The idea for Punachicks Farm, a pasture-raised poultry farm on Hawaii Island, was hatched when owner Emily Taaroa was asked to write a business plan for a class at Hawaii Community College. After crunching the numbers for a poultry farm, she decided to make the business a reality. In 2013, Taaroa and her husband, Yoric, started the business on a “shoestring budget,” according to the farm’s website.
“I ended up putting it down on paper and doing market research for the business plan and found out that not a single person was doing this in the entire state — and it was something in really high demand from chefs,” Taaroa told Pacific Business News. “All the articles from chefs would say: ‘We can get almost anything locally, except for poultry.’”
Punachicks Farm started small, processing about 200 chickens per month on five acres of leased land, Taaroa said. Now, the business processes about 1,400 chickens per month on 25 acres of land owned by her family. The farm has expanded to selling fresh eggs and seasonal turkeys, as well as hosting beef and dairy cattle, and agroforestry and vegetable operations.
Today, the farm brings in more than $500,000 in gross revenue per year, she said.
About 75% of the chickens produced are sold to restaurants, 15% are purchased by individual buyers at the farm, and the rest go to butcher shops and stores, Taaroa said. Chickens retail to the public for about $6.25 per pound, according to the company’s website.
How did your business get started? When we started back in 2013, there was not a single pasture poultry farm — or any other type of poultry farm, even confinement houses — pretty much in the entire state. I’m talking about for broiler chickens — meat birds. ... There was one very small farmer out on the Hamakua Coast that was doing several batches of 100 chickens every year, but that was about it. I was working for a large landowner, at the time. I worked with farmers pretty intensively, and had a lot of interaction with farmers and access to farmland, and I was taking a business plan development class for work, so I could help our farmers develop business plans. For the class, we had to write a business plan, and so I ended up writing one about pasture poultry.
What’s the biggest challenge for your business right now? Inflation is hard. I don’t like raising my prices, and I really have held steady on most of them. I haven’t increased my per-pound chicken cost in two or three years ... It’s been a while. We just try and manage that through economies of scale, I guess, purchase everything in bulk and things like that. … And I think as an ag business in general, it’s really hard to find work-life balance, because your home is your work. And with livestock and animals, you’re pretty much on the clock 24/7. You don’t really get to check out and take a vacation.
How do you plan to grow the business in the future? We’re not able to expand anymore on our broiler chickens because we’re already maxed out on the number that we can raise per year and still be able to slaughter on the farm without a different inspection level. … The things that we could increase on would be the egg-laying production and our other enterprises, the smaller ones on the farm. And we’re growing our farm stand significantly, as well.
Punachicks Farm, LLC
Emily and Yoric Taaroa, co-owners
Address: 17-462 N. Ala Road, Kurtistown, HI 96760
Phone: 808-430-0147
Website: punachicksfarm.com
