Our Story
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Maui Herb and Spice utilizes organic, regenerative farming, and water conservation techniques, and permaculture design. We seek to remediate damaged farm land by using minimal tilling, focusing on perennials, composting in place, the cultivation of indigenous microorganisms, cover cropping, and returning all green waste back into the systems that produced it. It is our goal to "close the gap" between what we take from the land and how we give back to it with all of our outputs. We are dedicated to transforming the modern human lifestyle from a destructive industrial consumer way of life that only takes from and depletes natural resources to instead an intentionally reciprocal relationship with the natural world, helping to rebuild and participate cooperatively with the natural systems that give us sustenance and allow us to thrive.
We are cultivating powerful medicinal herbs, foods and spices that help our species to thrive. We showcase and champion highly beneficial plants that support human health and wellbeing and we model a mini-permaculture homestead lifestyle providing an enjoyable and practical alternative to the debt and destruction outcomes in the industrial growth system of our modern day consumer society, responsible for the rapid destruction of the complex living systems on this planet. We must take action locally on a global scale to reverse this astronomical destruction by our communities and industries. Time is of the essence. |
Danielle Richardson, our founder, has been a Maui resident since 2010. She is an Ecopsychologist, facilitating healing experiences utilizing contemplative practices, nature immersion, and ecological literacy education. She has been studying, utilizing, and growing medicinal herbs since 1989. She started studying permaculture design on Maui in 2013 during her graduate work in Ecopsychology at Naropa University when she interned at the Maui Farm, an organic permaculture farm that supports women transitioning out of the court system towards independence with organic farming. She has served as a protea farm laborer on multiple protea farms including Kula Vista Farm and Cloud Flower Protea in Kula. She provided landscaping crop-production and nursery management for Biological Applications Nursery in Paia and actively participated in the ballot initiative imposing a moratorium on the growing of genetically modified organisms in Maui County in 2014. 2014 through 2015, she had the unique opportunity in the non-profit sector managing a program combining social services for adults with developmental disabilities with organic farming at Laakea Village in Paia.
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