Old Onomea Hānai Farm

In the oldest times Onomea Bay was a fishing village called Kahali‘i. Read more about the Legend of Twin Rocks. Settlers cleared much of the vegetation to plant food producing crops such as taro, coconuts, breadfruit and mangos.

In the early 1800’s the fishing village known as Kahali’i, became a shipping port. Onomea Bay served as one of the Big Island Hawai’i’s first natural landing areas for sailing ships. First importing materials to construct the Onomea Sugar Mill and then exporting raw sugar. 

In 1863 Onomea Plantation was started. When the sugar industry sprung up, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers lived here and worked in the cane fields and helped build the Onomea Sugar Mill. The picture to the right is of the plantation map. In 1938, Hilo Sugar Company owned 4,051 acres of land on Hawai‘i Island and leased an additional 3,720 acres. In December 1976 the mill shut down due to competition from foreign markets.

By the 1960s and 70s, Onomea Valley was an overgrown and virtually impenetrable jungle, choked with wild invasive trees, weed and thorn thickets, and strangling vines. Donn Carlsmith bought most of the land for his personal use. It was later divided into parcels and sold off. We bought our land from his daughter who lived on the mainland and let the land go back to invasive jungle. The second picture is what the land looked like when we bought it. You can follow the journey to farm https://www.facebook.com/hanaifarm/