Making it work on Moloka'i

Tuesday, May 16

Ho‘olehua, Moloka‘i

Tuddie Purdy, 49-year-old proprietor of Purdy’s Natural Macadamia Nut Farm, talks story about Moloka‘i and his business, sitting in the family’s front yard a few hundred feet from the farm’s visitor center. His words, which follow here, have been condensed.

I was born and raised here, so I pretty much know what this island started out to be. I’ve actually been home for 20 years now that I moved back from O‘ahu. And 20 years, doesn’t seem like I’ve been here for 20 years. Seems like I was here like five years. And you know, it really hasn’t changed much really.

I worked for Aloha Airlines about seven years on O‘ahu. I was able to transfer home in 1977, ’78, when Kaluako‘i Resort was opened up. That was the first time Moloka‘i opened its doors to a visitor industry. So Aloha expanded flights to Moloka‘i.

The visitor industry started on the West End and Kaluako‘i Resort was managed by Sheraton Hotels, and at that time it was actually awesome. It was real beautiful. It was brand new. Sheraton did a great job at making sure the guests was really taken care of. And it was not a real high-class kind of place, but it was a brand-new place. So it looked really good, and they did everything real Hawaiian. Everything was real Hawaiian.

So there was an influx of people coming at that time and just was curious to come to a brand-new island — “the most Hawaiian island” — what was that?

We were doing a group called Tauck Tours that was coming at least once a week, sometimes twice a week. It was a group of about 40-something people and Aloha carried them. We couldn’t land a lot of times because of the wind conditions. Aloha decided they were going to leave the island, leave Moloka‘i. At that point I decided I wasn’t gonna leave. I was gonna stay here. I was gonna live on this island.

I acquired this homestead in 1980, 5 acres of Hawaiian homestead land, which is only one house away from my Ma, where I grew up. And it was passed onto me from the original homestead family. ’Cause there was no economics for himself and his family here, he decided to go to the Mainland.

The macadamia nut trees that we have on the property was planted by the original homestead family, the grandfather, and it was sitting idle for about 20 or 30 years, this grove of 50 trees. We knew about it because we grew up here, but you could not tell, it was encompassed in all this other brush that grew around it. So my mom and dad, because they were retired from the pineapples, they told me they gonna clean this place and go make it good.

In 1982 is when I actually opened the farm up with the same group that flew with us, Tauck Tours, and I said, “Well, you know I have a farm of macadamia.” This is just a brand-new thing that I wanted to try and see if people would like to see, and learn, and taste macadamia nuts in its natural state.

So, they were the guinea pigs. I asked them because I knew all the escorts. So they said, “Yeah, nothing else to do.” The only thing they could do on this island — it was not any activities for visitors — it was just an island to come to. And you could relax, you could stay Kaluako‘i, and that was about it. Pineapple was still growing, so people did pineapple-kine stuff: They stopped at the field, showed the people on the bus.

So they did that and they came to my farm. And from ’82 till now we’ve actually been very, very successful at how we deal with macadamia nuts.

And so it started with those guys. And after I did that for about maybe six months with them, and finding out, getting reaction, then I opened it up to the general visitor industry. So up to this date it’s been very successful financially and just living-wise successful.

But I measure success not in terms of money or financial success; I measure it all in being happy at what I do and having a place to live and being able to take care of my family with whatever I can utilize from this 5 acres of homestead land.

We’ve gone, and this is gross income, from like $54,000 up to maybe $70-something thousand and even up to $80,000 in a year for my farm. And it’s fluctuated, from the time we started. And at times it might have been maybe only $30-something thousand in a whole year.

I haven’t been a regular American businessman. I’ve been more of a Hawaiian homesteader. I wasn’t trying to look for the reasons why this was like that, and this was like that. I wasn’t actually caring about it. I was able to live here the same, do the same things, eat the same things, go out and do travel around the world, just about. So I did everything the same. Whether I made $70,000 one year or made $35,000 one year, it never changed at all — in terms of being successful.

The original grove is 50 trees. Since 1982, I’ve planted over 250 more trees. And since about eight, 10 years ago, we’ve been trying to acquire the original 35 acres attached to this 5 acres.

So the future plan is planting more macadamia nut trees, maybe about 50 to 100 more trees, on that extended land area. I have already over 200 guava trees already in the ground. And behind above that is a — I’m gonna use the word “driving range” because it’s actually just open land that I’m taking care of. I don’t want to plant fruit trees or nut trees on that area because it is a revocable lease. So at this point I’m just trying to keep it down and keep it manicured and mowed and everything, but I do see it as being a potential driving range.

It would be, first of all, local. And if the thing worked, then of course, I might open it up to the general public. And it’s one of the things that is necessary because there’s only one driving range way down at Kaluako‘i.

Right now we have to buy macadamia nuts from different people on the island. Just about every Hawaiian homesteader on this island has at least a few trees, macadamia nut trees. So I buy it from people here. But I also have to buy from off island, like Big Island.

So the future is, of course, expanding enough where we’re gonna be able to supply ourselves with our own nuts right here, just from our property. In a year’s time, I should have 4 acres of land, utilized in terms of either driving range, encompassing about 2 acres, the other 2 acres is gonna be macadamia nuts and guava, and I’m gonna put a hale up there. I’m gonna live there.

The island of Moloka‘i is so unique in its own being, and we’ve been the last island to be touched with development. And so we’ve seen and we’ve learned quite a bit from the history of the Hawaiian Islands on what we might not want to see on Moloka‘i, in terms of changing it to become just a tourist place. But it is a great place for visitors. So I use the word “visitor” more so than “tourism” or “tourist” or “touristy.” I use the word “visitor” because we really want people come and visit us.

And what they get a chance to do here is actually meet real people. People are not working for someone. You don’t go out and go hire somebody, and work at your business and that person doesn’t know that much about it but they getting a paycheck, so they just gonna do it.

Just about every business on this island pertains to the visitor industry, especially individual businesses, like the mule ride to Kalaupapa, wagon ride down at East End, Bill Kapuni. All these guys are Moloka‘i people. Most of them were born and raised here.

So the opportunity with the visitor industry coming to the island gave them a chance to create their own businesses. Once they opened Kaluako‘i Resort it was just part of the sequence. It was income. They had a chance to utilize their land that would be creating income.

The good thing what most people see right off the bat over here is that people are friendly. So they ask me, “Why they so friendly?” And I say, “Well, one of the main reasons why they are very friendly, is because nobody came here to change their lifestyle.” So if somebody came and changed their lifestyle, created one big hotel complex, that stopped them from going to the beach, taking their family down to the beach to go holoholo, that would change their lifestyle. Then they wouldn’t be so friendly.

You know, I don’t think people over here really take that as being the priority, you know for us that visitors are a necessary part of our economics. We never had it before the late ’70s. We could survive without it. Most people here, because there’s no shopping centers, bowling alleys, any of these things you have all on O‘ahu and Maui and all these places, they go down to the beach, they go hunting, they go fishing, they go diving, they go lay net, they go do all these things that are part of their social upbringing, plus it is a food resource. So people on this island can live very well if the thing just stopped, guaranteed.

In the business sense of the word, you normally would open in “the business hours.” But on this island, if there’s something else that came up, family (situations), they gonna shut down in two shakes, no problem.

A lot of times people from the Mainland don’t understand that. The guys think just because you in business, you should be here at this time: You said, “I’m open at 9 o’clock” and you not here at 9, then something’s wrong; you not doing it right. But this is right for us. On this island, this, to us, is right.

The visitors that come are more mature. They are people that have been around the state of Hawai‘i already. Even though we might not have all this and this and this all lined up for them to do, I think that’s the kind of people that’s coming, that have done it already, and now we want to kind of explore, we want to see more of a natural kind of environment instead of something made up for us, something built for us. And you know, “Oh, I spent big money” and “Wow, they got a nice waterfall at this hotel. Wow, it’s so beautiful.” Eh, I think they come here to see one real waterfall. I think they’re coming here to see the real ocean, not something made up for them.

From my point of view, and it’s only mine, Moloka‘i Ranch first of all is New Zealanders. So that’s gotta be clear and pointed out: They’re not Moloka‘i people that own Moloka‘i Ranch. I call it good, bad and ugly. Ugly part is that they’re not really listening to the island. They mentioned, “No, no, no, we’re helping the island, the economy for the island. We’re providing them with jobs,” which of course they do. That’s why it’s a good part. There is good in it. So it’s not like all bad.

(When Kaluako‘i opened) they had music being played around the tables, so every night at dinner my brother, Kimo Paleka — who works at Hawaiian Airlines over here — Kimo’s mom, were going around the tables playing music. They had torch lighting ceremonies out there. It was overlooking Kaluako‘i and Kepuhi Beach. It was awesome.

There was not a lot of visitor activities at that time: never have Bill Kapuni, never have the mule ride, never have the wagon ride, never have fish and dive, never have a lot of things on this island. And so everything was concentrated at Kalauako‘i.

What happened was new owner of Kaluako‘i, which was foreign Japanese, came in. They never took care of the grounds, they never took care of anything ’cause their plans was to build big and more. They never took care of the hotel the way that Sheraton did, and so people started to not, you know, visit that place. I think right now they supposed to be changing hands to somebody from Texas, something like that.

Tauck Tours was, of course, staying at the hotel. And they asked them if the guys could upscale the rooms somewhat. The guys just declined to do it. They didn’t want to take care of a group of 40 people. They wanted to deal with hundreds of people at a time, that’s the only way they can make money.

If these guys (make) the rooms real nice, I guarantee people gonna come over here. And if you could fill that place up — three months out of the year when the hotel rooms are filled up on the island, economics on this island is awesome. I mean, people working eight hours a day, five days a week.

A roadside sign just outside the airport on Moloka‘i expresses a view held by many island residents.

Hotel Moloka‘i was one of the first hotels on this island that was a modern one, and that was in the ’60s that was built and it was awesome for our island. Then they for whatever reasons it went down, it went down, and it was closed up. But then with these three guys bringing it back to life, it took the place of Pau Hana Inn, which was eventually closed down.

It seems to me that more people are actually coming here from the kind of people that I get in the nut grove. They’re here not only on a vacation, but on an informational kind of thing: They want to learn more culture, they want to learn more lifestyle. And people on this island willing to give ’em the time of day. You ask them something, they gonna tell you everything. They not gonna stop at one sentence. The guy’s gonna just go on and on and on and on.

[ Lana'i ]