From what my friend said, if they were closer to the processing place, they'd be able to make a little bit of money selling cacao pods to them but it's so far away that they'd spend more in gas to get there than they'd make selling the pods. They only have one or two trees, though.
With most things in Hawaii, we don't have 'economy of scale' so we can't really do commodity crops. High end stuff sold directly to the consumer is about the only way for farming and ranching to be viable around here. Which cacao would be, one wold think? The farmers/ranchers pretty much have to do it all from harvesting, processing, packaging and selling since we don't have a lot of the various processing facilities since there's not enough crops for them to process. Some crops like Kona coffee and beef have processing and selling support but a lot of crops are still at the "grow it and sell it at the farmer's market" level.
Macadamia nuts used to be a big cash crop, but there's basically just one processing facility and after they got enough of their own trees to keep their facility busy they pretty much quit buying nuts from other folks. Since mac nuts have really hard shells and are somewhat difficult to process, the small mac nut farmers don't have anywhere to sell the nuts now and pretty much have been selling their crops as pig food if they're even bothering to pick the nut at all. There used to be a lot of cut flower production, but some sort of trade bill was signed which allowed foreign flowers to be sold in the U.S. so that market collapsed. The big collapse was when they pulled the support from under sugar. We had a huge amount of sugar planted in Hawaii. Once that trade law was signed which allowed foreign sugar to be sold in the U.S. the whole market collapsed overnight. It took years for our island to get back on it's feet again and there's still a lot of old cane fields which aren't really productive anymore. They tried timber, but that didn't work. Especially since they were trying for a commodity crop and we don't have the economy of scale for it. They'd have done a lot better to plant cacao trees instead of those stupid eucalyptus pulp paper trees.
We have a small chocolate processing facility somewhere on the island, but there's only one that I've heard of. I don't know if they've planted out their own cacao trees or if they're just depending on folks to bring in pods from their backyard trees or what. There's multiple coffee processing facilities. There was someone doing vanilla, but I think they now make most of their money selling vanilla flavored foods at their restaurant. A few honey producers, not sure how the goat cheese folks are doing. There's a couple of tea farms. We have a whole bunch of small producers, not sure how many of them are supporting themselves by their crops, a lot of folks grow coffee, tea, beef - and I'd suppose the chocolate as well - as a side line for extra money but very few of them depend on the crops to pay the mortgage.
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