulu. The North side needed to be pushed back about 10 ft. Leonard Cardoza made this happen.
Starting from Scratch
There was one one structure on almost 600 acres!
That structure covered a water tank which provided water for cattle on the property.
Since then we have added a lot! Click on the button below, and you will see our current collection. Thank you Scott Greer for helping make most of this happen.
What do you do with a collapsed lava tube?
Right behind the Visitor Center is a collapsed lava tube. When the land was used for sugar cane, the owners really had no idea what was down there. They could hear water flowing at times, and it was full of sugar cane that was difficult to harvest because it was down in a hole.
We saw it as having the potential of a beautiful place.
Click the button and you can see the evolution of the collapsed lava tube into our Sunken garden.
Marissa Miyashiro got us started. She had worked on a cacao farm in Kona, and helped us do our first plantings. The plants shown in the picture were planted in 2012, and most were planted with shields to protect them from rose beetles that can strip the leaves off of a cacao plant in short order.
Our first attempts at chocolate were interesting, but not great. Better equipment and processes have lead us to high quality chocolate!
Chocolate
The “Power Lot(s)”
This lot is only five minutes from downtown HIlo, and blessedly has HELCO power available. Lots of ideas of what to do with this lot. Interestingly, different governing bodies have different ideas as to whether it is one lot, or two. Not surprisingly the taxing entities want it to be two, but other bodies want it to be one. It would be super helpful for us if it were two as we could do a consolidation subdivision to make the lots make sense.
The main lot is 45, the second lot is 27 and is in the lower right corner of the main lot. The red outlines show how we would like to rearrange the two lots, basically separated by a small gulch.
