Field Notes
2022, BY THE NUMBERS
In 2022, it took 4,857 miles of off-roading, wearing out 11 sets of tires and 57 pairs of boots, fielding 355 lbs of ammunition, shouldering 523,930 lbs of deer, washing the floors 756x, watching 266 sunrises, building 1 new butcher facility, breaking 3 band-saw blades, ordering 71 butcher coats, 116 knives, and 2,464 energy drinks, butchering for 79,065 hrs, printing 50,327 labels, shipping out 18,577 boxes, pressing send on 1 million emails (I’m guessing on that one), and building one extraordinary team - 42 members strong, to turn 9,526 invasive deer into over 450,000 lbs of nutrient dense food.
In adding up all those numbers, we know that not a single one could be tallied without the 7,814 customers we are grateful to have greeted this year and the 2,109 ʻOhana Members whose monthly commitment to our mission allows us to continue to grow and work towards better.
And in keeping with last yearʻs end-of-year review, we wanted to share Maui Nui, by the numbers, 2022:
Mahalo nui,
Jake Muise - CEO/Co-Founder
A Sense of Place
GENERATIVE STORIES
For many years, our work - the everyday stuff of figuring out a single solution for a single problem - seemed too small, not enough. And yet. In looking back at years of moving the dial just a few thousands animals a year, we now know that if not for the 2,710 deer our team harvested in 2015, the 3,005 in 2016, the 2,893 the year after that and so on, Maui would be facing twice the number of Axis deer we have on-island today, over 137,000 deer compared to an estimated 65,000. But this is the nature of generative stories. They often take a long time to tell. Unlike the enticing stories of upheaval that seem to happen all at once, generative stories unfold at the pace of a day at a time, advancing slowly, quietly, forward.
(Image of Palikū Muise, in awe of the pele./ Featured image of Haleakalā crater with Hawaiʻi Islandʻs Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualālai rising above the clouds in the distance by Zach Pezzillo.)
Peleʻs recent return to Mokuʻāweoweo Crater atop Mauna Loa, reminded me of how magnetic the eruptions and overturnings of our lives can be. Jake, the kids, and I were among the thousands that slow-crawled our cars up Saddle Road, hoping for just a couple of quiet minutes to sit, all amazed, watching her flow down into the Pōhakuloa plains. Only the language of our kaʻao, our legends, seem apt enough to describe what we witnessed of her. But the epic kaʻao of Pele, with all her fires, her explosive, molten island-building ways, was a shared narrative, yet another example of the brilliance of our kūpuna, our ancestors. Pele is paired and balanced in our stories with the energy of her sister - Hiʻiaka - who we can find in the landscape as the first kupukupu ferns that unfurl from newly-cooled lava flows, as the lifting shoots of each plant that, at leaf and flower pace, slowly reforest the slopes of our sleeping volcanoes. Hiʻiakaʻs role in our kaʻao as well as in the cycles of our landscapes is one of regrowth, of the slow and essential work of generation.
As we look back on a year of growth and on 7 years of the slow advance of our mission, the same personal directives with which I started out (and with which I struggle, daily) continue to apply: to lean into the everyday habits, attitudes, postures that will carry us through the long arc of our work; to learn to be attentive to our big breakthroughs and small progressions alike and to tell about them; to remember that, in all the chaos and challenges that can happen in a small business and in the world, there is also an ordinary and abundant reality of things that are going good, that are working to bring us into balance.
So here, at the close of another year, I want to say mahalo. Mahalo ā nui for being a part of this story, however fast or slow it takes to tell, for helping to move this narrative - of generative possibilities, of getting back to balance - forward.
Aloha,
Kuʻulani Muise - Brand Director/Co-Founder
(Our Maui Nui ʻOhana with a bunch of shaka missing, photo by Jonathan Cabatic.)
From the entire Maui Nui ‘Ohana, we want
to wish you all a beautiful close to 2022 and a bright new start in the New Year.
ALOHA NUI NŌ!
