Your nose is running but you're not gasping.

"That," says Shin Ho, "is a good sign. That means it's just about right."

She's talking about her mother's green papaya-long bean salad, but she might well have been referring to the proper degree of heat for any Laotian dish.

We're sitting around the table in her parents' kitchen, eating the green papaya salad her mother, Le Xieng Ho, has prepared for visitors, along with long-bean fried rice and spicy long beans with Thai red chili paste.

The long-bean theme has to do with the fact that the Hos own Ho Farms, tucked back into a hidden valley near Malaekahana just outside of Kahuku town on the North Shore, one of few food-certified family farms in the Islands. Long beans are among their crops, along with long squash, long eggplant, Japanese cucumbers (which, come to think of it, also are long) and their signature product: jewel-toned mixtures of grape and cherry tomatoes.

Dad Wei Chong Ho is standing up, alternately shoveling fried rice into his mouth and talking about a favorite Lao ingredient — shrimp paste — and the way farmers eat back in his former homeland.

"The countryside more healthy," he says. "They eat straight from the farm, the vegetables more fresh, more fiber, and they don't fry, they steam."

His 27-year-old daughter, the marketing expert in the business, picks up the theme. The practice, she says, is to steam vegetables together, then serve them with sticky rice and a dipping sauce of the pungent, salty, pinkish paste. The Laotian flavor palette, in contrast to the Thai, favors salty and sour over sweet. Traditionally, Laotians eat sitting on the floor, packing the sticky rice into little balls used for scooping up other dishes, skillfully pinching up ingredients with thumb and forefinger.

Wei Chong Ho laughingly tells a story about men sitting around drinking and using fish heads to dip in the sauce.

Son Neil Ho, 23, the fourth Ho family partner in the business and the computer and logistics whiz, takes a break from the packing floor, steps away in the long, low open-sided building that serves as both the farms' nerve center and the family's indoor-outdoor home. A full living-room suite, television and Buddhist shrines set up on the concrete floor greet visitors as they drive up the dusty farm road.

The Ho parents have a house behind this building but, said Shin Ho, they never seemed to use their living room, so they moved it out where the action is.

Mrs. Ho maintains two kitchens here: the roomy enclosed space where we're sitting and a smaller, screened but open space nearby where she has her three-burner propane gas burners set up, for wok cooking. "You don't want to be in here when she cooks," says Shin Ho, miming reeling back. Not only is there sputtering fat and smoke, but when the chilies and chili paste hit the sizzling oil, it can literally take your breath away.

AL FRESCO KITCHEN

So she cooks virtually in the open air in a tidy space that contains a counter, a handy shelf for her oil, salt, pepper and other seasonings.

The Hos represent the contemporary generation of small but successful farmers on the North Shore and in other Island agricultural communities. Theirs are leased, rather than owned, acres — 40 acres in two adjoining parcels, 35 of which are planted in trellised vine crops. Their commitment is to using the least possible chemical aids to growing, and to safe farming and handling practices.

The farm began with five acres farmed by their grandfather and uncle, who had preceded the family to Hawai'i. After they moved here in 1987, when Shin was 5 and Neil 2, Wei Chong Ho, a businessman in Laos, tried several entry-level jobs open to immigrants with limited English skills: driving a produce truck and also a taxi, said Mrs. Ho, who was a seamstress in Laos. But he decided being a farmer with his family sounded like a better life.

"Farming is hard, but for the money and work you put in, if things go all right, you can do well for yourself," said Shin Ho.

Of course, in farming, the "if" in "if things go all right" is a big one. During a bouncing, jouncing truck tour of the farm, Shin Ho lists challenges: disease and pests, weather, the problems of upkeep on the aging water system, distribution issues, market changes. "It's always something," she says, shrugging philosophically.

But the Hos are tackling the problems with modern sophistication. The senior Ho goes to Asia often to research farming techniques; it was he who brought back the idea of trellising the vines in shade houses — canopies of sheer, sun-admitting, woven plastic fabric. The fabric concentrates heat, helps discourage birds, reduces the need for pesticide treatments. A grant from the National Resource Conservation Center is helping pay for this experiment. So far, says Neil, it's working well, bumping up production, producing more No. 1-grade vegetables. On the other hand, when it's hot, the shade houses can get too hot. It's always something.

They start their plants not in the soil but in sterile "grow bags" — paper sacks of coconut fiber to which nutrients can be added. This keeps the plants from contact with the raw soil, which can spread diseases.

STRATEGIC FARMING

Right now, the big concern is the tomato crop. A pest, the western flower thrip, has invaded, and the plants are showing the effects.

Still, they're harvesting what they can. The long beans are hanging plentifully off the vines and the gorgeous eggplants are growing thickly, so they should have plenty for sampling and display at this weekend's Farm Fair.

Neil says farmers in the past have not always taken a strategic approach to their work, or called on science and industry for help. But like the Hos, they're doing so now. Both he and his sister went to college on the Mainland and worked there for a while, but decided to return when the senior Hos landed a big contract with Costco, expanded growing areas and needed help.

Says agriculture advocate Dan Nakasone, who helps local restaurateurs link up with farmers, this decision of the third generation to return to the farm, as much as the new thinking they bring, is a hopeful sign for Hawai'i agriculture.