AoR 189: "Sailing true" on waves of grass with Pono VonHolt on Hawai'i

"Ponoholo" comes from Hawaiian wayfinding: when the canoe was on the right path — reading stars, currents, and waves — you were pono holo, going the good way. Pono Von Holt runs Ponoholo Ranch on Kohala Mountain at the north end of the Big Island, the birthplace of King Kamehameha, and where his family has raised cattle since 1928. Annual precipitation on the ranch ranges from 10 inches of rain at the coast to 110 inches in the cloud forest on top of the mountain. In this conversation, Pono traces the arrival of Mexican vaqueros in the 1830s and the birth of the paniolo, explains how adopting intensive planned grazing in the mid-1980s allowed them to increase their stocking rate, and how dry cows do brush control in a way that chains and caterpillars never could, and makes the case for why an island ranch 2,500 miles from a feedyard decided its comparative advantage was a 450-pound calf.

The Art of Range is supported by RanchBot Monitoring Solutions.

Host: Tip Hudson

Music by Lewis Roise

Producer: Matt Ziegler, WSU College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resources Communications

Visit the episode page at artofrange.com for the transcript of this interview and links to other resources mentioned in this episode.