Further Reading
Two kinds of resources: organizations already doing work like this, worth knowing about directly, and the published research behind specific claims made elsewhere on this site. Neither list is meant to be exhaustive — just real and worth your time.
Organizations doing similar work
- Permaculture Apprentice — How to Create a Food Forest — a solid, detailed step-by-step guide, useful to compare against the planning content on this site.
- Agroforestry.org — a nonprofit that publishes The Overstory, a free long-running agroforestry journal. Good for going deeper than any single site can.
- Portland Food Forest Initiative — a nonprofit doing homeowner lawn-to-food-forest conversion, one of the closest analogues to this venture's homeowner-facing mission.
- Project Food Forest — another nonprofit model, public food forests plus classes.
- Denver Urban Gardens — Food Forests — a community-orchard model, useful for seeing the "public good" framing done well.
- OpenTable — Farm-to-Table Sourcing Guide — written for restaurant operators specifically.
- WebstaurantStore — Local Food Sourcing Guide — same audience, a more operational angle.
Published research
Organized to mirror the rest of this site, so you can go straight to the research behind whatever claim you want to check. Some of these are peer-reviewed journal articles; a few are theses or graduate research projects, noted as such — real and useful, but held to a different standard than peer review.
On food forest design
- Allen & Mason (2021), Urban food forests in the American Southwest
- Albrecht & Wiek (2021), Food forests: Their services and sustainability
- Nair (1985), Classification of agroforestry systems
- Lovell, Dupraz, Gold et al. (2017), Temperate agroforestry research: multifunctional woody polycultures and long-term field trial design
- Riolo (2018), The social and environmental value of the Picasso Food Forest, Parma, Italy
- Nero, Kwapong et al. (2018), Tree species diversity and socioeconomic perspectives of urban food trees, Accra, Ghana
On direct farm-to-restaurant supply chains
- Paciarotti & Torregiani (2018), Short food supply chain between micro/small farms and restaurants
- Paciarotti, Mazzuto, Torregiani et al. (2022), Locally produced food for restaurants: a supply chain network design
- Jump (2019, graduate thesis), Understanding local produce sourcing by restaurateurs in Houston, Texas
- Török, Agárdi, Maró et al. (2022), Business opportunities in short food supply chains: three Hungarian para-gastro restaurants
- Buck, Getz & Guthman (1997), From Farm to Table: The Organic Vegetable Commodity Chain of Northern California — dense and academic, but the earliest well-cited look at direct/organic commodity chains in this literature.
On soil, water, and establishment
- Fahad, Chavan, Chichaghare et al. (2022), Agroforestry systems for soil health improvement and maintenance
- Muthuri, Barrios, Öborn et al. (2015), Local knowledge on soil health indicators in Kenyan agroforestry — smallholder, tropical-farm scale, closer to this venture's own scale than most Western research.
- Montagnini & Nair (2004), Carbon sequestration in agroforestry systems
On native forest restoration
- Friday, Cordell & Giardina (2015), Future directions for forest restoration in Hawaiʻi — the one Hawaiʻi-specific paper in this whole list, and the closest thing to direct academic grounding for the restoration work behind the Nā Hoa Ululāʻau case study.
On indigenous stewardship and traditional ecological knowledge
- Berkes, Colding & Folke (2000), Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Adaptive Management — the foundational paper in this field, cited thousands of times since.
- Robbins & Berkes (2000), Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management
- Chan (2022, graduate research), Solutions to California's Wildfires: Indigenous Stewardship and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
- Wilson & Noyes (2025), Indigenous Stewardship of Ancestral Lands Activates Land and Culture — on Bears Ears National Monument's co-stewardship model.
- Martinez (2023, graduate research), We Shape the Land: Environmental Decision Making and Climate Justice — California Native land stewardship tied directly to food and culture.
None of the traditional-ecological-knowledge research above is Hawaiʻi- or Kanaka Maoli-specific — worth saying plainly rather than letting the citations imply otherwise. This site's own laulima and mālama ʻāina content (see About) comes from family and cultural knowledge, not from these papers. They're included here as general grounding for why traditional ecological knowledge matters as a field, not as a substitute for Hawaiian sourcing.
On South Kona's traditional agricultural system
- Lincoln & Ladefoged (2014), Agroecology of pre-contact Hawaiian dryland farming: the spatial extent, yield and social impact of Hawaiian breadfruit groves in Kona, Hawaiʻi — the primary source for the kaluʻulu, the documented breadfruit-canopy agroforestry belt this site's own case study draws on directly.
- McCoy, Cheng, Mulrooney & Ladefoged (2022), Garden Offerings in the Kona Field System, Hawaiʻi Island: A Fine-Grained Chronology and Its Implications — open access; excavated directly in Kealakekua Ahupuaʻa, the same ahupuaʻa this venture's land is in. Dates upland farming here to around AD 1400 and documents the shift from individual farmers' own agricultural ritual to elite surplus extraction via the Makahiki ceremony as political control centralized.
- McCoy, Mulrooney, Horrocks, Cheng & Ladefoged (2017), Evaluating agricultural bet-hedging strategies in the Kona Field System — direct predecessor to the 2022 study above, on the same excavation.
- Horrocks & Rechtman (2008), Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and banana (Musa sp.) microfossils in deposits from the Kona Field System, Island of Hawaii — direct crop evidence from the field system itself.
- Māla Kaluʻulu — not a research citation but a real, currently operating example: a worker-owned cooperative a few miles from this site, co-founded by one of the researchers above, restoring the same kaluʻulu belt on its own parcel. The closest real analogue to this venture of anything in this list — same historical system, same district, same labor-equity structure, already running.
On the addressable market for breadfruit and kalo
- Berning, Andersen, Mertz et al. (2022), Resilience of breadfruit agro-ecosystems in Hawaiʻi during the COVID-19 pandemic, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience — the primary source behind the Direct-to-Consumer Markets breadfruit figures, including the Hawaiʻi ʻUlu Cooperative's own account of demand outstripping supply.
- Zhao & Loke (2021), Taro Production and Market Landscape in Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi Department of Agriculture — the primary source behind that same page's kalo pricing and channel data, and the report that explicitly argues against a taro supply shortfall.
- Lysák, Ritz & Henriksen (2019), Assessing Consumer Acceptance and Willingness to Pay for Novel Value-Added Products Made from Breadfruit in the Hawaiian Islands, Sustainability — a controlled consumer study finding informed buyers willing to pay more for breadfruit products, included as a data point on the demand side rather than a market-sizing study.
On poi and traditional taro processing
- Puʻueo Poi bids aloha, West Hawaii Today, 2017 — the primary source behind How Poi Is Made's history of Hilo's own commercial poi mill and its 2017 closure.
- Hand-Pounded vs. Milled Poi Explained, Waiāhole Poi Factory — the source on the technical difference between the two methods, and that mill's own move away from milling entirely.
- Hawaii Administrative Rules §11-50-3 — the state food safety code's specific exemption for hand-pounded poi, distinct from every other processed food.
On health and safety risks in food forest work
- University of Hawaiʻi CTAHR (2010), Best On-Farm Food Safety Practices: Reducing Risks Associated with Rat Lungworm Infection — the primary source behind Growing Safely's rat lungworm section.
- Leptospirosis: The Microscopic Danger in Paradise, a review of Hawaiʻi case data including the taro-farming exposure figures cited on that same page.
- PlantPono.org and the USDA NRCS Pacific Islands Area invasive species fact sheet for Christmas berry (Schinus terebinthifolius).
- Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk (HEAR) project report and the Hawaiʻi Cattlemen's Council species profile for cat's claw (Caesalpinia decapetala).
- Hawaiʻi Invasive Species Council and Pacific Fire Exchange on the grass-fire cycle behind guinea grass and maile pilau's fire risk.
- CDC/NIOSH, Preventing Heat-related Illness or Death of Outdoor Workers.
On labor and cooperative structures
- Arana Landín (2019), A study of the statutory background for worker cooperatives in the US
- Martin, Martin & Martin (2014), Social Reform and Worker Cooperatives: Countering Economic Inequality