The mist comes in low over the Kona Coffee Belt most mornings, pooling between the rows of glossy-leafed trees before the sun burns it away. If you stand still long enough on a farm in Holualoa, you can hear it: the rhythmic pull of ripe cherries from their stems, the creak of an old wooden pulping machine, and underneath all of it, a voice. Someone talking. Someone remembering. Someone passing something along that no manual ever captured and no certification program ever required. This is Kona coffee storytelling, and it is as old as the community itself.
When people ask what makes Kona coffee so special, the first answers tend to reach for geography: the volcanic slopes of Hualalai and Mauna Loa, the afternoon cloud cover that filters the sun, the mineral-rich soil. These things are real, and they matter deeply. But they are not the whole answer. The fuller answer lives in something harder to taste and harder to quantify. It lives in the oral history of a farming community that has been building, breaking, and rebuilding itself for well over a century. The flavor in your cup is inseparable from the stories that produced it.
Kona coffee storytelling is not a marketing concept. It is not a tagline or a brand direction. It is the primary vehicle through which an entire farming community has transmitted identity, technique, land knowledge, and cultural pride across generations. It moves through kitchens and tool sheds, across fence lines and at community gatherings, in the specific way a grandfather shows a grandchild how to feel for a ripe cherry without looking at it. It is the most important agricultural document the Kona community has ever produced, and almost none of it has ever been written down.
This article is about that living archive. We will trace it from its origins in the plantation era through the Japanese immigrant communities that shaped it, into the institutions that work to preserve it, and all the way to the present moment, when hurricanes, economic pressure, and demographic change make its survival more urgent than ever. We will also talk about what you can do, whether you visit us here at Buddha's Cup or sip our coffee from a kitchen table three thousand miles away, to become a carrier of this story yourself.
Where Story and Soil Begin: The Origins of Kona's Farming Community
The Plantation Collapse That Created a Community of Storytellers
The Kona coffee farming community as we know it today was not planned. It was born from a specific kind of collapse, the kind that forces people to improvise and adapt, and in doing so, to talk to each other constantly about what they are learning.
In the late nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Islands were dominated by large sugar plantations that had drawn contract laborers from Japan, China, Korea, Portugal, and the Philippines. When sugar began to fail in the Kona district, plantation owners faced a choice about what to do with the land. Many of them divided their holdings into small parcels, typically between three and twelve acres, and leased those parcels to their former laborers. This arrangement was formalized through a tenant farming system that in the Japanese community was known as bunchi kosaku seido. It was not generous in its origins. Landlords retained ownership and expected a share of the crop. But it created something that no one had designed on purpose: a community of small, independent, family-scale farmers who had to figure out coffee cultivation largely on their own.
This structural fact is the origin point of Kona's oral tradition. When farms are small and family-operated, knowledge does not accumulate in extension service reports or corporate training programs. It accumulates in people. The person who figured out how to read the cloud cover to predict afternoon rain was not writing a memo about it. They were telling their child. The person who discovered that a particular section of volcanic ground drained differently and needed different pruning rhythms was not filing a report. They were showing a neighbor during the harvest, talking through it over a shared meal, passing it along in the natural course of a life spent working a small piece of land.
The tenant farming structure also meant that failure was personal and immediate. If you did not understand your soil, your trees, your microclimate, and your market, your family did not eat well. This existential pressure made knowledge precious and sharing it was a form of community insurance. You told what you knew because someday you would need someone else to tell you what they knew. The oral tradition that developed out of this system was practical before it was cultural. It became cultural because it was so thoroughly practiced.
Oral history thrived in this environment in ways that written documentation simply could not. Leased farmers rarely had the capital to hire agricultural consultants or the access to academic literature. What they had was each other, and the accumulated wisdom of the seasons they had already survived.
Japanese Immigrants and the Cultural Roots of Kona Coffee Oral Tradition
The story of Kona coffee's oral tradition cannot be told without centering the Japanese immigrant community that built so much of its foundation. The men and women who came to Hawaii from Japan, often from rural farming prefectures, brought with them a deep cultural inheritance around oral transmission. In Japanese agricultural communities, knowledge moved through family, through seasonal rhythms, through the shared labor of community gatherings. The idea that wisdom about the land was something you wrote down and filed was foreign. It was something you embodied, demonstrated, and spoke aloud to the people who mattered most to you.
When Japanese laborers transitioned from plantation work to tenant farming in Kona, they brought these cultural practices with them. They formed community organizations, held gatherings tied to the agricultural calendar, and maintained networks of mutual support and shared knowledge. The tanomoshi, a rotating credit system common in Japanese American communities across Hawaii, was itself a form of oral institution, built entirely on trust, reputation, and spoken commitment.
One of the most important physical anchors of this history is the Uchida Farm in Captain Cook, established in 1900. The Uchida family was among the first Japanese families to establish a coffee operation in Kona, and their farm became a repository not just of agricultural practice but of community memory. It is the kind of place where the land itself holds stories, where the arrangement of outbuildings and the specific variety of trees planted in specific rows reflects decisions made by people who are no longer alive but whose choices continue to shape the present.
Understanding the culture surrounding Kona coffee means understanding how Japanese immigrant families wove themselves into the volcanic hillsides of the Big Island, creating a community whose identity was inseparable from the specific, difficult, beautiful work of growing coffee at elevation in a tropical climate. The stories they told were not separate from the work. The stories were how the work was transmitted.
What Tenant Farming Made Possible and What It Demanded
The tenant farming structure created a particular kind of farmer. Because the parcels were small and the families were often the only labor available, Kona coffee farmers had to become generalists in a way that large plantation workers never did. The same person who pruned the trees in winter picked the cherries in fall, ran them through the pulper, spread them on the drying rack, monitored the fermentation, and then drove the processed beans to market and negotiated a price. This breadth of involvement meant that the stories farmers told were also broad.
Stories about weather. Stories about soil. Stories about what happens when you pick too early or wait too long. Stories about prices and buyers and which roasters were honest and which ones were not. Stories about faith and endurance when a dry spell threatened a season's income. Stories about joy, the particular pleasure of a harvest that came in clean and plentiful after a year of careful work. All of these stories circulated within families and between neighbors, creating a layered oral record that was simultaneously agricultural manual, economic diary, spiritual journal, and community biography.
The oral record was also a practical survival tool. Before the University of Hawaii agricultural extension programs reached small Kona farms in any meaningful way, farmers relied almost entirely on accumulated community knowledge to manage pests, adapt to shifting weather, and make decisions about variety selection. The person who knew what to do when the coffee berry borer showed up was invaluable, and what they knew had come to them the same way they would pass it on: through a conversation, a demonstration, a story with a lesson embedded in it.
This tradition is still alive and still necessary. The journey of a Kona coffee bean on a family-owned farm is not just a physical process. It is a process saturated with transmitted knowledge, with the specific decisions and practices that come from generations of people talking to each other about what this land requires and rewards.
The Living History Farm: Where Oral Tradition Becomes Preservation
The Uchida Farm as Community Memory
The most deliberate act of storytelling preservation in the Kona coffee community exists on a 5.5-acre property in Captain Cook: the Kona Coffee Living History Farm, operated by the Kona Historical Society on the site of the original Uchida Farm. It is, in essence, a physical embodiment of oral tradition. The farm is not a museum in the conventional sense. It does not primarily ask you to look at things behind glass. It asks you to be present in a working agricultural environment and to receive the stories that the place and its guides are ready to give you.
The farm was established in 1900 by the Uchida family, making it one of the oldest continuously documented coffee operations in Kona. The Kona Historical Society took over stewardship with a clear purpose: not simply to preserve the physical structures, the farmhouse, the processing shed, the drying racks, but to preserve the living knowledge and human narrative that those structures represent. This distinction matters enormously. Physical preservation without human voice produces a museum. Physical preservation with human voice produces a living history site, and there is a profound difference between the two.
When visitors come to the farm, they encounter demonstrations of traditional coffee processing techniques, tools that were actually used rather than simply displayed, and an atmosphere that actively recreates the rhythms of early twentieth-century Kona farming life. During the annual Kona Coffee Cultural Festival, the Living History Farm becomes a central stage for the community's storytelling traditions, with guides and community members offering tours, demonstrations, and conversations that bring the historical narrative into the present moment.
The farm is also a gathering place for the community itself. Its value is not only to outside visitors who want to understand Kona coffee history. It is to the farming community as a whole, which has in this place a physical anchor for collective memory. When you can walk to a building and say "this is where it happened, this is what they used, this is how they lived," the stories you tell about that place become more vivid and more durable.
Guides as Griots: The Human Voice at the Center of Preservation
At the heart of the Living History Farm's preservation work is a simple and profound truth: the spoken human voice outperforms every other medium when it comes to transmitting emotional and practical knowledge simultaneously. Signs and exhibits can tell you that a pulping machine was used to separate the coffee cherry's outer skin from the seed. A skilled guide can tell you what it sounded like when it ran, what it felt like to operate it at dawn before the sun came up, and what the farmer who used it every day for thirty years said about the mornings when it broke down at the worst possible moment.
The Kona Historical Society has understood this from the beginning of its Living History Farm program. The guides it trains are not simply tour operators reciting facts. They are cultural carriers, people who have absorbed the stories of the community and who know how to give those stories to others in a way that actually lands. Some of the most memorable guides at Kona coffee sites are people who learned their knowledge from someone who was actually present during the events being described, and there is an almost physical sensation of transmission that occurs when you hear a story that has traveled in that way.
This is what anthropologists sometimes call a "griot" tradition, named after the West African oral historians who serve as the memory of their communities. Every culture that relies on oral transmission develops its own version of this role. In the Kona coffee community, it manifests in the guides at the Living History Farm, in the older farmers who make themselves available to younger growers, and in the community members who show up at gatherings not just to socialize but to make sure certain stories are told again, to new ears.
The difference between reading about Kona coffee history and hearing it from someone who learned it from someone who lived it is the difference between information and understanding. Information can be transmitted in writing. Understanding requires a human voice, the specific cadence and weight of a person choosing their words carefully because the story matters to them and they want it to matter to you.
The Annual Festival as a Storytelling Stage
Every November, the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival activates the entire community as a storytelling space. It is the largest annual gathering of Kona coffee oral histories in a single event, and it is not incidental to the preservation work happening year-round. It is the year's peak expression of that work.
The festival, which has been running for decades, brings together farmers, roasters, baristas, community members, and visitors for a week-plus of events that span coffee competitions, farm tours, cultural demonstrations, culinary experiences, and community gatherings. The Living History Farm is a featured site during the festival, with elevated programming that takes advantage of the larger audience. But the storytelling is not confined to any single venue. It happens everywhere: at farm tour stops where a farmer explains why they still use the same processing method their grandparents used, at cupping events where judges talk about the specific character of this year's harvest, at dinners where community members reminisce about seasons past.
For younger members of the Kona coffee community, the festival serves as an annual intensive in community identity. This is the moment when stories that might otherwise circulate only within families or close friend groups become part of a broader public conversation. Children who have grown up hearing their parents talk about farming in a certain way suddenly hear those same themes echoed by strangers, by community elders, by visiting researchers and journalists. The festival tells young people: this is not just your family's story. This is your community's story. It belongs to everyone who grows coffee on these slopes.
The Stories Farmers Tell: What Oral Tradition Actually Carries
Agricultural Knowledge Passed Mouth to Ear
When we talk about Kona coffee storytelling as oral tradition, it is easy to drift toward the poetic and lose track of the practical. But the most essential stories in this community's oral archive are not dramatic narratives. They are technical knowledge wrapped in human memory, and they are irreplaceable precisely because they have never been written down.
Consider the knowledge embedded in a simple observation about cloud cover. Holualoa sits at approximately 1,400 feet above sea level, in the band of the Kona Coffee Belt that benefits from afternoon clouds rolling in off the Pacific to shade the trees from the most intense afternoon sun. Experienced farmers read those clouds the way other people read weather apps, and they read them with a specificity that no general meteorological forecast can provide. They know, from accumulated seasons and from what older farmers told them, that when the clouds form at a particular angle over the shoulder of Hualalai, the afternoon will be drier than expected. They know when the mist means moisture that will help and when it means moisture that will invite disease. This knowledge was not discovered by one person. It was refined over generations and transmitted orally, season after season.
The same applies to hand-picking technique. The journey from cherry to cup begins with the decision made by human hands in the moment of contact with a ripe cherry. Farmers pass down not just the general principle of selective picking but the specific tactile information: the exact give of a perfectly ripe cherry versus one that needs another few days, the way the stem releases cleanly when the timing is right, the micro-decisions about which cherries on a cluster are ready and which should be left for the next pass. This is knowledge that lives in the hands and in the stories that explain the hands.
And then there is the soil. Volcanic soil shapes Kona coffee flavor in ways that are now documented scientifically, but farmers were working with this knowledge long before the science caught up. Stories about specific parcels of land, about the section that drains too fast after rain, about the corner of a field where the trees have always been more productive, about the place where you have to mulch heavily or the shallow volcanic layer dries out too quickly, all of this constitutes a detailed oral map of the landscape that is more locally precise than any general soil survey.
Pest and disease management represents another critical category of transmitted agricultural knowledge. The coffee berry borer, the coffee leaf rust, the various fungal challenges that can devastate a crop under the wrong conditions: experienced farmers have strategies for all of these, and the most effective strategies are often adaptations of approaches that were developed in the community and passed down through direct conversation, not through printed advisories.
Identity, Pride, and the Stories That Define a Community
Agricultural knowledge is one strand of the oral tradition. But running alongside it, inseparable from it, is a strand of stories about what it means to be a Kona coffee farmer. These are the stories about identity, pride, belonging, and the specific emotional texture of a life shaped by the rhythms of a coffee farm.
Stories about pride travel in both directions through Kona farming families. There are stories of triumph: the year the harvest came in exceptional, the season that validated every difficult decision, the moment when a buyer tasted your coffee and had nothing to say because there were no adequate words. And there are stories of hardship: the drought year, the price crash, the neighbor who had to sell, the summer that tested everyone and left some families permanently diminished. Both kinds of stories are essential to the community's oral archive, because both tell the truth about what this work actually is.
Generational narratives form another crucial category. Stories about children who grew up on the farm, left for college or for the mainland, and then returned, changed and unchanged. Stories about those who stayed and what that choice cost them and gave them. Stories about the land being passed from one generation to the next, and the conversations that happened around those transitions. These are stories about continuity, about what it means to inherit not just property but responsibility, not just a farm but a relationship with a specific piece of volcanic ground that has been in the family for decades.
And then there are the stories about labeling fraud, which represent one of the most significant community wounds of the modern era. For decades, the Kona coffee label was applied to blends that contained as little as ten percent actual Kona coffee, with the remainder being cheaper beans from other origins. Farmers talked about this among themselves with a combination of fury and heartbreak. It was not simply an economic injury, though it was certainly that. It was an identity injury. When someone buys a bag labeled "Kona coffee" and drinks it and thinks they know what Kona coffee tastes like, and what they are actually drinking is mostly something else, the story that Kona coffee farmers have been trying to tell for generations is stolen from them. The advocacy that led to ongoing challenges in the Kona coffee industry is itself a form of oral history, the community insisting on its right to tell its own story authentically.
House Bill 2298, which raised the minimum Kona content in blends labeled as such to 51 percent, was the result of a community that had been talking about this injustice for years, that had organized its anger into testimony and advocacy. Research involving 41 stakeholder interviews found that farmers saw geographic indication labeling not simply as a commercial protection but as a cultural one, a way of saying that the story this coffee carries is specific, real, and not transferable to beans grown somewhere else.
Grief, Resilience, and the Stories That Come After Loss
Every farming community that survives long enough accumulates a deep library of disaster and recovery stories, and the Kona coffee community is no exception. The Big Island sits on one of the most geologically active spots on Earth. Earthquakes, volcanic events, drought, flooding, and now intensifying tropical storms have all written chapters in the community's oral history, and what those chapters share is a stubborn insistence on continuation.
In September 2026, Hurricane LaLa made landfall in a way that forced the Kona community into an immediate and urgent conversation about survival and recovery. Trees were uprooted across the Coffee Belt. Infrastructure was damaged. Farmers who had spent decades building their operations faced scenes of destruction that called on every resource of resilience they had. The community's response was immediate and characteristically oral: phone calls, check-ins, gatherings in farm driveways and community centers. People asking who needed help and who had something to offer. People sharing what they knew about how to handle uprooted trees (research from USDA-ARS and UH-CTAHR suggests that uprooted trees can often be saved if managed correctly in the critical period after a storm, and that knowledge, like all the other knowledge in this community, traveled fastest through direct conversation).
Earlier in 2026, an earthquake had already shaken the community, damaging water tanks and creating new anxieties about infrastructure resilience. The farmers who called each other in the aftermath of that event were doing what Kona coffee farmers have always done after disruption: rebuilding the community's shared understanding of what had happened and what needed to happen next through the most reliable technology they have, the human voice in direct conversation with another human voice.
The language of resilience is itself a form of oral tradition. Phrases and framings that have been used by Kona farmers for generations resurface in new contexts. The specific way an older farmer talks about the earthquake of 1868, which devastated the region and from which the community rebuilt, echoes in the way a younger farmer talks about Hurricane LaLa. The story changes in its details but not in its structure: disruption, community, effort, continuation. This is what oral tradition does. It provides a template for survival, a narrative framework that says we have been here before, in some form, and we came through.
Threats to the Oral Record: What Could Be Lost
Generational Gaps and the Demographic Pressure on Small Farms
The Kona coffee community's oral tradition is under real pressure from forces that are not dramatic but are relentless. The most significant is demographic. The farming population in Kona, like small-scale agricultural communities across the United States and around the world, is aging. Many of the people who hold the deepest and most specific knowledge about Kona coffee farming are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Some of them have children and grandchildren who are farming alongside them. Many do not.
When a farmer retires without a successor, what exactly disappears? Not the land, which will typically be sold or leased to someone new. Not the trees, which will continue to grow. What disappears is the specific, accumulated, contextualized knowledge that one human being developed over a lifetime of working a particular piece of ground. The microclimate observations. The timing instincts. The pest management approaches. The understanding of which sections of the farm respond to which interventions. And, perhaps most importantly, the stories that connect all of that knowledge to the broader community history that gives it meaning.
Undocumented knowledge is not simply unrecorded. It is fragile in a way that written knowledge is not. A book can sit on a shelf for a hundred years and still be read. Knowledge that lives only in a person's memory and conversational practice disappears when that person can no longer speak or choose not to, or when there is simply no one around to receive what they want to pass along. The gap between an aging farmer with knowledge to share and a young person willing and positioned to receive it is one of the most consequential spaces in the Kona coffee community right now.
Climate Disruption as a Threat to the Continuity of Practice
Oral tradition is not transmitted in the abstract. It is transmitted through practice, through the shared rhythms of work that create the occasions for stories to be told and received. When those rhythms are disrupted, the occasions disappear, and the stories that depended on them are at risk.
Hurricane LaLa's destruction in September 2026 was not just a physical event. It was a disruption of the cycles of work that embed oral knowledge in daily farm life. When trees are uprooted and processing infrastructure is damaged, the routines that normally structure a farmer's day, and the conversations that normally happen within those routines, are suspended. The harvest walk that would have prompted a story about a technique learned from a grandmother. The afternoon processing session that would have been the occasion for a younger farmer to ask an older one why they do something a particular way. These moments do not happen when the farm is in crisis response mode.
Recovery knowledge is itself a category of oral tradition that becomes critical after events like LaLa. Research indicating that uprooted trees can survive if managed correctly in the immediate aftermath of a storm is precisely the kind of information that needs to travel quickly through the community. The farmers who know this, who have encountered uprooted trees before or who have been in contact with agricultural researchers, become essential nodes in the community's information network. Their voices become, in those moments, the most important voices in the community.
Economic Pressure and the Mislabeling Crisis as an Oral History Wound
The mislabeling crisis in the Kona coffee industry has been, among its many dimensions, an attack on the community's right to tell its own story to its own audience. When a consumer buys a product labeled "Kona blend" and receives coffee that is ninety percent something else, they have been given a story about Kona coffee that is almost entirely false. The flavor they experience, the associations they form, the understanding they develop of what Kona coffee is and where it comes from, all of this is built on a fabrication. The farmers who actually grow Kona coffee, who have inherited the oral tradition of the community and work every day within it, lose their audience to a counterfeit narrative.
House Bill 2298, which raised the minimum Kona content requirement for blends, was a legislative act with a storytelling dimension. It said, in effect, that if you are going to tell a story about Kona coffee, the story has to be substantially true. The 51 percent floor is not a satisfying endpoint for many in the community, who argue that true Kona coffee storytelling requires 100 percent authenticity. But it represents a meaningful step in the direction of restoring the community's right to have its story heard correctly.
The 41 stakeholder interviews conducted in research around geographic indication labeling revealed something that experienced observers of the Kona community would recognize immediately: farmers do not talk about mislabeling only as an economic problem. They talk about it as an insult to their identity, a theft of the narrative they have spent their lives building. The advocacy work that continues around this issue is inseparable from the oral tradition of the community. It is the community insisting, in organized and public voice, that its story matters and that it will not tolerate having that story corrupted for someone else's profit.
How Buddha's Cup Carries the Story Forward
Holualoa as a Storytelling Place
We are located in Holualoa, a village on the Kona Coffee Belt that sits at approximately 1,400 feet above sea level, in the microclimate band that produces some of the most distinctive coffee on the island. Holualoa is a particular kind of place. It has long been a community of artists and farmers living alongside each other in a way that has shaped its character. Galleries share the road with coffee farms. The same people who grow and process coffee sometimes also paint, sculpt, or make music. This combination of agricultural rootedness and artistic sensibility means that Holualoa has always been a community that valued the act of making something with care and communicating why it matters.
Our estate in Holualoa sits within this community as one node in a larger narrative that stretches back to the plantation era. We have not always been here, but the land we farm has. The volcanic ground beneath our trees carries the memory of every season it has supported, every decision a farmer made in its presence. When we work this land, we are in conversation with that history, whether we always name it explicitly or not. What we have inherited is not just a farm. It is a responsibility to continue a story that was being told here before we arrived and that will continue to be told here after us.
This is not a romantic abstraction. It is a practical orientation that shapes how we farm, how we process, and how we talk about what we do. A journey through flavor and culture at our Holualoa farm is an encounter with this layered history, with the specific character of a place that has been shaped by particular people, particular decisions, and a particular oral tradition that connects us to everyone who farmed in this belt before us.
Farm Tours as Structured Storytelling
At Buddha's Cup, we offer several ways for visitors to enter the story of this farm and the broader community it belongs to. Our Free Farm Tour is an accessible starting point, an opportunity to walk the land, see the trees, understand the layout of a working Kona coffee farm, and hear why things are done the way they are done here. Our Deluxe Tasting experience adds the dimension of flavor, connecting the story of the farm to the specific sensory experience of the coffee it produces. Our VIP ATV Tour takes visitors deeper into the property, covering ground that reveals the farm's full scale and the relationship between its different sections. And Manny's Walking Tour is perhaps the most explicitly narrative of our offerings, a guided walk through the farm that is structured as much around story as around process.
What all of these tours share is a commitment to the idea that the best way to understand Kona coffee is to hear about it from people who are living the work. Our guides are not reading from scripts. They are sharing what they know from experience and from the knowledge they have received from others who farmed before them. When a guide explains why we pick selectively rather than strip-harvesting, they are transmitting a decision that has roots in the oral tradition of the community, in the accumulated wisdom of generations of farmers who learned, through direct experience and through the stories of their predecessors, that quality and patience are inseparable.
When visitors come to a coffee farm tour in Holualoa, they become temporary participants in an ongoing story. They leave with more than coffee. They leave with a small piece of the community's living oral history, a firsthand account of what it looks like and feels like and means to grow coffee in this particular place. That piece of the story will travel with them, and they will pass it along, in the way that people always pass along things that have genuinely moved them. This is how oral tradition works. It is not confined to farming communities. It propagates through every person who receives a story and finds it worth repeating.
The people behind your morning cup at Buddha's Cup are the most important storytelling resource we have. The knowledge they carry, the care they bring to every step of the process, and the connection they maintain to the broader community of Kona coffee farmers is what makes the experience of visiting our farm genuinely different from reading about Kona coffee online.
Mamaki Tea, Rum Cakes, and the Broader Story of Hawaiian Agriculture
The oral tradition of Hawaiian agriculture is not only about coffee. It encompasses the full ecological and cultural richness of the islands, and at Buddha's Cup, we try to reflect that breadth in what we grow, what we make, and what we share with visitors and customers.
Mamaki tea is one of the most important expressions of this broader tradition on our farm. Mamaki, a plant native to Hawaii, has been used in traditional Hawaiian healing practice for generations, and its knowledge base is itself a form of oral tradition. The uses of mamaki, its preparation, its effects, the specific ways it was gathered and dried and brewed, all of this was transmitted through generations of Hawaiian healers and families long before anyone wrote it down. We grow mamaki on our farm because we believe it deserves a place in the story we tell about Hawaiian agriculture, and because its presence connects us to a tradition of land knowledge that predates coffee farming on the island by centuries.