Today I did some weed whacking and found a perfect spot to plant another cacao tree. We planted around 170 cacao trees all together by now. I wish we planted 1000 of them 5 years ago! But I guess we all move at our own pace and keep pushing along.
If I had to take a wild guess there are about 90,000 cacao trees planted in the entire state of Hawaii. This is based on the 2020 Hawaii cacao survey results that UH recently released. In the next 5 years the total amount of cacao trees that Hawaii farmers are planning to grow is projected to increase to about 350 acres which is roughly 200,000 trees.
In 2019, 4.86 MILLION tons of cacao was harvested globally. The great pyramid weighs 6 million tons. Hawaii harvested less than 40 tons in 2019 so that’s not even 0.001% of the worlds supply! Even if we doubled the rate of planting we still wouldn’t reach 0.01% for a very long time.
Originally posted on 2021-11-07, part of the daily planting journal behind Ha’a Chocolate’s food forest on Hawai’i Island.