Kava Farming Process

Kava is the plant with the greatest cultural importance in the South Pacific and has become a great cash crop for many farmers. It is a crop that they master farming like no other, with farming techniques known for centuries, suiting their lifestyle and way of working. 

Site

Kava will generally be planted in a selected location, on a well-drained piece of land, often on a sloped site on the side of a valley, or on a rich plateau of those mostly volcanic islands. The farmers generally have several kava plantations, or "Karen" as they call them in Vanuatu, in different areas. This will mitigate the risk of losing all their plants if a not-so-uncommon tropical cyclone hits the island.

If the land is a "new "plantation, it must be cleaned first, but many big trees will deliberately be left, as the kava plant loves a bit of shade. The initial cleaning and weeding will be easier if the land has been farmed before and left for several years to regenerate. 

Direct planting instead of nurseries is still the farmers' preferred option. One could wonder why nurseries are not used more, given that a nursery seedling aged 5-7 months, having a well-established roots system, will have a better survival rate when transplanted on the field. But their choice could easily be explained by several reasons: 

The first one is the lack of proper road infrastructures to bring the seedlings to the farm, mostly located in the mountainous interior with a very poor network of roads -if any-. 

The second point is the generally huge availability of planting material for most farmers, which makes the ratio of plants growing by cuttings planted less relevant for them. 

The third point is that an efficient nursery would need good running water on site for watering the seedlings, which is hardly the case on island farms.

Of course, as direct planting is more risky and less efficient, the farmers, to minimize the percentage of young plant losses, will be planting kava plants in selected periods, mainly in the more rainy periods, during the wet season- which extends roughly from November to June, and will also ,cater for expected losses by planting more cuttings.

Planting

The farmers dig a hole or, more often simply soften the rich volcanic soil with a big wooden stick, then push several cuttings in them with a slight angle. The cuttings will come from some kava plants he has harvested a few days earlier and that have been kept moist in a hole, with a bit of soil and of mulch or dried leaves covering them. 

The farmers will only replant cuttings from a healthy plant that they know is good and adapted to the local terroir, keeping in mind that the better the kava cultivar is, the less resilient it is. The best kava varieties are the hardest to farm from an agricultural point of view, and are often kept closer to his home, mainly for the farmers’ own consumption. 

Depending on the location and the current weather, they might cover the cuttings and new seedlings from direct sunlight with some dried coconut palm. No irrigation, fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide, or insecticide are used on Vanuatu farms; only water from the sky and good traditional agricultural practices will make the kava plant thrive.

Maintenance

During the first year, the main work will be to control the growth of the weeds in between the kava, as their root system will compete for the soil nutrients and water with the young kava plants, which still have a limited root system. As the plants grow bigger, shading the soil and establishing a more efficient root system, the time lapse between the weeding sessions will increase. 

The farmers often lessen in this first year the weeding work by doing intercropping, planting between the rows of kava some other crops. Some of those  cover-crops, such as sweet potatoes or peanuts, will be harvested during the first years, providing an income to the farmers while they are waiting for their kava to be ready.

As soon as the kava plants reach a decent size,  the weeding will be less, but other work remains: A good hilling will help the plant to grow good roots, and similarly, some pruning could also stimulate the growth of its underground part, the valuable part of the plant.

If the kava has been densely planted, the farmers may harvest one line out of two for their own consumption after two years. After four years, the kava is mature enough to be harvested for the commercial markets, and will be either sold fresh for the kava-bars of the urban areas, or dried for the export market. It will be carefully harvested using big wooden sticks instead of shovels and spades to avoid damaging the lateral roots, which contain roughly twice as many kavalactones as the main stump (also called “basal roots”).

Kava farming is not just about economic gain; it's about preserving a way of life and cultural heritage and showing everyone in the community that as a farmer, one can make a good living from the land without the need to go look for work in the urban areas or doing seasonal fruit-picking overseas. These farmers are the custodians of an age-old tradition, and their constant adaptation and their commitment to sustainable and responsible practices set an example for the world.