The Hawaii Ag Department Clipped Poultry’s Wings. But Why? … The Department of Agriculture’s leases restrict farmers from producing chickens despite the state’s goals of increasing food sustainability and the local taste for fowl.
Elise Nielsen has been building her poultry business over the course of the pandemic. But she has hit a major roadblock: She can’t lease Department of Agriculture land.
Nielsen and her husband launched their business in early 2021, having already raised quails at their Maui home. Nielsen says she did her homework, and called DOA to confirm she could eventually lease land. So she started scaling up her business, Kihei Poultry.
But it turns out that the DOA prohibits farming poultry or swine on the land it leases. Now, she faces months of work to see if she might get an exemption from the Board of Agriculture to let her raise poultry on her property.
Nielsen says her poultry work only started as a means to help her family become more self-sufficient, but as she continued raising quails at her home in Kihei, she realized its potential for the local market.
