Sugar Hill Farmstead 2022 Year In Review
There is so much to celebrate this year at Sugar Hill Farmstead: we’ve added new products, increased production to meet demand, hired a part-time employee, and kept more food in the local system than ever before. We’ve celebrated together and gotten through some rough patches, too. While we’ve been working away at making Sugar Hill Farmstead a leader in regenerative agriculture on the Big Island, the best gift of all came in July with the birth of our daughter.
We couldn’t have done it all without you! Thank you for supporting us along the way. We’re so excited to see what 2023 will bring but first, let’s take a closer look back at 2022.
The Whole Diet becomes a CSA option
In the very beginning, our goal was to grow the healthiest food possible using no commercial pesticides, antibiotics, or harsh chemicals that are found throughout the food chain. We rehabilitated the soil through rotational grazing and then started vegetable and fruit production using manures and natural farming methods. We know healthy eating is the bedrock of a healthy life – read about Bodhi’s health journey in this post. The Whole Diet made its debut in 2022, and it’s a pretty incredible combination of weekly organic vegetables and a monthly variety of grass-fed and pasture-raised meats. This hybrid CSA expands a customer’s ability to eat local, organically grown, and all-around healthy foods in a convenient way. Check out the Whole Diet here.
Stuffed cabbage made from cabbage and ground beef from the Whole Diet- recipe on the blog
2. Hired our first part-time employee
We can’t do it all and do it well. Bringing someone on that was talented, highly capable, and shared the Sugar Hill Farmstead vision took some time, but we couldn’t be happier with the results. Mimi came to us from GoFarm, which teaches budding farmers how to plan, plant, and harvest for a productive CSA/market garden. In the short time she’s been with us, we doubled our growing space to include a greenhouse and expanded the garden area. Mimi is a powerhouse and it’s great to have her on our team.
3. Home Delivery Service
Another thing we’re passionate about is supporting local businesses. That’s why we’re proud to offer home delivery for the greater Hilo area and Kailua-Kona through Big Island Courier Service. There’s some statistic that when you shop local, your dollars end up supporting 8 more local jobs; when you shop with us that’s exactly what you’re doing. In addition, drivers pick up from the farm and deliver the same day so everything is farm fresh when it reaches your door.
4. Built the Farm Stand
While we take our work pretty seriously, we had a lot of fun designing and building our farm stand, which sits between the vegetable field, greenhouse, and cow pasture. Welcoming customers to the farm was a highlight for us; we hope it was for you too! We were able to finish the stand so quickly with the help of a micro-grant from Vibrant Hawaii.
Every Saturday, the chalkboard doors were updated with a list of vegetables in the CSA bags, and any extra products available. We look forward to welcoming you to the farm stand in 2023!
5. Our biggest accomplishment- Hadleigh!
We were thrilled to welcome our little girl in July 2022. She’s a farm girl already, that’s for sure. We are happy to announce that Hadleigh has been cleared by the orthopedic surgeon- no more hip dysplasia! The outpouring of support as we processed the diagnosis helped us get through that rough patch. Growing healthy food without chemicals is even more important to us now.
Thanks for taking a moment to celebrate everything we’ve accomplished together this year. And here’s to continuing to create, grow, and thrive in 2023!