Purchasing Grass Fed Beef and Oahu
Raising the Steaks: Kunoa Cattle Delivers Local, Grass-Fed Beef to the O'ahu Marketplace
How the Hawai'i cattle ranch began supplying O'ahu'south supermarkets, restaurants and schools—something Hawai'i ranchers have been trying to practice for two decades.
Fête showcases Kunoa beef in 7 of its dishes, including the steak tartare, topped with a quail egg.
Editor's Note: After this story was published in HONOLULU Magazine'due south August issue, Bobby Farias left Kunoa Cattle Co. to start Hawai'i Meats.
B obby Farias, a third-generation rancher and president of Kunoa Cattle Co., meets me in a conference room in downtown Honolulu. We're in a building where Dominicus Yat-sen once raised funds to lead a revolution in China. Sun's brother, Sun Mei, with a 3,900-acre ranch in Kula, Maui, sold many of his cattle to aid finance the cause. The location'south history is purely coincidence—Kunoa'due south public relations agency is housed hither. Information technology's not the pastoral landscape of the ranch, where I had hoped we would be, or even the slaughterhouse out in Campbell Industrial Park—with the life and death of beef laid bare, standard opening scenes for a story most beef. Merely then, with a slogan like "Our nutrient is our future" and a visitor name that means "stand free," Kunoa's cattle are really a ways to an stop, like Dominicus Mei'southward more than than a century ago.
For when Farias talks about beef, he talks about building Hawai'i's nutrient security, how healthy cattle hateful healthy soil, which is really the foundation of healthy everything, and how ranchers manage more open up space in Hawai'i than any private landowner (overseeing the equivalent acreage of ii islands the size of O'ahu)—so really, shouldn't we be paying more attention to our ranchers?
Of all the nutrient that Hawai'i imports, beef seems the most absurd. The Hawai'i Cattlemen's Council estimates we import around ninety% of the beef nosotros eat, and send away about 75% of Hawai'i'south 120,000 head of cattle. Every bit in literally transport: The alive animals are loaded into containers on boats (and some on planes) and sent across the Pacific.
Hawai'i ranchers once supplied all of Hawai'i's beef, but they relied on importing grain to do and then. When ranchers on the Mainland figured out how to enhance and deliver beef more cheaply and more conveniently (boxes of steaks versus whole carcasses), Hawai'i's last major feedlot folded in 1992. We lost our gustation for grass-fed beefiness, and so Hawai'i's calves were shipped out to where grain was plentiful and cheap. And then, like the photo of Marty McFly's nowadays, each piece of Hawai'i's beefiness infrastructure began to disappear as we changed what used to be: The slaughterhouses, the butchers, the distribution.
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Bobby Farias at Kunoa Cattle's O'ahu facility in Kapolei.
Photo: Aaron Grand. Yoshino
In the past five years, yet, Kunoa has achieved what Hawai'i'southward cattle manufacture has been attempting over the by twenty—delivering local, grass-fed beef to the O'ahu market, from supermarkets to schools. Until Kunoa, nobody was able to do it all—different companies supplied some restaurants, a few supermarkets, and no unmarried ranch had anywhere near enough beef for all of O'ahu's schools. And now, you'll observe braised Kunoa beef cheeks showered with caramelized fennel and lemon zest at Fête, Kunoa top sirloin steaks at Times Supermarkets, Kunoa beef in Redondo's hot dogs and Zippy'southward chili, Kunoa beef bars (like fruit leather, but fabricated of beefiness) sold at 7-Eleven, and Kunoa beef stewed with 'ulu in Kaua'i and O'ahu public schools. For the school contracts alone, Kunoa volition supply well-nigh 400,000 pounds of beef a year.
To do this, Farias sacrificed living on his ranch on Kaua'i, leaving backside the open space, his horses and cattle, to move to Makakilo where his cattle canis familiaris, Hina Iti, trained to sort cattle since she was 3 months onetime, now waits for him to come home. It occurs to me, seeing Farias in his cowboy lid, brass-buckle belt and leather boots, carrying a leather folder carved and fashioned by his saddlemaker—presenting the flair of a champion roper despite beingness in the uttermost place from a rodeo loonshit—that in a decade of talking to more than a dozen ranchers, a Honolulu PR office has never been the setting.
"We try to have our business organization designed effectually the style business is done," says Farias. And business is done on O'ahu, where nigh of the consumers are.
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Bobby Farias, president of Kunoa Cattle, points above the herd at the Kaua'i ranch.
photo: courtesy of kunoa cattle co.
B ack in 2005, Farias didn't take any cattle of his own, but he was all the same ranching—as a programmer and manager. He built properties on big tracts of country, but left almost of the space undeveloped. He ranched cattle on them for the agricultural tax breaks and became Kaua'i's largest calf broker, sending weaned calves to the Mainland for whatever cost was offered—equally low as $264 per calf and equally loftier as $860.
In a bid to accept some control of their destiny, some of Hawai'i's ranches and processors—including Parker Ranch, Kuahiwi Ranch, Maui Cattle Co. and Hawai'i Beef Producers—made a commitment to keep cattle for the local supply. But, as many of them have said at one point or another in the past decade, they were barely keeping afloat. In 2010, Michelle Galimba of Kuahiwi Ranch told me: "There are a lot of one-half-solutions out at that place. [I'm] working to connect all the dots. … Only from after you're washed raising the cow, there are 14 critical points where you tin totally mess upwardly bringing a alive moo-cow to the supermarket shelf. On fourteen points they all gotta be jammin'. There'southward no room for fault with fresh meat." About five years after, the system was running more smoothly and she was locally selling most all of Kuahiwi's 900 animals. Only with more ranchers doing the aforementioned, at present it was the slaughterhouses that were jammed. Since so, she has scaled back to keeping about half of her cattle in Hawai'i. "It'south less nerve-wracking for the states to diversify," she says.
"There's no room for fault with fresh meat." — Michelle Galimba, Kuahiwi Ranch
Keith Unger, president of the Hawai'i Cattlemen'southward Council, says, "For livestock it'south similar turning the Titanic," a simile a lot of ranchers like to utilise. A calf born today for the local market won't exist sold as a steak for almost three years, which makes ranchers skittish. What if the shambles can't conform it? What if there's a drought, exactly what happened—for half dozen years—afterwards Maui Cattle Co. committed to keeping its beef here? What if fickle consumers decide to ditch beefiness and become Across Meat? Yous could see the appeal of shipping calves to the Mainland.
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Kunoa cattle ranching on Kaua'i. Kunoa ranches more than than 3,000 cattle on more than iv,000 acres on the island.
photo: courtesy of kunoa cattle co.
I northward 2015, Jack Beuttell, recently graduated from Duke University with two masters—ane in business and one in environmental management—partnered with Farias, moved to O'ahu and told people he was going to buy a butchery. If people idea this was another instance of a recent transplant backed past big dreams and niggling research, they could be forgiven. Farias says O'ahu's slaughterhouse was $600,000 in debt and processed only viii animals a month. It was then beleaguered that the co-op that owned it appealed to the state to acquire the facility. Support for a nib to do that failed. Even Farias needed convincing.
Five years later, the facility's staff has grown from 15 to 51 and ramped up processing to almost 400 animals a month. Kunoa has convinced businesses to purchase its beef in part by behaving similar the large Mainland meat corporations it hopes to wean customers away from. Information technology buys other ranchers' cattle to meet demand (Farias is proud to say that Kunoa pays more than for an animal than Mainland companies) and is the country'due south but single-possessor vertically integrated cattle company, with its ain ranch and slaughterhouse. This is how Kunoa supplies nigh 30,000 pounds of beef a month for Zippy'due south, all of Kaua'i's public schoolhouse needs and one-half of O'ahu'due south.
Farias says Kunoa tried to bid for 100% of O'ahu's public schools' beefiness needs, but "everybody got spooked. 'You lot're crazy. You'll never be able to,' they said. Why are you lot guys betting confronting me before we fifty-fifty started? I've never failed yet. I've never tried notwithstanding, but I've never failed yet. If you don't have calluses for the business, and so you lot improve go out."
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In 2011, Zippy'south was actually using local beef, sourced from Kuahiwi and about a dozen other ranchers on Hawai'i Island, but then stopped. "At that place wasn't good continuity," says Farias, "and at some point Zippy's had to brand the choice to get the article beef they can depend on." Now the restaurant uses Kunoa and most 27,000 pounds of beefiness from another local producer, Hawai'i Beef Producers. "What got Zippy's to think local once again, is that Kunoa's model is to aggregate … to help us not run out."
Farias says, "lodge from us just the way y'all order from Cargill," the largest privately held company in the U.S. and one of Due north America's largest beef processors, producing almost eight billion pounds of beef a year.
Kalbi marinated steak from Fête.
L istening to Farias talk, it's easy to imagine Kunoa as a big, slick operation. Information technology has raised $5 million from investors, hired a CFO who previously helped run Hawai'i Gas, and has that downtown Honolulu PR company. But "they're still a small business concern," says Robynne Mai'i of Fête. "We're hanging in there with Kunoa as they're figuring things out." Initially, she didn't want to give up Fête'south "grain-fed, succulent meat" sourced from the Mainland. Just Farias, a childhood friend ("we used to go to Kaua'i every summer and spend ii weeks with his family," she says), convinced her to give the beefiness a adventure.
At beginning, it was inconsistent, given that Kunoa was ownership beef from various ranchers. Or the shanks would come up in whole, a trouble since Fête's chefs don't keep chainsaws in their knife collection. But ever since Kunoa has ramped upwardly its buying and is able to better sort through the beef to deliver what restaurants want, Mai'i says the consistency has improved. Things accept also gotten better since Kunoa hired Bryan Mayer, a butcher who developed a training programme for Fleisher'south Craft Slaughter-house in New York and a member of Squad USA for the 2020 World Butchers Claiming (no, information technology'due south not a sequel to Game of Thrones). Mayer speaks the language of eatery chefs. "Kunoa wants to do big things," says Mai'i. "And information technology's hard to service the restaurants if you lot don't have a good butcher on paw."
Now, Fête serves Kunoa beefiness in seven of its dishes, including the gochujang-marinated New York strip steak; the Chaz burger, with a half-pound custom alloy of footing beefiness; and a steak tartare, the trimmings from the strip steak chopped and mounded under a raw quail egg, flaky salt and fried shallots.
"I call up Hawai'i'due south going to solve some of the ranching and meat bug that the rest of the world is facing considering we're coming at information technology from a clean slate." — Bobby Farias
A due south I'yard writing this, I realize that I've been talking for hours with people about beef and we've said fiddling almost how it tastes. Buying and eating local beef underscores the fact that—for those who are privileged—no longer do we eat purely to survive or just for the flavor: Nosotros choose what nosotros consume to reaffirm what we believe in, what we fight for, what we want to remember.
Kaleo Schneider, owner of Buzz's Steak Business firm, says she switched to Kunoa's beef for its hamburgers to back up the local economy and to support a sustainable business. "Climate change is going on," she says. "I drove a biodiesel vehicle xx years ago, so I've been concerned near this a long fourth dimension." It's but later on that she says, "the hamburger tastes fantastic." About of the steaks at Buzz'due south, though, are nonetheless imported corn-fed beefiness considering people equate premium steaks with tenderness, and it'south difficult to achieve that aforementioned quality with cattle raised solely on grass.
Simply tastes can change: Bluefin tuna, once reviled for being too pungent—it was usually footing into pet food—has become 1 of the most valuable fish in the world. So now that local beef is in nearly of the public schools in the country, a new generation will grow up tasting grass-finished meat. Maybe there will be a day when the concentrated flavor of a grass-finished steak will exist prized in the U.Southward., the way a ropy steak from an erstwhile, muscular creature is relished in Spain. There'southward also a growing market of consumers bullish on local beefiness—they turn to that as a fashion of opting out of industrial agriculture, with its bars feeding operations that rely on hormones and antibiotics to go on animals alive, while taking a price on the environment.
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Kunoa beefiness shines in the burger at Buzz's Steak House.
Farias takes it one step further—asserting that the style Kunoa raises cattle is non just better than the confined feedlots, but really good for the environment. He employs a grazing strategy popularized past biologist Allan Savory, whose TED talk on holistic resources direction garnered almost vi million views. "It's a regenerative agriculture farming method," Farias says. "It'due south a carbon sequestering method, not a carbon exhausting method." Every bit in, it has the ability to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potentially reversing global warming. These ideas of Savory's are controversial amongst other scientists. But Kunoa is disarming enough to have attracted investors including the Volo Foundation, which supports "science-based climate solutions" and Sustainable America, an environmental nonprofit whose mission is to build sustainable food systems.
"I think Hawai'i's going to solve some of the ranching and meat problems that the remainder of the globe is facing because we're coming at it from a make clean slate," says Farias. "Full-bodied brute feeding operations are not going to be the respond."
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Someone once told Farias that O'ahu, equally the gathering identify, "is where the idea is going to come from. People look to Hawai'i to solve their problems. They're overworked then they come hither to relax. They demand to heal, they come here to heal. That's on all fronts. How does Hawai'i merge all that—working at Bishop Street and [negotiating] some of the almost expensive deals going on, but doing it in an aloha shirt?"
More than a hundred years ago, Sun Mei came to Hawai'i for work and opportunity. He became a rancher and man of affairs, and then sent for his brother, Sun Yat-sen, to attend school in Honolulu. It'due south said that here, Sun Yat-sen's exposure to Western ideals and its history fomented his ideas of China's sovereignty and modernization. A few years ago, Beuttell joined Farias in Hawai'i to build the Islands' nutrient security and provide an antidote to a globe that had mayhap modernized too much, likewise fast. Whether they attain what they set out to, we won't know until the cows come dwelling house.
Read more stories by Martha Cheng
Source: https://www.honolulumagazine.com/raising-the-steaks-kunoa-cattle-delivers-local-grass-fed-beef-to-the-oahu-market/
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